St. Michael & All Angels Church

Location 8

From 1879 the Yeats family attended St Michael and All Angels, a church that would have contrasted greatly with the church at Drumcliff near Sligo where Yeats’s great grandfather was rector and where Yeats himself chose to be buried.

In fact St Michael’s décor and High Church ritual attracted criticism, and spies, from nearby Acton, a Methodist stronghold, and highly suspicious of Romeward trends in the Church of England.

Yeats’s father was not a devout churchgoer (unlike his wife, Susan) and he often allowed his son to skip Sunday services if he would stay at home and study.

But in reaction, perhaps, to his father’s unbelief, Yeats not only brought Christian imagery into his poems but explored Eastern religious teachings, indulged in the late-Victorian-interest in spiritualism, and wrote poems sympathetic to Ireland’s Catholicism, folk beliefs, and ancient myths.

Much of the mediaeval imagery that the Pre-Raphaelite movement had reclaimed involved angels and so a range of angels, unsurprisingly, feature in Yeats’s poems and plays. And the frontispiece of his first collection of poems features St Michael and four angels, showing the influence of this church on his thinking.

Though angels are often associated with harps, they appear with lutes and rebecs in William Morris’s stained glass windows. And one angel, in one of the stained glass windows in St Michael’s, holds a scroll of sheet music.

So angels and lutes provide the dramatic opening to Yeats’s poem, “The Travail of Passion”. With images of Christ’s suffering, and Mary Magdalene’s perfume jar (a favourite Pre-Raphaelite theme), the poem also captures the combination of passion and sorrow that inspired 1890s Symbolist poetry, and the very “Bedford Park” sense that art has as important a role in our spiritual lives as it does in our everyday living.

The Travail of Passion

When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;
When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way
Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,
The hyssop-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kidron stream:
We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,
That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,
Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.