Yeats

The Charge Fragment:

Why It Was Yeats Who Wrote It

by Cynthia Joyce Clay

Remembering that the first villanelle in English was written in 1874, there are four prime candidates who may have written the Charge in the form of a villanelle. These are William Earnest Henley, Aleister Crowley, William Butler Yeats, and Dorren Valiente; all of whom were Pagans and wrote Pagan poetry. Valiente is well known for having written an extremely beautiful prose version of the Charge of the Goddess as well as a poem version (Farrar 1981/1984, p. 15). However, Valiente’s poem version is not a villanelle. Between her being a later author than the others and having her own non-villanelle poem version, it seems unlikely she is the author of the Villanelle Charge.

William Henley wrote a few villanelles (Henley, 1908/1970, pp. 227-230) and “In journals which he [Henley] edited, much of the early work of W. B. Yeats...was published” (Conell, p. 2). Henley, like Yeats, was “unabashed in his paganism” (Connel, p. 42). In one of his villanelles (Henley, p. 228) Henley clearly refers to magical practices: “And if you wish to flute a spell,/Or ask a meeting ‘neath the lime.” Nevertheless in that very villanelle “...Henley, provides an excellent example of the condescending attitude toward the form...” (McFarland, p. 50) and goes on to say “You must not ask of it the swell/Of organs grandiose and sublime--” (Henley, p. 228). Since the Charge of the Goddess is one of the most important moments in rituals for many Pagans or Witches, this could be taken as a statement that a villanelle is not an appropriate form for so meaningful a part of worship. If this is what Henley means, it could either be a cover for writing the "Villanelle Charge", or his true feelings. On the theory that the statement could be a ruse I read several of Henley’s poems and as many of his villanelles as I could. Other than the villanelle which is partly quoted here and begins with “A dainty Thing’s the Villanelle” (Henley, p. 228) which is mildy amusing, his poetry is just awful. Henley just hammers away at the rhyme scheme. Nor am I alone in my dislike of his poetry: “Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang, William Henley, John Payne--these names are nearly absent from anthologies now, and not altogether unjustifyably” says McFarland (p. 61).

Henley’s poetry in no way matches the craftsmanship of the "Villanelle Charge." What is very significant about Henley’s villanelle and its clear allusion to magic is that it was first published in 1888 (McFarland, personal communication, Sept. 2000). This compounded with the fact that Henley served as editor to Yeats’s early poetry allows for the speculation that Yeats showed Henley his (Yeats’s) villanelle. Since Henley was a Pagan, it is not impossible that he was a member of the Golden Dawn. Henley’s “A dainty Thing’s the Villanelle” establishes two points: one Henley’s poetry is inferior to the "Villanelle Charge" and so Henley was not its author; second and more importantly, that the Charge in villanelle form must have been written in 1888 or just before since Henley in “A dainty Thing’s a villanelle” admonishes against the use villanelles for anything of importance. Why Henley would admonish against using the villanelle form for “organs grandiose and sublime” if someone had mentioned doing or had actually done just that?

Before moving on to Yeats, Aleister Crowley must be considered because he did write Pagan poetry and especially because lines from Crowley’s Book of the Law --I, 58 (Crowley, p. 201) appear in the "Villanelle Charge." Taking a look at some of Crowley’s poetry such as “But of all the plagues wherewith a man is cursed, /Take my word for it, Woman is the worst” misogyny is clearly expressed which is quite at odds with the view of the feminine expressed in the "Villanelle Charge." As regarding the quality of Crowley’s poetry, “The best that could ever be said of Crowley’s fictional prose style was that it was an improvement upon his verse (his non-fiction writing was better than either of them, without ever threatening excellence)” (Hutchinson, 1998, p. 81). According to Kathleen Raine (1990, p. 216) “Crowley wrote many volumes of bad verse and resented Yeat’s poor opinion of it.” Raine (p. 181) also asserts that “Yeats was the leader of the successful ejection of Crowley” from the Golden Dawn. Indeed, Hutchinson (1998, p. 72) provides excerpts of Yeats’s letters wherein Yeats says “We did not admit him [Crowley] because we did not think that a mystical society was intended to be a reformatory.” Crowley, failing to be initiated by the London branch of the Golden Dawn, went to Paris where Mathers initiated him in November of 1898 (Hutchinson, p. 69). Therefore Crowley was initiated into the Golden Dawn eight years after Yeats was. Although Crowley claimed to have received the Book of the Law during a private ceremony in 1904, the Book of the Law was not published until 1938 (Wilkinson & Beta, 1996, p. 10) and did not contain the commentaries. The Book of the Law was privately circulated among Crowleys's devotees before 1938, but Yeats was no devotee of Crowley. Since Yeats died in January of 1938 (Jeffares, 1984, p. xx) it is highly improbable that Yeats ever read the Book of the Law. If Yeats wrote the "Villanelle Charge," he could not have taken any part of it from Crowley.

Since Crowley published secrets of the Golden Dawn in 1909 (Hutchinson, p. 119) for which Mathers sued him in 1910 (Hutchinson, p. 119) it is more likely that Crowley had stolen the lines that appear in the "Villanelle Charge" from the Golden Dawn. Since Yeats considered Crowley a “mad person” (Hutchinson, p. 71) and “a person of unspeakable life” (Hutchinson, p. 73) and may have booted Crowley down the stairs when Crowley came to take the Golden Dawn papers held by the London group (Hutchinson, pp. 71-72) it is unlikely Yeats would have shown Crowley the "Villanelle Charge." It seems more likely that those particular lines that appear as I,58 of the Book of the Law were part of body of secrets held by the Golden Dawn, Yeats and Crowley each using them according to their respective talents and ethics.

Having ruled out Doreen Valiente as being a later writer not known for writing villanelles; having ruled out William Henley as a writer of poor villanelles and as a poet who regards the villanelle as a form not deserving of “organs grandiose and sublime”; and having ruled out Aleister Crowley as a misogynist thief, I can now elaborate upon why I believe William Butler Yeats wrote the villanelle fragment that I was given (USA mail service, not astrally) as the Charge of the Goddess. First, to be considered is that Yeats was writing poetry at the time that Passerat’s villanelle form suddenly became used by poets writing in English. Since I have no artifact that can be dated and handwriting analyzed, proof must take the form of an analysis of the fragment's coherence with Yeats’s known choices of subjects, themes, and techniques.

First, is the subject matter of the "Villanelle Charge" subject matter Yeats would be interested in? Hutton (p. 80) avers that the Golden Dawn “had a powerful image of a female divinity built into its ideological core...” Hutton (p. 80) goes on to say that the deities the Golden Dawn studied were “invoked to assist the spiritual progress or practical wishes of a person or group...” Further Kathleen Raine (1990, p. 212) offers evidence to support her supposition that Yeats took part in the writing of Golden Dawn rituals. The Golden Dawn included a ritual about the moon (Raine, p. 210). Further, Raine (p. 218) also quotes from Yeats’s Autobiographies to establish that Yeats had himself invoked the moon. During 1897-1902 Yeats formed his own mystical group for whom he created rituals (Hutton, p. 157). Also, Yeats was particularly interested in Irish history. He wrote a collection of Irish fairy and folk tales (Yeats, 1888) and he wrote a highly complimentary introduction to Lady Gregory’s compilation of ancient Irish sagas (Yeats and Lady Gregory, 1902/1986). The Irish sagas talk of the ancient Irish Bards. Further, it is not unreasonable to assume that Yeats would have read Reginal Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft which calls the ancient Bards witches (Robbinson, p. 134). As a member of secret society that celebrated a Goddess as well as a God, as a possible writer of mystical rituals, as someone who had himself invoked the moon, and as someone who may have known that his predecessors, the Bards of ancient Ireland were sometimes called witches, Yeats would be inclined to use the subject matter of the "Villanelle Charge."

The next question is are the themes of the "Villanelle Charge" congruent with themes important to Yeats. The first theme presented in the "Villanelle Charge" is that of meeting secretly to do a magical rite. This is exactly something Yeats was in the habit of doing. The next theme is the adoration of a female divinity. This too would be a theme that Yeats would be comfortable with especially as he is quoted by Hutton (p. 165) as saying “women come easily than men to that wisdom which ancient peoples, and all wild peoples even now, consider the only wisdom.” The next theme is that of earth being a place of joy with love being a constant ritual to the Goddess. One of the most persistent themes of Yeats’ poetry is that of transcendent knowledge inherent in just loving. The final theme of the "Villanelle Charge" is reincarnation expressed as a circle. According to A. G. Stock, (1964, p. 123) in Yeats’s “symbolism the moon governs human life and the nights of a lunar month stand for the successive incarnations.” “A Vision amounts to a summing-up of Yeats’ [sic] own sense of values in a system of thought about the soul in and beyond life...” (Stock, p. 122) and in A Vision (Yeats, 1937/1938) the workings of incarnations are referred to repeatedly as “The Great Wheel” (Yeats, p. 67) spheres (Yeats, p. 187), and cycles (p. 243). Further Yeats (p. 67) opens "Book I: The Great Wheel" of A Vision with quotations from Empedocles, Burnet , and Heraclitus to define God as circle revolving from discord to concord and back again for all time. Yeats’s symbolism of the moon and his understanding of the deity are themes that are central in the "Villanelle Charge."

When delving into Yeats to find the most salient characteristics of his poetry, I discovered that Yeats revised his works throughout his life time (Rosenthal, 1962, p. xix); indeed “for Yeats’s poems a truly ‘Definitive Edition’ ...will always remain elusive’” (Finneran, 1983/1990, p. 1). Therefore, though I date the initial writing of the "Villanelle Charge" as 1888 because of the admonishment in Henley’s villanelle, in all probability Yeats would have revised it over the years. If Henley’s poem is not a comment on the "Villanelle Charge," then Yeats could have first composed the "Villanelle Charge" in 1899 taking the moon ritual given in Leland's The Gospel of Aradia which came out in 1899 as its base. This eleven years' difference between the publication of Henley’s villanelle and Leland’s Aradia moon ritual is highly significant. Dating the "Villanelle Charge" with Leland’s 1899 book is reasonable, and yet why would Henley in 1888 counsel against using villanelles for “organs grandiose”? The Henley date is tantalizing because it suggests that Yeats had access to a version of the Charge prior to the earliest historically accepted date of Leland’s Gospel of Aradia. The Henley date hints the "Villanelle Charge" was written prior to the publication of Aradia; nevertheless, historians prefer a documentable date. If a clear written source is available it is accepted over a suggestive comment. The Leland date provides such a source, but only in part. The passage of the "Villanelle Charge" that is almost word for word as given by Crowley in his The Book of the Law was not published until just before Yeats died (Jeffares, p. xx; Wilkinson and Beta, 1996, p. 10). Since both men belonged to the Golden Dawn and both had received instruction from Mathers who was one of the four to form the Golden Dawn; and since Mathers was a Freemason, the conjectures I raised earlier of ancient Bardic influences on the Freemasons and possible (though only remotely possible) Italian sorcery influences coming by way of France through Mary Queen of Scots’s retinue seem reasonable. Both the themes and the subject of the "Villanelle Charge" are related to the Italian witchcraft as related by Leland as well as being related to perceptions of the ancient Celtic Bardic traditions.

The third question in analyzing "Villanelle Charge" for attributing authorship to Yeats is: is the craftsmanship of the "Villanelle Charge" akin to Yeats’s craftsmanship.

Although it was easy to find information about Yeats’s habit of revising; indeed one whole book I found was simply on that (Finnerman, 1983/1990), it was very difficult for me to find critical commentary on Yeats’s technique. Most critical writings I found centered on his symbolism. A scouring of WEB yielded all of Yeats’s poetry, but no commentary on his technique. However, like Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz, I found what I need on my very own bookshelf. I mention this difficulty because I am always uneasy finding only one source that answers a particular question. I am not an authority on Yeats; I am not an authority on Yeats authorities. Unlike the other information I have given in this article which can be validated by more than one source even if I only give one source, the information on Yeats’s technique is based on one source. Nevertheless, I have studied poetry formally (one teacher being Allan Grossman who received a “Genius’--MacArthur Award) and since the observations of the source struck me as wholly in keeping with my own analysis of Yeats’s technique, I shall quote away with confidence.

“Yeats turned to folk sources to give his work the grain of ordinary humanity and the direct appeal of ballads and other popular traditional forms” (Rosenthal, 1961, p. xvii). Yeats is known to have based some of poems on Irish folk songs and ballads (Finnerman, pp. 185-194). “The element of song is always present in this poet’s work, not only in his purely lyrical writing with obvious roots in folksong but also in his more intellectual and rhetorical writing” (Rosenthal, pp. xvii-xviii). Yeats usually “employs a conventional stanza... and his syntax is as straightforward as that of good prose.” (Rosenthal p. xviii) Yeats “can make a slight distortion or variation--an off-rhyme or grammatical ambiguity--count for a great deal.” (Rosenthal p. xviii) One of the hallmarks of Yeats’s later poetry is that “The tone is prophetic and incantatory, yet in some fashion these qualities are combined with candor, directness, and something like the flavor of conversational speech. There is far more to the later Yeats, but it was all promised in the poetry before 1900...” (Rosenthal p. xviii) Yeats expressed “worship of erotic love and beauty” (Rosenthal, p. xxxii); and Yeats held the "conviction of a sexual principle at the heart of all existance”. Yeats was committed to mystisicm and “believed that the power of his later writing owed to his commitment as he codified it in a A Vision.” (Rosenthal, p. xxxii)

To better related these hallmarks of Yeats's technique to the "Villanelle Charge," it is necessary to relate the challenges presented by villanelles. Of the villanelle McFarland has said “...the form is not so much a ‘trick’ as a challenge. ....while it is indeed easy to write a villanelle, it is not so easy to write a good villanelle...a good villanelle...results from a a fortunate fusion of content and form” (McFarland, 1987, p. ix). “The need for slant or near rhyme and for eye rhyme has opened the form considerably for poets writing in English. The poet writing in English is severely challenged by the requisite seven ‘a’ and six ‘b’ rhyming words. ...Two lines ultimately a couplet that must function as a unit, will be repeated four times each within a span (usually) of just nineteen lines. ...The redundancy must either be concealed somehow, or must be made to appear necessary” (McFarland, p. 45).

In analyzing the "Villanelle Charge" to determine if Yeats may have written it, the first striking point is that the "Villanelle Charge" was sent to me as a prose piece. Those who had been memorizing it did not know it was a poem. I discovered it was a poem by following my instinct that it sound very poetical to structure it as a poem, analyze the feet and meter, and then searching for and finding a poetry form that matched the structure of five tercets followed by a couplet which I had set up. Since one hallmark of Yeats’s poetry is that his syntax is “as straightforward as that of good prose” (Rosenthal p. xviii) the fact that I had been given the fragment as a prose piece is suggestive of Yeats’s hand.

Next, Yeats poetry typically makes use of tradition folk forms of ballads and songs (Rosenthal p. xvii). Indeed Yeats was always happy to say from whom he attributed the source of his poems: “In 1904 Yeats claimed that ‘The words and and the air of ‘There’s Broth in the Pot’ were taken down from an old woman known as Cracked Mary...’” (Finneran, p. 188). The villanelle was originally an old Italian dance and song and so this too matches with Yeats’s predilications for sources. What would be more appropriate than writing a poem about a Pagan Goddess than using a “Country dance, gig, roundleay, song...such as Country wenches sing” ?

Since Yeats is well known for basing some of his poems on extant songs and ballads (Finnerman, 1983/1990, pp. 185-194) it is time to compare the "Villanelle Charge" with those pieces that most resemble it: Leland’s full moon ritual from The Gospel of Aradia; Gerald Gardner’s Charge of the Goddess; and Crowley’s section I,58 of the Book of the Law.

From Leland:
Once in the month, and when the moon is full,
Ye shall assemble in some desert place,
Or in a forest all together join
To adore the potent spirit of your queen,
My mother, great Diana. She who fain

From "The Villanelle Charge"
Once in the month, and better it be
When the moon is full, meet me
...in some secret place

The first line is very close to the "Villanelle Charge"; the second line is similar to the third line of the first tercet of the "Villanelle Charge"; and the fourth and fifth lines reflect the meaning of the "Villanelle Charge"’s second tercet. (Diana is the Goddess of the Moon.) The only problem with determining this as a source for the "Villanelle Charge" is that it came out in 1899, a year after Henley published his villanelle “A dainty Thing’s” (McFarland, personal communication) that says “And if you wish to flute a spell,/Or ask a meeting ‘neath the lime” which is certainly a reference to magic and then says“You must not ask of it the swell/Of organs grandiose and sublime--” The Leland poem bears no relation to the villanelle form, so why Henley’s injunction against a villanelle being used for important worship?

The next recorded form of the Charge of the Goddess is Gerald Gardner’s(Kelly, )which has this passage which is almost verbatim of the "Villanelle Charge"’s third and fourth tercets:

For I am a gracsous Goddess. ‘I give unimaginable joys, on earth certainty, not faith while in life! And upon death unutterable, rest, and ecstacy, nor do I demand aught in sacrife'

However, this passage is taken from the infamous Aleister Crowley (Crowley, 1938/1996) section I, 58 of The Book of the Law:

I give unimaginable joys on earth: certainty, not faith, while in life, upon death; peace unutterable, rest, ecstasy; nor do I demand aught in sacrifice.

From "The Villanelle Charge" starting with the last line of the second tercet:

For I am a gracious Goddess

I give joy on earth, certainty
Not faith while in life, and upon death
Peace, unutterable rest.

....ectasy
{Nor do} I demand aught in sacrifice,

Now here is a real puzzle. Gardner did meet Crowley in 1946 and then again during May 1947 (Hutton, pp. 216 & 221) the year Crowley died. Therefore, Gardner probably did take the passage from Crowley, but why does Gardner’s version contain the refrain of “For I am a gracious Goddess” exactly as the "Villanelle Charge" has it while Crowley’s does not? Arrestingly, Gardner does set the Crowley passage in quotation marks, but not the "For I am a gracious Goddess" segment which would mean Gardner did not quote that segment from Crowley. How then did this passage that is almost verbatum in Gardener come to be part of the Charge fragment? I theorized that it was actually part of Golden Dawn secrets and that Crowely stole it from the Golden Dawn as he had stolen other secrets from them (Hutchinson, p. 119). What must be kept in mind with looking at these sources is that Leland's Aradia was published eleven years after the "Villanelle Charge" was probably first written; Crowley's The Book of the Law was not published until a year before Yeats died; and Gardner's Charge was not written until after Yeats's death. This suggests that Yeats's source for the subject of the "Villanelle Charge" was something other than Crowley, Leland, or, of course, Gardner.

Besides Yeats's poetry having the conversational flow of prose and tending to be based upon songs and other old sources, Yeats, according to Rosenthal (p. xxviii) “can make a slight distortion or variation--an off-rhyme or grammatical ambiguity--count for a great deal.” This statement reflects what McFarland (p. 45) says is essential to making a good villanelle, “the redundancy must either be concealed somehow, or must be made to appear necessary.” Are there any off-rhymes or grammatical ambiguities that either conceal the strict rhyme scheme or appear to make the rhyme necessary?

In the villanelle form, the first line of the first tercet and the third line of the first tercet are the lines that must be repeated and form a couplet at the end of the poem. Although only one line in the "Villanelle Charge" clearly repeats, and that line is “For I am a Gracious Goddess,” it does not exist in the first tercet. However, upon examination the word “Goddess” is rhyming with the word “place” which is the last word of the third line of the first tercet. A disguised rhyme in the form of an off-rhyme is sneakily set in the first tercet. The villanelle form requires that two, not just one line repeat from the first tercet, and that line must be the poem’s first line. Well, the last word of the first line is “be” and this follows the rhyme scheme with “Me,” line four, and “ty” on “certainty” line seven. The tenth line of the poem I had felt was incorrectly passed on to me, and when I analyzed the form I saw the word “ecstasy” was in the wrong spot; moving “ectasy” to the end of the line fits the villanelle form correctly. I had also felt the piece was unfinished, and again, looking at the requirements of the villanelle form, I saw that the second to last line must end in a word that rhymes with “be” and that the last missing line must be “For I am a gracious Goddess.” Also the assonance formed by the word “rest” in line nine is a case of the strict rhyme scheme being craftily softened while the questionable grammar of the line slows the poem to bring to a rest on the word “rest”. That sort of handling of form to emphasize meaning is the hallmark of Somebody Who Knows What He Is Doing, in other words, a master poet.

The rhyme scheme in the fifth tercet is thrown away completely and yet the rhythm is so carefully kept that tercet fairly bounces along. The rhyme scheme is abandoned in the fifth tercet for language I would characterize as “candor, directness, and something like the flavor of conversational speech” as Rosenthal would say (p. xxxii) but also abadoned to point up the concepts that the religion of Wicca or Witchcraft shares with Yeats, the “worship of erotic love” and the "conviction of a sexual principle at the heart of all existance”. Amusingly, rhythm is a salient characteristic of erotic love and sexual principle, and bouncing, happy rhythm is kept in “Love and mirth are my rituals/For I am the beginning and the end” while structure rhyme has been stripped away. If we see the lines as a couple happily bouncing away, there is further meaning in the line if we consider that sex is in one sense a beginning, a beginning of a new life, and in another an end, as orgasm is considered in English a climax (a type of finish) and called by the French “the little death.” The two lines bounces us naturally into the third line’s statement about reincarnation.

The "Villanelle Charge"’s fifteenth line stating the Goddess is the “circle of rebirth” is wholly in keeping with Yeats’s symbolism of the moon and his understanding of the deity. According to A. G. Stock, (1964, p. 123) in Yeats’s “symbolism the moon governs human life and the nights of a lunar month stand for the successive incarnations.” “A Vision amounts to a summing-up of Yeats’ [sic] own sense of values in a system of thought about the soul in and beyond life...” (Stock, p. 122) and in A Vision (Yeats, 1937/1938) the workings of incarnations are referred to repeated as “The Great Wheel” (Yeats, p. 67) spheres (Yeats, p. 187), cycles (p. 243). Further Yeats (p. 67) opens Book I: The Great Wheel of A Vision with quotations from Empedocles, Burnet , and Heraclitus to define God as circle revolving from discord to concord and back again for all time.

The final quatrain in interesting on two counts. First, the meter is slightly jarred away from the bouncing regularity of the preceding tercet. Second, the first two lines of the quatrain do not follow the established rhyme scheme, and yet they do form a couplet as each pair of lines in the quatrain is supposed to per Passerat’s villanelle form. This is yet another distortion of the form, but it is a distortion that helps to focus the content of the poem. The basics of the meter and rhyme are followed but distorted in such a way to emphasis the import these simple words have. Yeats typically was able to make “a slight distortion or variation...count for a great deal” (Rosenthal, p. xviii) and so this first couplet of the finishing quatrain suggests his hand.

It is to be noted that Yeats poetry, even in its earliest forms, is “incantatory” (Rosenthal p. xxxii) and this is exactly what "The Villanelle Charge" is; it is an incantation.

Two questions might properly be brought forward at this point regarding my argument that Yeats composed the "Villanelle Charge" that was given to me in a fragmented form. The first is: why would the poem come to me in a fragmented form with no-one knowing it was by Yeats? The Golden Dawn was a secret society and Yeats “gave away no secrets of the Order” (Raine, p. 246). Next, it is possible that Yeats may have intended for the poem to be memorized. It is even possible he never wrote it down to keep it secret, and he passed it on orally as in the old Celtic Bardic tradition and is a tradition in Wicca. The fragment, as I was given it, had been passed along by people who had memorized it and handed it on as a piece to be memorized piece. As a actress who is a “bad study” (meaning memorization is an ordeal for me) I can attest the "Villanelle Charge" is really easy to memorize. Those that I know about who handed the poem on to me have no real education in poetry and so it is not surprising they did not realize they were passing along a poem. Hallmarks of Yeats’s style are after all, prosiness and conversationalness (Rosenthal, p. xviii). That it came to me in fragmented form is not surprising when it is considered that Americans of our era are not of an oral tradition; we are used to referring to books, the written word, and so the intellectual skill of memorization is not as firmly mastered as it was in oral tradition societies or even societies that feel memorization goes hand in hand with book learning. Americans memorize nothing beyond the alphabet and maybe the multiplication tables, and so my experience in a London school where we were given sentences from Jane Austin to memorize to use in the written yearly State examination allows me to appreciate that memorization is an intellectual skill attended to in Europe but not fostered in the USA. My husband who spent part of his childhood in Spain as well as in many Latin American countries can rattle off all sorts of lists of facts that he was required to commit to memory as a child. Another reason why the poem would not be likely to be remembered completely is that the Charge of the Goddess is delivered (that is theater lingo for giving the speech) by a woman, and the person who is the extent to which I can trace this poem back is a man. He memorized it as some male witches like to do for various and excellent , obvious reasons, but when it came time to pass it on, years after he had learned it, he could not remember it all. He was hypnotized with more being extracted from him in that manner. All of this considered, is it any wonder the piece came to me incomplete?

The second question is: have any other “long lost” poems attributed to Yeats ever surfaced? Yes, indeed there have. According to Richard Finneran (1983/1990, p. 176-184) “Michael O hAodha has suggested that eleven poems signed with the initial ‘Y.’ in the Dublin periodical Hibernia from April 1882 to July 1883 might be the work of W. B. Yeats.” Finneran presents evidence pro and con regarding the poems being Yeats’s, but shies away arguing on the basis of the poems’ content, themes, and style because “such arguments must always be subjective...” and so he presents all eleven poems for the “individual readers to weigh the evidence and to reach their own conclusions.”

I have now given all my reasons why I believe the "Villanelle Charge" was initially composed by Yeats along with my speculations as to what the history of the possible sources was. What remains to be done now is to give the poem that spanned more than a century in its composition and unites two millennium.

If you have comments or questions do e-mail me with them.

References

Chronology