Up a Tree

Poet W.B. Yeats had a complicated history with women.  Let's start with Maud Gonne. A New York Times*  article from 2008 describes Maud Gonne as a "beautiful, brainy feminist Irish revolutionary" and the muse for much of Yeats' romantic poetry over several decades. As mentioned in the previous post, Yeats' fixation with Gonne led him to propose to her four times -- and he was turned down four times. Still the relationship persevered in what they would call a mystical or spiritual marriage.  Both were fascinated by the occult and the mystical. In 1908, for instance, Gonne was in Paris and sent Yeats a letter describing a vision she experienced: "I had such a wonderful experience last night that I must know at once if it affected you & how? At a quarter of 11 last night I put on this body & and thought strongly of you & desired to go to you." Because she was an actress, Yeats wrote a play for her that he intended for her to star in, but she ref...

 I mentioned a couple of posts back that the kids were were distantly related -- as in 10th cousins a few times removed -- to the wife of W. B. Yeats. It turns out she was a bit of a character in her own right, so I'll leave a discussion of her and her marriage to Yeats for the new time. I'd heard Yeats' name from time to time in my life, but a couple of things made me actually pay attention to the man and his works. The first was our trip to Ireland in 2013, when our tour took us to County Sligo and the supposed grave of the poet. I'll discuss that supposed comment at the end.  Yeats is almost a second patron saint of Ireland, and probably would be if he'd been a Catholic or even a believer. People come from all over to visit the grave and take pictures of it. Sharon's pic graces the top of this page. Yeats was born in Dublin but his life was split between England and Ireland. Still, he always considered himself Irish, wrote many pieces about the country and se...

Suppose, just suppose, one of the most famous quotes in poetry didn't mean what many readers -- and countless posters, coffee cups and other slogan-adorned merchandise -- think it does. That may well be the case with Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." You know the lines -- Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference. We view those lines, most often out of context, as being an inspirational reflection on forging our own paths, eschewing the way of the masses to find something better, probably, overlooked by the crowds who prefer the comfortable, well known routines that dominate daily life. Take a chance, the lines seem to cry out, and you'll find serendipity that will completely change your life. Surely this is the case sometimes. We discover new music, new art, new food, new relationships that we gratefully recognize as being so much more interesting and challenging than the beaten paths we ha...

I mentioned last week that I would check to see if I was related to Robert Frost or Robert Burns. I meant it as a joke, but as the week progressed, I decided I would follow up on the idea, including another couple of famous poets, W.B. Yeats and John Keats while I was at it.  As I've said before, if you broaden your search beyond direct ancestors -- your great and great-to-the-X grandparents, the chances you are related to someone famous multiply greatly, and some of the genealogy sites make the search pretty easy. Give them enough information to pinpoint the person you're looking for, click an icon, and voila, the information pops up.  The program I use won't identify relations beyond 15 generations, but you can still go back pretty far. I ran the four men I cited above and found that our family is related to two of them -- Yeats, who married a 10th cousin, three times removed, and Frost, a 6th cousin, three times removed. I'll skip which side of the family is related ...

The headline jumped out at me as I perused one of the several news feeds I check each day: "Taylor Swift is related to famed poet Emily Dickinson and now it all makes sense," proclaimed a CNN headline. Ordinarily I wouldn't have cared a whit and moved on. I'm not a Swiftie or even a fan (then again I'm not exactly the target audience.) But these days she can hardly sneeze without some news outlet posting a breathless article about it. But with what I consider to be the inordinate amount  of publicity the woman receives and my delving into my family's past to learn more about history, I gave the article a read.  A lot of questions popped up in my head. Who cares, was the first. Well obviously Swift fans, who've apparently made comparisons between the women. And I suspect they'd be excited because they would imagine a genetic link between the two women's perceived greatness, so of course their idol would have been fated to become their favorite songs...

I've read several news analyses and opinion columns over the years discussing why Supreme Court rulings on the religion section of the First Amendment are so varied. Why, they ask, can't the court be consistent with its rulings? The answer is both simple and complex. The simple answer is that the rulings reflect the two main streams of thought that have existed since the ratifications of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights: accommodationism and separationism. The more complex and nuanced answer is that even if you appeal to the Founding Fathers -- a group whose membership fluctuates according to the persons or groups who appeal to them -- you find both sentiments at play, even in the two men we've been looking at: Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Just one example for each man: Jefferson started attending worship services held in the House of Representatives after a prominent Virginia preacher was invited to speak at a service, and apparently continued to attend for t...