THE PRINT COLLECTOR/ALAMY/INDIAPICTURE
(W. B. YEATS),
OSCAR ELIAS/ALAMY/INDIAPICTURE
(BOOK),
AURÉLIEN POTTIER/MOMENT/GETTY IMAGES(HORSES),DESIGN PICS/THE IRISH IMAGE COLLECTION/DESIGN PICS/GETTY IMAGES(BUST)AN IRISH AMBLE
By Sohini Das Gupta
W
illiam Butler Yeats,
20th century’s literary
Goliath from Ireland,
made no bones about
his love for magic (“The world is full of
magic things, waiting for our senses to
grow sharper.”) and mystique (Come
away, O human child!/To the waters
of the wild/With a faery, hand in
hand...).One might struggle to size
up his literary aesthetics as Romantic
or Modernist—much of his work is
meditative, much of it political, and
even more, vehemently in between—but
what remains uncontested is Ireland’s
pride of place as his inspiration.
Whether in his homesick ode to
Sligo’sInnisfreeisland (“The Lake Isle
of Innisfree”), idealised while trudging
the “grey pavements” inLondon, or in
his fractured reaction to the “terrible
beauty” of the nationalist Easter Rising
(“Easter, 1916”), Ireland’s footprints in
the Yeatsian psyche are as tangible as
Yeats’s own across Ireland.
For lovers of the Dublin-born poet,
the city’sAbbey Theatreis a good
gateway to the trail. Ireland’s national
theatre, co-founded by Yeats andradical
thinker Lady Gregoryin 1904, has
over the years seen many definitive
moments of the country’s cultural
revival. The electric hubbub from its
early days of hosting plays by Oscar
Wilde, J.M. Synge and SeanO’Casey
survives, as a mix of classic and
contemporary pieces continue to
be staged even today. Do not skiptheNational Library of Ireland,with
its vast reservoir andfrequent
exhibitionsofYeats’s literature.
WhileGortin Galway houses
the poet’s summer homeThoor
Ballylee,and the verse-inspiring
green shadows ofCoole Park, a trip
toConnemarapromises the soft
melancholia of Irishcountrysidethat
haunted Yeats forever.
But it is inSligo, where the
Nobel Laureate spent much of
his childhood summers, that
one can deep-dive into all things
Yeats. Scour the rocky
reaches ofKnocknareafor
the legends of Queen
Maeve, or marvelatstone circles, dolmensand passage
tombs strewn aroundtheCarrowmore
Megalithic Cemetery—one of Europe’s
largest Stone Age graveyards. That is to
not forget the watery isle ofInnisfree,
immortalised as the place “where peace
comes dropping slow.”
At the Sligo Town Centre, you’ll be
mapping frantically to squeeze in time
at the Yeats Memorial Building,or pay
homage at the poet’sstatuein front of
the Ulster Bank building. Between
the poet’s neoclassical holiday
retreat ofLissadell Houseand his
final resting place atDrumcliff
Churchyard, Sligo sings of
the “bitter sweetness” of
Yeat’s life, and beyond.Ireland
The rugged jade landscape of Connemara, where W.B. Yeats spent his honeymoon, was a
great influence; A striking, life-like sculpture of the poet in Sligo (b ot to m).BOOKS
Dublin
GortSligo
ConnemaraScouting for poetry in W.B. Yeats’s Ireland