Tread softly
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 served in the Irish Senate.
One of his celebrated poems is "Easter, 1916," which commemorates The Rising, a rebellion that attempted to win Irish independence from English rule. Joe Biden used a portion of the poem in a 2010 speech in Brussels discussing foreign policy.
The second prompt came in a frothy romcom called "Must Love Dogs." At one point in the movie, Christopher Plummer's character quotes the Yeats poem "Brown Penny":
"I whispered, 'I am too young,'
"And then 'I am old enough';
"Wherefore I threw a penny
"To find out if I might love.
" 'Go and love, go and love, young man,
"If the lady be young and fair.'
"Ah penny, brown penny, brown penny,
"I am looped in the loops of her hair."
Turns out Yeats makes a number of appearances in pop culture. Ray Bradbury titled one of his short story collections after a line in Yeats' "The Song of Wandering Apples." A collection of essays by Joan Didion uses a reference to a Yeats poem for its title. A character in the TV show "Cheers" makes a reference to the Diane character reading Yeats. And quotes show up in other movies.
Being the barely literate student of poetry I sometimes am, I didn't realize the title for No Country for Old Men and its subsequent movie adaptation comes from the poem "Sailing to Byzantium," which holds much more meaning for me as I've grown older.
Some things you might not know about Yeats:
-- He studied art in university and began his creative life as a painter, like his father before him.
-- He proposed to the same woman four times, unsuccessfully, and having failed to win her, proceeded to propose to the woman's daughter, who also turned him down.
-- He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1928, the first Irish person to be so honored.
-- He cofounded the Irish National Theatre and the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and was a dramatist in his own right.
-- He may not actually be buried in Ireland.
He died in France and was buried there initially, but he'd left instructions he wanted to be buried in Sligo, his mother's birthplace and a favorite place of his. The story is a bit complicated, but he was supposedly disinterred and moved to an ossuary containing the bones of several other people. When his wife made arrangements for him to be moved, a selection of bones thought to match his physical characteristics were gathered and sent to Ireland. Another story claims he was buried next to a man who'd died that the same time, and the graves were mixed up when the body was disinterred for shipment to Ireland.
Those rumors swirled around for years, prompting his children to write a letter in 1998 to the Irish press presenting a multipoint rebuttal of the stories that basically stated there was no way their mother could have made any mistakes, and their father was definitely buried in the grave marked as his.
But in 2015 The Irish Times published a piece detailing documents that had come to light that seem to bear out aspects of both the stories I mentioned. You can read the full piece here: Papers confirm bones sent to Sligo not poet's. It's a good read and contains the family's 1988 rebuttal.
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