News at Eleven: [William Butler] Yeats wrote two sequences

of verse about current events in the early 1920s. "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" comes fourth among the poems in The Tower; before it Yeats placed "Meditations in Time of Civil War," a sequence about the later Irish conflict, written after he and his new family had returned to his country, and touched off when anti-Treaty soldiers blew up a bridge near his home. ("They forbade us to leave the house," Yeats recalled, "but were otherwise polite, even saying at last 'Good night, thank you,' as though we had given them the bridge.") Both sequences begin in ottava rima, with complaints about the failure of a collective enterprise. Both then include, in order, a visionary passage in an irregular ten-line stanza; a symbol of East Asian art and tradition ("Chinese" dancers, a samurai sword); a pair of poems derived from ballad stanzas, one of them altered by an extra rhymed line; and a concluding night scene in which supernatural riders from centuries past "swim to the mind's eye," symbols of chthonic violence and premonitions of mob rule.

from The Nation: The Weasel's Tooth: On W.B. Yeats

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