The Words upon the Window-Pane by William Butler Yeats

First published: 1934

First produced: November 7, 1930, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Type of plot: Naturalistic

Time of work: The 1920’s

Locale: Dublin, Ireland

Principal Characters:

• Dr. Trench, an elderly scholar
• Miss Mackenna, the secretary of the Dublin Spiritualists’ Association
• John Corbet, a graduate student at the University of Cambridge
• Cornelius Patterson, a gambler
• Abraham Johnson, an evangelist
• Mrs. Mallet, an experienced spiritualist
• Mrs. Henderson, a medium

The Play

The action of The Words upon the Window-Pane takes place in the parlor of a now-seedy Dublin boardinghouse that has an illustrious history. Built in the eighteenth century and originally owned by friends of Jonathan Swift, the house has had as its occupants two celebrated Irish patriots, as well as Esther Johnson (1681-1728), Swift’s “Stella.”

As the one-act play opens, guests are arriving for a séance, to be conducted by Mrs. Henderson, a medium who has journeyed from London at the invitation of the Dublin Spiritualists’ Association. The participants are greeted by Dr. Trench, the Association’s president, and Miss Mackenna, its secretary. The first arrival is John Corbet, a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge who is writing a thesis on the relationship between Swift and Stella. Corbet declares his skepticism of spiritualism, and Dr. Trench responds by relating the story of his own early disbelief until his conversion during a séance much like that which is about to take place. Trench explains to Corbet that Mrs. Henderson will act as a medium for the voices of the dead; he cautions Corbet, however, that a “hostile influence” has disrupted Mrs. Henderson’s past séance.

Trench is interrupted by the arrival of Cornelius Patterson, a gambler, whose interest in spiritualism is chiefly to learn whether horse races are run in the life after death. Switching topics, Trench tells Corbet the history of the house and points out the lines from one of Stella’s poems, incised on the glass of the parlor’s window. While Corbet attempts to read the now faintly cut lines in the dim light, Abraham Johnson enters. Johnson, an itinerant preacher, is anxious to rid the séance of its hostile influence by reciting the rite of exorcism, but he is dissuaded by Dr. Trench.

Corbet now recognizes the poem cut into the glass—four lines written by Stella for Swift’s fifty-fourth birthday:

You taught how I might youth prolongBy knowing what is right and wrong,How from my heart to bring suppliesOf lustre to my fading eyes.

Trench and Corbet discuss Swift’s dual tragedy, his inability to return the love offered him by both Stella and “Vanessa” (Esther Vanhomrigh, 1690-1723), and the destruction of his political hopes, embodied in an ideal order mirroring the Roman senate of Brutus and Cato.

Mrs. Mallet enters. She tells Corbet that her motive for attending the séances is to contact her drowned husband. When Mrs. Mallet describes the appearance of her husband in a previous séance, gasping and struggling for breath, Dr. Trench explains that in addition to their death the spirits often relive “some passionate or tragic moment of life.” With the arrival of Mrs. Henderson, the séance begins.

Mrs. Henderson passes into a trance in which she speaks through Lulu, a child who is her spirit “control.” As Lulu, Mrs. Henderson is about to contact the spirit of Mrs. Mallet’s husband, when she is possessed by the hostile spirit, who chastises an unnamed woman for her jealousy. He angrily reminds her of the means by which he has raised her from ignorance. The woman replies, addressing her accuser as “Jonathan.” Trench and Corbet realize that Mrs. Henderson is acting as a medium for the unhappy spirits of Swift and Vanessa.

A lengthy dialogue between Vanessa and Swift, related through Mrs. Henderson, follows. Vanessa counters Swift’s accusations by describing her loyalty and passion. If Swift and Stella are not married, she asks, what other obstacle can come between them? Swift alludes darkly to a disease of the blood “that no child must inherit,” but Vanessa offers her own health and strength as surety for the well-being of the child they might have. As the dialogue continues, however, it becomes apparent that the true stumbling block to their marriage is Swift’s intellectual arrogance, against which Vanessa poses her enlivening passion. As Vanessa leaves Swift to his solitude, Mrs. Henderson, possessed by Swift’s spirit, beats upon the locked parlor door.

Mrs. Henderson sinks into her chair, exhausted, and the sitters prepare to end the séance. Suddenly the spirit of Swift returns, now speaking to Stella. He praises her poem, in which she exalts their intellectual love. Swift asserts that women who are able to love “according to the soul” possess greater happiness than those who experience bodily love. He then recites the poem, and Corbet recognizes it as the work from which the lines incised on the window glass are taken. After prophesying that Stella will “close [his] eyes in death,” Swift vanishes and Mrs. Henderson wakes.

The participants begin to leave, each laying down money for Mrs. Henderson as he departs. John Corbet remains behind. Although he denies his belief in her mediumistic talents, he praises Mrs. Henderson’s abilities as an “accomplished actress and scholar.” He is now convinced that the medium has revealed the long-standing mystery of Swift’s celibacy: The writer’s genius enabled him to foresee the debasement of the modern world—thus his repugnance, through his own posterity, toward adding to the “collapse.”

However, Mrs. Henderson claims to be ignorant of Swift; Corbet’s speech is nonsense to her. She describes the loathsome appearance of the evil spirit whom she has called up; his clothes are filthy, his face broken out in boils. Corbet tells her that she has seen Swift in old age, after the onset of madness. After Corbet leaves, Mrs. Henderson is left alone. As she slowly goes about making a cup of tea, the spirit of Swift weaves in and out of her trance, raving.

Dramatic Devices

The most striking dramatic element in The Words upon the Window-Pane is the play’s joining of naturalistic setting and characterization with a supernatural central action more in keeping with the fantasy of Yeats’s earlier dramatic work. The characters verge on being the stock figures of Irish melodrama—the bragging gambler, the motherly Mrs. Mallet, the deranged fundamentalist preacher. The play’s locale, too, is reminiscent of early twentieth century naturalism. Thus, characters and setting frame the supernatural action of the drama.

Yeats turns the conventions of naturalism against naturalism’s usual intent—to portray human beings as victims of historical and economic fate. The passionate interchanges between the disembodied spirits of Swift and Vanessa, and Swift and Stella, come to assume more emotional reality than the “real,” tangible existences of the living characters who witness this reenactment of long-dead events. In a sense, the social determinism of naturalist theater molds the lives of the living characters while, at the same time, the heroic dead finally escape it. The undisguised irony here is that those who might be supposed to have some control over their social roles, the living, are helpless before them, and those who can only reenact their lives on earth triumph over their circumstances.

The one-act structure, from which Yeats rarely departed, is well calculated to reinforce the significance of isolated human actions. Early in the play, Dr. Trench comments that “some spirits . . . go over and over some painful thought, except that where they are thought is reality.” Trench’s remark is a clear instance of another dramatic irony: For Yeats, thought is also the only reality, and Trench’s “living” reality is only counterfeit. The absence of a longer, three-act structure frees Yeats from the necessity of the sort of character development that would lend significance to his living characters, thereby diminishing the importance of the spirits’ sole, passionate action.

That the séance participants act as spectators to the play’s central action is an additional strength of the one-act format. Once again, the interchanges among the dead gain reality at the expense of the living. Trench, Corbet, and the others fall naturally into the roles of passive witnesses to history, a role, Yeats believes, into which people of the modern era are all cast. Moreover, as the “real” audience watches the characters onstage becoming an audience for past events that they do not understand, the playgoers are given the opportunity of making sense of the interaction between past and present, the living and the dead.

Critical Context

The Words upon the Window-Pane is without question the least typical of Yeats’s plays, at least in apparent structure. In some respects, the work seems more akin to Sean O’Casey’s gritty Irish realism or George Bernard Shaw’s ironic exposure of contemporary self-deceptions. However, all the authentic Yeatsian dramatic elements are also present: the fascination with the supernatural, the obsessive concern with Irish history, and the mystery of human mortality, the play’s Nō-like structure centering on an overwhelming pivotal event.

The play is also one of Yeats’s most autobiographical, at least in terms of the drama’s basic premise, the séance. Yeats had attended many such séances and other spiritualistic encounters and had during the 1920’s composed A Vision, a mystical work based on his wife’s gift for automatic writing. He brings to the plot, then, his intimate and realistic knowledge of the kinds of people—sincere mystics and opportunistic cynics—who participate in séances; at the same time, the action of the play depends on Yeats’s actual belief in the ability of the living to contact the dead.

The concern with Swift’s old age, as well as his emblematic status as a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry, also reflects Yeats’s image of himself during these last years of his life. Increasingly disillusioned with both the wider failures of Western society and the more specific collapse of Irish independence, Yeats had begun to divorce himself from the folk heritage that was so powerful an element in his earlier poetry and plays. In place of the Celtic bard, who had been his model for three decades, Yeats substituted Swift, with whom he felt particular kinship. From Yeats’s perspective, Swift, too, was an outsider in Ireland—an intellectual, a non-Catholic, a cosmopolite. Like Swift in old age, the aging Yeats had begun to revile the disintegration of his own body.

In general, critics believe that the play’s success lies in Yeats’s imaginative re-creation of Swift the man, rather than in the poet’s elevation of Swift’s eighteenth century ideals of civic republicanism and classical learning. Perhaps because the play’s structure is so unlike Yeats’s other dramatic work, audiences otherwise sympathetic to Yeats have found this play difficult going. The play’s tone is unquestionably grim, and the rather desperate theme is not lightened by the fascinating symbolism and physical grace of the Cuchulain cycle (On Baile’s Strand, pr. 1904; The Golden Helmet, pr., pb. 1908; At the Hawk’s Well, pr. 1916; The Only Jealousy of Emer, pb. 1919; The Death of Cuchulain, pb. 1939) or the dance plays (Four Plays for Dancers, pb. 1921). Nevertheless, critics and audiences have admired this experiment in naturalism, and have thought the play to be an untypical, but still striking, success.

Sources for Further Study

Archibald, Douglas N. M. Yeats. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Book Demand, 1983.

Brown, Terence. The Life of William Butler Yeats: A Critical Biography. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1999.

Dorn, Karen. Players and Painted Stage: The Theatre of W. B. Yeats. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1984.

Harper, George Mills. The Mingling of Heaven and Earth: Yeats’s Theory of Theatre. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1975.

Knowland, A. S. W. B. Yeats: Dramatist of Vision. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983.

Moore, John Rees. Masks of Love and Death: Yeats as Dramatist. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1971.

Nathan, Leonard E. The Tragic Drama of William Butler Yeats. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.

Rajan, Balachandra. W. B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction. 2d ed. London: Hutchinson, 1969.

Skelton, Robin, and Ann Saddlemyer, eds. The World of W. B. Yeats. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967.

Watanabe, Nancy. A Beloved Image: The Drama of W. B. Yeats, 1865-1939. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1995.