Blueshirts

Abstract

When Yeats left the Senate in the summer of 1928 he was worn out by the seemingly endless fight against mob Catholicism. He wanted to leave Irish bitterness behind and attain in old age ‘some measure of sweetness and light’.¹ He warned that ‘the blundering of a censorship may drive much Irish intellect into exile once more, and turn what remains into a bitter polemical energy’. After adding that he saw his life’s work threatened, he concluded: ‘I am glad … to be out of politics. I’d like to spend my old age as a bee and not as a wasp.’ ² Such honeyed visions were, of course, delusive. After a period of illness and convalescence spent mostly in Rapallo, Yeats returned to Ireland to take up political interests once again. He spent his political old age as a wasp, not as a bee.