W. B. Yates, Sligo

Sligo is a town associated with two famous brothers by the name of Yeats. One was the artist Jack Butler Yeats, about whom I know very little. The other was William Butler Yeats, the Nobel Prize winning writer and poet, about whom I know quite a lot. Yeats was assigned reading for my Higher School Certificate. Somehow the high stress of that crucial year combined with the potent imagery of Yeats' own poems to indelibly etch much of his life story, and his poetry, on my brain.

The people of Sligo obviously share this concern, but they have dealt with theirs by erecting this wonderful, somewhat stylised statue of Yeats on one of the main corners of the city.



Despite the trauma of the Higher School Certificate and an inherent suspicion towards Romantic poetry, I still have a soft spot for Yeats. It may just be a small bruise on my cerebral cortex, but it feels almost like affection.

Here I kneel at the feet of the master. He is covered in his own poetry and I am covered in his shadow. Perfect order in the universe.

Sligo is a literary kind of town. There five bookstores within a few blocks of each other in what is, with less than 18,000 residents, quite a small town. All five stores, based on the window displays, were gearing up to celebrate the release of the final Harry Potter book at midnight the following night. My kind of town indeed.

The entire Sligo district was a kind of Yeats pilgrimage for me. We even drove past the graveyard where he is buried. There's a big sign by the side of the road pointing the way to his grave, past all the other non-famous corpses that are in the way. There are also a few other clues, like the Yeats cafe and restaurant. Okay, I'm an admirer too, but having a Yeatsachino by his grave is just taking it all a bit too far.

For your edification I reproduce below the text of the poem that most creeped me out when I was forced to memorise, interpret and analyse it while still young and quite impressionable. More of Yeats' writings and a detailed biography can be found online here.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!
Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?