Trips, Visits and Events
The Yeats winter school weekend
by Pauline-Sophie Courau
In the hazy morning of January 28th, with coffee in hand, puffy eyes and tangled hair, Miss Lau, Sally Renier, Adeline, Marie, Laure, Sophie, Anne-Charlotte, Laure, Francesca, Manon, Danae and I met at Charles De Gaulle International Airport.
An hour later we were boarding a plane to Dublin. This long awaited trip was to take us to Sligo, a three-hour drive from the Irish capital, the hometown to one of the most famous poets of the XXth century - William Butler Yeats. Just after arriving in Sligo we went to visit its art museum, which gave us an opportunity to see the paintings of Jack and John Yeats (poet’s father and brother) and get accustomed to the Irish accent. Being able to understand a word in three by the end of the trip was no small achievement!
The conference was held in a very nice hotel, just outside the small town. Right after checking in, we all went to discover what was to be our home for three whole days. The spacious rooms, the pool, sauna and gym were surely to make up for the long and tiring journey. That evening, we were all gathered in the conference room of the hotel. What a shock! We were the only young people attending the conference. Michael Keohane, President of the Yeats Society, warmly welcomed us. This was followed by a musical presentation by four local musicians. They had set a number of Yeats’ poems to music, and we could easily recognize ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, ‘The Stolen Child’ or ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. By the end of the evening, we were empty stomached and the 20 minutes downhill walk to the centre of Sligo seemed extremely long! After eating lovely ‘Irish’ pizza (is there one country on this planet Domino’s hasn’t invaded?) and drinking litres and litres of hot chocolate, we all marched back to the Sligo Park Hotel for the curfew (wisely designated by Miss Lau!!)
The next morning, after waking up, feeling exhaus...uh...perfectly rested, we had a full Irish breakfast with soda bread and we prepared ourselves for the first lecture. Presented by Professor Patrick Crotty, Head of English at St. Patrick’s College, it dealt with the theme, ‘Yeats and Work’. None of us knew what form the lectures would take; I was quite afraid that we would go through each poem, tediously, one by one. It turned out the lecture was a very clever reading of Yeats’, showing his concern with labour and images of labouring and crafting in his poetry. It was extremely interesting because everything that was suggested by the professor was illustrated with examples of poems we had been studying in class. It was also interesting to consider new meanings the Professor brought to the same poems.
Later in the morning, we left the hotel to go downtown to the Yeats Memorial Building. Leontia Flynn, a young Irish poet, author of ‘These Days’, a collection of poems recently up for the Whitbread prize, lectured on ‘The poet and personal history’. She also read some of her own poems. I particularly remember the ones that dealt with the relationship she had with her father as a child. Her talk gave an interesting perspective on the relationship between a poet’s private life and the public life of his poetry. It was an interesting approach to some of the problems and issues of reading Yeats .
After some lunch, we finally went to do some shopping (!! ) which essentially consisted of walking in and out of clothes shops without finding anything really to our taste. But it gave us an opportunity to visit Sligo, which is a lovely small town. It has (according to our driver) 54 pubs, the streets are narrow and most of them cobble stoned and lined with colourful two story buildings.
Some time later we all reconvened at the Yeats’ memorial and got on a bus to go visit the places Yeats made legendary in his poems. We saw the flat-headed mountain Ben Bulben, Sleuth wood, the Lake of Glen-Car and its waterfall, where we all religiously recited the ‘come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild...’. We even visited the churchyard at the foot of Ben Bulben where Yeats is buried. We all pondered the enigmatic inscription on his gravestone commanded by the poet himself: “Cast a cold eye on life, On death. Horsemen, pass by!”)
When it came to our fellow Yeats fan(atic)s on the tour we got to the point where we started feeling like the bubbles in a pool of intellectuals. Some of these people actually appeared to consume Yeats more than oxygen and their commitment to the author is passionate enough to justify long airplane hours and jetlag. I’m particularly thinking of a woman I met who had come all the way from Georgia, USA just to attend the conference. She told me this after I shared how mad I thought we were for coming out all the way from Paris only for the occasion. During this journey through the world of Yeats’ mythical landscape, we started philosophising over Bailey’s and Irish Mist and declared ourselves the founding members of the modern dead poet’s society in the midst of the picturesque Clen-car valley with some curious sheep looking on . After a dinner organised for all the conference participants, Leontia Flynn shared with us some more of her irreverent poetry.
I would love to tell you what the third day’s ‘Yeats and Madness’ lecture consisted of, but the sleepless nights (talking about Yeats, of course!) prevented me from switching my brains on. But I’m sure that some of my more devoted colleagues took copious notes! The journey back seemed endless. All of us were tired and, sorry for any parent reading this, not too happy to come home.
On behalf of all the girls I would like to thank Sally and Miss Lau for taking us to Ireland. This trip not only allowed us to study further in-depth Yeats’ work but also to teach some of the Irish youngsters we met how to speak English. Yes, fellow Anglophone friends, Shakespeare’s language is being badly mistreated overseas, not the content, just the pronunciation...
Dernière modification le 19-05-06 par
