Trips, Visits and Events
Landscape and Yeats
By Paddy Salmon
Seeing the landscapes where Yeats grew up added an extra dimension to many of the poems.
His brother and father were fine artists and we saw some of brother Jack’s landscapes in Dublin.
If you stand facing the Atlantic at Sandhill, the beach near Sligo where he grew up, you have on your right, the huge, ox-like, “masculine” mountain of Ben Bulben. It juts out towards the sea and dominates the countryside.
- Yeats’ gravestone at Drumcliff, watercolor by Paddy Salmon
We got close to it at Lissadell House, the extraordinary home of the upper-class Gore-Booths and Constance Markievicz, whom he visited regularly, though he resented being made to sleep in the stables! Yeats’ grave lies beneath the shadow of Ben Bulben, in the nearby church at Drumcliffe, with the epitaph he wrote for himself in the poem Under Ben Bulben:
On Life, on Death,
Cast a cold eye
Horseman, ride by!
Isn’t that superb ?
Then to the left of Sligo, on the other hand, you have a mysteriously “feminine” mountain, looking like an enormous breast with a nipple on top: this is Knock-na-reay, where we climbed on our second day in beautifully unexpected sunshine.
The nipple, when you climb up, turns out to be a huge cairn, probably a Celtic burial chamber, attributed to a Queen Maeve (whoever she was) - back in neolithic times. It has never been excavated and archaeologists think it may have untold riches and passages and hundreds of chambers, like one of the pyramids. But it is so inaccessible that it will probably never be touched. It’s better that way; let’s keep a few mysteries in life!
From the top we had one of the finest views you could hope to have: to the west, the rolling Atlantic ocean; to the north, Ben Bulben; to the south, a mysterious range of limestone mountains, which extend all the way to Denmark; and below us, nestled in the valley, Sligo, the town where Yeats grew up, with, beyond it, beautiful Lough Gill and the magical Lake Isle of Innisfree, which he describes in the eponymous poem.
Anyway Knock-na-reay is undoubtedly female, rounded, remote and mysterious, as opposed to the arrogant, forward-thrusting Ben Bulben.
So, Yeats is to be understood, topographically too as well as poetically, as sandwiched between two worlds - the male world of politics, civil war and his duties as a senator and the female world of his unrequited love for Maud Gonne (and her daughter!), his fascination for automatic writing, as practised by his wife, Georgiana and his interest in the great love stories of Irish legends. The landscape shows it all.
Thank you, Betty Lau, for organising such a fascinating trip and for ensuring we had such fine weather all the time!
Dernière modification le 19-05-06 par
