A Terrible Beauty Is Born
I've posted a few poems by WB Yeats on the blog site and I was reminded of this one about the Easter Rising in 1916 which was used by Martin Kettle as an analogy for the political changes that have come about in Scotland both during and since the country's independence referendum.
Things have indeed changed, changed utterly, and to me there is a terrible beauty in what's now happening to the Scottish Labour Party and even though I'm not a 'betting man' I think I'll place a small wager on Scottish Labour having 25 fewer MPs at Westminster after next May's general election.
Things have indeed changed, changed utterly, and to me there is a terrible beauty in what's now happening to the Scottish Labour Party and even though I'm not a 'betting man' I think I'll place a small wager on Scottish Labour having 25 fewer MPs at Westminster after next May's general election.
Easter Rising
By WB Yeats
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Ringing the Changes (24 October 2014)
The penny is finally beginning to drop amongst journalists south of the border that Scotland really has changed as a result for the independence referendum.
The old Westminster elite, the ancient regime, that has been used to running the country for so long is on its way out, the Labour Party is completely discredited led as it is these days by someone, Johann Lamont, who is a self-styled feminist and gender equality champion.
Yet has had nothing of substance to say about the the fight for equal pay in Scottish local government for the past 15 years.
So if you ask me it's no wonder that so many people are voting with their feet.
In Scotland the old politics have crumbled, as they once did in Ireland
In the recent referendum young voters opted for independence. As with Ireland in 1916, a new mood has taken hold and change seems inevitable
By Martin Kettle - The Guardian
'Éamon de Valera, who retired as Ireland’s president at the age of 90 in 1973, managed to shape national life and politics for half a century and beyond.' Photograph: PA
Sometimes a history book prompts one to reflect on the past and present alike. RF Foster, professor of Irish history at Oxford university, has just published such a text. In Vivid Faces, Foster delves into what made the Irish revolutionary generation of the early 20th century tick. Yet at the core of his richly nuanced inquiry into the radical nationalist mentality is an analysis with implications that stretch beyond Ireland to this day – notably to 21st-century Scotland, but also elsewhere in these islands.
Generations make a difference in history. The men and women who transformed Ireland between 1916 and 1922 were strikingly young, even by the standards of today’s callow politicians. The average age of the executed leaders of the Easter Rising was 37. Michael Collins, effectively the first leader of independent Ireland, was killed when he was a mere 31. The corollary was that those who survived, embodied by Éamon de Valera, who retired as Ireland’s president at the age of 90 in 1973, managed to shape national life and politics for half a century and beyond, until they in turn were peacefully supplanted by a very different, more Europe-centred Irish generation.
As Foster crucially argues, these young revolutionaries of the early 20th century were in revolt not just against the British government – the traditional nationalist narrative – but against the previous generation of Irish nationalists too. The active 1916 generation tended to be urban not rural people, for whom religion was not always a defining characteristic. They often came from comfortable, and in some cases privileged, backgrounds. A significant proportion were in white-collar jobs: teachers, writers and civil servants. Several wrote poems. But they had a common revolutionary awakening, and the first world war presented them with a shared opportunity, which they grasped.
In Foster’s account, the revolutionary generation underwent a crucial change of mentality in the years before 1916. Foster calls it “the quiet revolution in the hearts and minds of young middle-class Irish people from the 1890s onwards.” One, the well-born Muriel MacSwiney, and by then 28-year-old widow of the hunger-striker mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, put it this way in 1920: “You see, my parents are not quite like myself. I think I am rather characteristic of a certain section in Ireland. The younger people of Ireland have been thinking in a way that some of the older ones have not.”
These young radicals were alienated not just from British rule but also from the values, lifestyles and ambitions of their parents. They disliked the forms of schooling, entertainment, writing and politics of the previous generation. They rejected the powerful established alternative offered by the constitutional Home Rule party under John Redmond, which in 1912 it appeared to be on the verge of delivering. By that time, the new generation was hungry for something more than that.
Fast-forward to the present day and look around. Are there modern signs of a generation impatient of the political past and hungry for something new? True, there is no mass European war taking place today, as there was then. True also, there is a total absence, with the exception of Islamist jihadism, of the belief in politically motivated violence that marked 1916. And true, in addition, there have been other generational revolts since the early 20th century that have been absorbed, including ones in Britain in the 1930s and 1960s.
Ask yourself nevertheless whether Britain today is marked by generational political ruptures that in small ways echo aspects of the Irish nationalist revolutionary experience of the last century as described by Foster and the broad answer, without pushing the parallels too far or too crudely, is surely yes. Those ruptures are particularly striking in the onward march of Scotland’s nationalist movement. In some very different ways, they are also discernible in England, in the rise of phenomena as apparently diverse as Ukip, Occupy and homegrown jihadism, and in the juvenile culture of Russell Brand’s narcissistic anti-politics.
No one who spent time in Scotland during the referendum campaign was in any doubt that they were witnessing something new. Partly, this sense of a generational break was magnified by the strength of pro-independence feeling on social media, all of which tended to reflect itself to itself with ever growing excitement. But the sense of a gathering generational rejection of past Scottish politics was palpable. And the defeat of independence seems barely to have slowed it. The sometimes malign incompetence of the victors may have fuelled it even more.
The figures show we are in new generational political territory now. Young voters clearly opted for independence in Scotland. The strongest pro-independence showing in the referendum was among voters in their late 20s and their 30s – which happens to be precisely the same generation that made Ireland’s break with the past a century ago.
It is not yet clear whether the surge in Scottish National party membership since the referendum – the SNP has more than tripled in size in the five weeks since 18 September – also reflects a surge of younger-voter support. But it may well also be the case. A TNS Scotland poll last week suggested 16- to 34-year-olds were twice as likely to expect to become more involved in politics in the future as Scots aged over 55.
This is emphatically not in any way to imply that the pro-independence movement is about to head off down the revolutionary blood-sacrifice road that the Irish nationalist movement once took so dramatically. But it does begin to feel as though a decisive break between generations is taking place in its own way all the same.
This time, in Scotland, it is potentially a break with devolution, with the traditional parties – Labour in particular – and with Britishness. It also seems inevitable in many minds, rather as it did to the Irish people who spurned Redmond’s party long ago. The insensitive stupidity of the official government reaction, though fortunately not as brutal as in 1916, is yet another echo. We may not be witnessing the birth of the terrible beauty that WB Yeats saw a century ago and on which Foster writes so compellingly. Yet under the pressure of generational change, our politics is stumbling, miserable, uncomprehending and barely self-aware, into a new form that, compared with even the recent past, has changed, changed utterly.
Sometimes a history book prompts one to reflect on the past and present alike. RF Foster, professor of Irish history at Oxford university, has just published such a text. In Vivid Faces, Foster delves into what made the Irish revolutionary generation of the early 20th century tick. Yet at the core of his richly nuanced inquiry into the radical nationalist mentality is an analysis with implications that stretch beyond Ireland to this day – notably to 21st-century Scotland, but also elsewhere in these islands.
Generations make a difference in history. The men and women who transformed Ireland between 1916 and 1922 were strikingly young, even by the standards of today’s callow politicians. The average age of the executed leaders of the Easter Rising was 37. Michael Collins, effectively the first leader of independent Ireland, was killed when he was a mere 31. The corollary was that those who survived, embodied by Éamon de Valera, who retired as Ireland’s president at the age of 90 in 1973, managed to shape national life and politics for half a century and beyond, until they in turn were peacefully supplanted by a very different, more Europe-centred Irish generation.
As Foster crucially argues, these young revolutionaries of the early 20th century were in revolt not just against the British government – the traditional nationalist narrative – but against the previous generation of Irish nationalists too. The active 1916 generation tended to be urban not rural people, for whom religion was not always a defining characteristic. They often came from comfortable, and in some cases privileged, backgrounds. A significant proportion were in white-collar jobs: teachers, writers and civil servants. Several wrote poems. But they had a common revolutionary awakening, and the first world war presented them with a shared opportunity, which they grasped.
In Foster’s account, the revolutionary generation underwent a crucial change of mentality in the years before 1916. Foster calls it “the quiet revolution in the hearts and minds of young middle-class Irish people from the 1890s onwards.” One, the well-born Muriel MacSwiney, and by then 28-year-old widow of the hunger-striker mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, put it this way in 1920: “You see, my parents are not quite like myself. I think I am rather characteristic of a certain section in Ireland. The younger people of Ireland have been thinking in a way that some of the older ones have not.”
These young radicals were alienated not just from British rule but also from the values, lifestyles and ambitions of their parents. They disliked the forms of schooling, entertainment, writing and politics of the previous generation. They rejected the powerful established alternative offered by the constitutional Home Rule party under John Redmond, which in 1912 it appeared to be on the verge of delivering. By that time, the new generation was hungry for something more than that.
Fast-forward to the present day and look around. Are there modern signs of a generation impatient of the political past and hungry for something new? True, there is no mass European war taking place today, as there was then. True also, there is a total absence, with the exception of Islamist jihadism, of the belief in politically motivated violence that marked 1916. And true, in addition, there have been other generational revolts since the early 20th century that have been absorbed, including ones in Britain in the 1930s and 1960s.
Ask yourself nevertheless whether Britain today is marked by generational political ruptures that in small ways echo aspects of the Irish nationalist revolutionary experience of the last century as described by Foster and the broad answer, without pushing the parallels too far or too crudely, is surely yes. Those ruptures are particularly striking in the onward march of Scotland’s nationalist movement. In some very different ways, they are also discernible in England, in the rise of phenomena as apparently diverse as Ukip, Occupy and homegrown jihadism, and in the juvenile culture of Russell Brand’s narcissistic anti-politics.
No one who spent time in Scotland during the referendum campaign was in any doubt that they were witnessing something new. Partly, this sense of a generational break was magnified by the strength of pro-independence feeling on social media, all of which tended to reflect itself to itself with ever growing excitement. But the sense of a gathering generational rejection of past Scottish politics was palpable. And the defeat of independence seems barely to have slowed it. The sometimes malign incompetence of the victors may have fuelled it even more.
The figures show we are in new generational political territory now. Young voters clearly opted for independence in Scotland. The strongest pro-independence showing in the referendum was among voters in their late 20s and their 30s – which happens to be precisely the same generation that made Ireland’s break with the past a century ago.
It is not yet clear whether the surge in Scottish National party membership since the referendum – the SNP has more than tripled in size in the five weeks since 18 September – also reflects a surge of younger-voter support. But it may well also be the case. A TNS Scotland poll last week suggested 16- to 34-year-olds were twice as likely to expect to become more involved in politics in the future as Scots aged over 55.
This is emphatically not in any way to imply that the pro-independence movement is about to head off down the revolutionary blood-sacrifice road that the Irish nationalist movement once took so dramatically. But it does begin to feel as though a decisive break between generations is taking place in its own way all the same.
This time, in Scotland, it is potentially a break with devolution, with the traditional parties – Labour in particular – and with Britishness. It also seems inevitable in many minds, rather as it did to the Irish people who spurned Redmond’s party long ago. The insensitive stupidity of the official government reaction, though fortunately not as brutal as in 1916, is yet another echo. We may not be witnessing the birth of the terrible beauty that WB Yeats saw a century ago and on which Foster writes so compellingly. Yet under the pressure of generational change, our politics is stumbling, miserable, uncomprehending and barely self-aware, into a new form that, compared with even the recent past, has changed, changed utterly.
