The Only Jealousy of Emer [with Biographical Introduction]

by W.B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats was encouraged from a young age to pursue a life in the arts. He attended art school for a short while, but soon found that his talents and interest lay in poetry rather than painting. Born and educated in Dublin, Ireland, Yeats discovered early in his literary career a fascination with Irish folklore and the occult. He felt an internal struggle with the contradictions he felt in his nature and in life, and spent much of his life seeking out a philosophical system to resolve this conflict.

In 1922 The Jealousy of Emer" premiered in Amsterdam, and like many of Yeat's plays featured Japanese-style masks. The story is based on a legend from the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology about Emer, the wife of the notorious soldier Cuchulain. The play picks up at the close of "On Baile's Strand", during Cuchulain's fight with the sea.

Genres: Plays, Drama

24 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1918

About the author

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).

Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Heath · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting play that draws on Irish mythology and folklore. I am not sure I understood all that was going on, but there were themes of self-sacrifice, magic, and the nature of love.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful omg. The language is just gorgeous

[Liam Porter · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the oddest play I've read by Yeats, and I had the benefit of reading (and enjoying) it's longer prequel, On Baile's Strand. The story is that a Queen waits for her King to return from fighting with the sea (the poetic climax to the aforementioned play).

One of the King's lovers, a girl called Eithne Inguba, is called for by the Queen.
The girl is scared but is told not to be afraid.
The Queen indicates the (dead?) body of the King but she doubts it is her husband
...rather "an image... put into his place, a sea-borne log bewitched into his likeness."
She intends the girl to seduce the avatar of the king regardless,
"kiss the image"
as if a lure to draw him back to life.
The body indeed comes to life with the mask of the King
but names himself "Bricriu of the Sidhe" "from Manannan's court",
some apparent demi-God.

He asks "do those tire who love the Sidhe"?
Perhaps talking of the love of war.
He "gives her sight" so she can see the ghostly form of her King
who cannot see her.
A woman "of the Sidhe", so a demi-Godess of sorts, wanders predatorily.
The masked figure "explains":

A dream is body;
The dead move ever towards a dreamless youth
[*] And when they dream no more return no more;
[*]And those more holy shades that never lived
But visit you in dreams. p.129

Modernist in style, this is not easy to understand. I read it again and again, convinced there was some ultimate meaning in it, but never grasping it. If you are onboard by this point, try to read those lines above 10 times and clarify for yourself what on earth it is saying.

Now here is my best shot:

Dreams [belong to living] bod[ies],
[and] the dead move towards [forever youthful] dreamless[ness],
[*] and [move towards] those mo[st] holy shades [which] never [actually] lived
[except for] visit[ing] you in your dreams.
and when they [reach the point of] dream[lessness] they return no more.

(I had to swap the some stuff around (marked [*] for the real nerds out there) for it to make any grammatical sense).

What was Yeats thinking with that original syntax? I like to think it was something like this.

"only the living dream; the dead move towards eternal sleep, joining those platonic "holy shades" of dreams; returning no more once they join them." Beautiful.

Or is this all just overanalysing some slightly slopping writing? I actually think a bit of column A and a bit of column B, to quote Abe Simpson.

Anyway, the demi-Godess slowly draws the King into a state where ultimately "memory on the moment vanishes" (c.f. "dreamlessness")
...when he suddenly cries out for his rightful Queen.

In the climax, the masked figure grows angry at this, implying that if the reluctant Queen Emer "renounces his love forever" that he will somehow be saved from some evil fate. What fate exactly is kinda obscure.

Anyhow, Emer relents, and renounces his love forever; and he awakens!

To add oddness upon oddity, the "awakened" king embraces the lover, Eithne, and not Emer. Emer expresses no emotion at this. You win some, you lose some.

From my increased use of "some" and "somehow" in this summary you can sense a little frustration. I am however happy to allow all this ambiguity.

This play comes in sequence after the first play, "On Baile's Strand". At the end of this play we are submerged underwater. Therefore the mood of the play reflects a loss of footing and a fight to anchor ourselves to familiar memory. The voice of death asks us to relinquish ourselves to a state of memoryless, dreamless eternal sleep. Quite fitting.

[Mythlee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the version published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Vol. XIII No. IV (Jan. 1919) pp. 175-193 (available via JSTOR on the poetryfoundation.org website).

As Emer describes it, her husband Cuchulain quarreled with another king who had "seemed a while most dear" and killed him, only to learn that this man "Was his own son begot upon some wild woman / When he was young" (178). Cuchulain, "mad with sorrow," ran out to wade in the water and "With shield before him and with sword in hand, / He fought the deathless sea" (id.). He continued to wade out, the other kings looking on impotently, until he was apparently drowned.

Now Emer brings in Cuchulain's latest mistress, Eithne Inguba, to try to call him back; these efforts are not successful, and ultimately Emer herself must permanently sacrifice her own hope of growing old with him in order to bring him back. Even though Emer recognizes "it is long since I could call him home; / I am but his wife" (179), both Emer and Bricriu (referred to as "Figure of Cuchulain") both suggest her hope is not delusory. Indeed, this seems to be confirmed by the words of the Ghost of Cuchulain in conversation with the Sidhe temptress; it is memories of Emer that make Cuchulain impure and allow him to resist her at least temporarily (187-89).

Ultimately, it is only the love of Emer – the one "who loved him first / And loved him through the years when love seemed lost" (as Eithne Inguba recognizes, p. 179) – that is both courageous enough and selfless enough to break the enchantment/temptation of the Sidhe woman. But of course the condition of the bargain is that Eithne Inguba (and possibly others in turn) will reap the benefit.

There's a certain ambiguity in Bricriu's involvement here; Emer is distraught at the hard bargain he drives with her, and he certainly puts his thumb on the scales by "dissolv[ing] the dark / That hid him from [her] eyes, but not that other / That's hidden [her] from his" (184). Yet the Sidhe temptress also sees it as a betrayal that he told Emer how to defeat her (p. 191).

Some interesting points from the Sidhe temptress episode:

* "the Sidhe / Are fishers also and they fish for men / With dreams upon the hook" (185).

* Emer "draws a knife from her girdle" (185), thinking to attack the Sidhe woman (although she would have had no power to hurt her). But this makes me wonder – might she possibly have attacked Eithne Inguba after 'using' her to bring Cuchulain back?

Emer's speaks the renunciation on p. 189, just in time to save Cuchulain from the Sidhe temptress. She speaks only once more, after Eithne Inguba enters, to say "Cuchulain wakes" (192). Thereafter, Emer is 'forgotten' within the play; she has no further dialogue and there is no reference to her by other characters or the stage directions.

One other random note. I liked Emer's discussion of the possibility that they are not dealing with Cuchulain but a changeling: "It may be / An image has been put into his place, / A sea-born log bewitched into his likeness" (179). This is something I encountered only in Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell although I am sure it is a much older trope that Yeats is drawing on nearly a century earlier than Clarke.

[Nora · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh emer emer emer