WB Yeats No Country For Old Men SD

we all know WB Yeats lofty poet bard of the nation unrequited lover what we weren't told at school however is that he was a particularly human soul obsessed all his life with sex and the occult a stark contrast to the poet who helped inspire the idea of a nation and its culture Yates's life encompassed farce as well as verse and many think his work was all the better for you were silly like us your gift survived at all wrote WH Auden of Yeats like us he lived a life of folly and desire perhaps it's time to look for the man behind the poetic mask I think the phrase that is most significant is his setting Don of the notion of myself I must really have you noticed that Yates is an anagram of yeast the both the property of turning the base into the freshest like some alchemists Yates transformed the base stuff of his life into the gold of poetry and like the best of magicians his final act may have been to disappear altogether before his death in France in 1939 WB Yeats wrote his funeral arrangements in verse commanding publicly that he be buried in slightly under Barrow been Baldwin's head in drumkit churchyard Yates is laid an ancestor was rector there long years ago a church stands near what Yates could not command history the outbreak of war in 1939 made it impossible for Yates's body to be brought home it was only in 1948 nine years after his death that Ireland could finally bring home its poet of the nation earth receive an honored guest William Gates is laid to rest let the Irish vessel lie empty of its poetry but true to form behind the curtain of the international stage play a more human story concerning the whereabouts of Yates's remains the saga of what happened to Yeats his body after he was buried is still uncertain and slightly contested Louise Foxcroft has her own connections to the mystery of Yates's body in 1939 her grand uncle was buried in the plot next to his grave the first one appears to be a it's a list of deaths even if it's from the parish register it's got Yeats William Butler aged 72 this is 1939 and he's buried in Level II or carry a and then one two three four four down is Alfred Hollis who's my great-uncle died aged 44 on the 11th of February buried on the same level as he AIDS I think they realized that they got WB Yeats somewhere and they didn't know where he was from this page this gets biscuits quite interesting these officials are placing him in another coffin to be transported down to the Irish Corvette to be taken away under escort armed escort I visited from cliff and about seven years ago with a cousin of mine and then we felt we were visiting Alfred's grave that's what it felt like perhaps Yeats now a God of literature looked down upon his own state funeral while he lived he could never escape his body its desires and frailties it kept posing questions of him maybe it's fitting it leaves us with a question decades after he died in the early years I couldn't understand yet to tell he seemed to I've been taken by the fairies and it didn't seem to resemble the Ireland which was beginning to understand I thought he was a living monument and I had to respect the monument but I didn't really feel close to him forced expirience I would have been in scale you know secondary skill deals with he's getting fast they're on your child to everything I am for real item you know but then after second to skill I didn't have really that much relationship emulsion especially not we age you know I mean it was under moon Ethan tells about it like I didn't really have much today or demoted and up in a sense I think Yates's image and identity for his reading public was formed very early by what we would not think of as the Celtic Twilight poetry I am going to begin with a poem of mine all the league I love industry because if you know anything about play you will expect me to begin with it the fact that industry kept coming back to haunt and the fact is what people asked for the fact that it was you know always the the signature poem drove him mad I will arise and go now one Goku in a tree and a small urban builder of clay and nut rolls made had he stopped writing in 1900 or 1910 he would still be remembered for what are the anthology poems and their ontology poems for a reason September night they talked in it just felt so relevant right now you know you look around and you see where we are now and how coin in the solid we'd all become we great and what happened with the Celtic Tiger and we all kind of re-experiencing that and assess ourselves to the prison and went into a team you know so we still is still very relevant to me are you but Nietzsche listen I'm formerly a greasy tail light 1/2 handstands I'm married you didn't say romantic Garland's here it's dead and gone gone it was only when I reread us it shocked me how relevant it was um that kind of annoyed me annoyed me that our society hasn't moved on and developed it annoyed me that a Reuter that is dead as well as years could still have his finger the pulse but that's as far as part of his genius read isn't it romantic garland may have died tragically young free Yeats smothered by materialism but he kept her spirit alive in another woman when you are old and grey and full of sleep and nodding by the fire take down this book and slowly read and dream of the soft look your eyes had once and of their shadows deep the early love poems are justly famous for their innocent romance indeed Yeats remained a virgin until he was 30 he confessed in print that his desires left him in a state of nervous exhaustion from which he sought relief in vain as a result the demure poet became a figure of fun in some Dublin circles when the English co-founder of the Abbey Theatre Annie Horniman fell for Yeats a limerick circulated in the bars of the city what a pity that miss Annie Hall when she wants to seduce our suborning she should choose Willie age who still masturbates and at any rate is of the horny what the smirking drinkers weren't to know was that the subject of sexuality would trouble and lucky for us inspire Yeats for the rest of his life I was 20 and with he was 21 when we first met and he was extremely proud at that one years seniority he looked much younger than I did because he's rather a disheveled art student he intended to be a painter like his father it was brought by my actor friend and he brought me round to see her and I found I was speaking to somebody playing a part I thought she was an actress her voice was much more very fine voice and she rejoiced in a room it and I found that harder to take I mean she was into being myth she was part of history and she knew it Yeats was in the business of making myths of himself of others and of Ireland he fashioned more gone into the goddess of unrequited love but the truth is that there was always another woman in his life Ireland herself and every stage was life the matter of Ireland and the destiny of the country and the quality of culture in the country the quality of politics in the country all concerned him he merged his two loves when he cast more Daz kathleen ii Hoolihan in the play of that name both chaste spiritual unattainable creatures but while Yeats was busy wooing his image of an ideal Ireland history was being consummated in the street the 1916 rising came as great surprise to you as it did to many others he could hardly believe it he felt rights that nothing is now certain about the future except that it cannot be anything like the past Yeats privately recoiled from the fanaticism he had started to see in Maud gonne and men like Pierce who he called have cracked but in his most famous political poem he accepted that they had been transfigured by history true marmar name upon name as a mother names her child when sleep at last has come on limbs that had run wild what is it but nightfall no no not night but death in Easter 1916 Yeats put aside his personal prejudices for the greater cause Yeats had believed allegations made about Morgan's former husband Major John McBride of domestic violence against her and the molestation of her then 11 year old daughter Isolde gone yet my bride takes his place among the heroes of the poem this other man I had dreamed a drunken vainglorious lout he had done most bitter wrong to some who are near my heart yet i number him in the song he too has resigned his part in the casual comedy he too has been changed in his turn transformed utterly a terrible beauty is born in the same year as the rising Yeats was facing his own personal crisis he was 52 and still alone he turned to a belief system that was to be taboo in the new Ireland the occult Yeats all his life believed that by intellectual and spiritual concentration could elevate your consciousness to a level where you could access things ideas worlds which were not normally accessible he early got interested in Asian thought in the 1880s and founded a hermetic society and humble and it was was affiliated with the Theosophical society and then left and partially because he wanted to do more exploring than they would and so he joined a magical water and was a very serious mage in the Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn this famous early letter of Yates's to his mentor John O'Leary defending his Yates's magical experimentation and searches he says the world of Magic's at the center of everything I think and do and right and I could not have written the problems which you will admire without that sense of a magical dimension such was Yates's belief in magic he was fully prepared to let his life be guided by it through the secretive code the Golden Dawn Yeats had an astrological chart drawn up it produced for him a deadline by which to become a husband and father 1917 was gonna be the most propitious year for him to get married and so he needed to make it happen if it was gonna make it happen but also I think he had turned 50 um he was feeling the need for family children caught you know posterity in a physical as well as intellectual sense a book was not going to be enough Yates now return to familiar territory much has been written about the sexless relationship between Yates and Morgan in reality they consummated the affair a number of times but the poet did not want to disturb the image of the tragic lover and the chaste Queen the first of all the tribe lay there and did such pleasure take she who had brought great Hector down and put all joy to rack that she cried into his ear strike me if I shriek when a final and predictable refusal of marriage came from Maude the poet turned his attentions to her 22 year old daughter Isolde Yates had become infatuated with her even though for much of her life he had been a surrogate father to her Isolde also refused marriage if Yates had made a fool of himself he didn't seem to care his attention now turned to 24-year old Georgia Hyde Lee's George as he was - caller had been drawn to the golden dawn with its frisson of illicit pagan rites he initiated her in 1914 so she was um she was a very good astrologer and a very knowledgeable in the history of the occult and brought a lot of her own knowledge and reading into the relationship in keeping with his own astrological deadline WB Yeats married Georgia Hyde Lee's in 1917 far from naive George would bring something so unexpected to the Union that it would change his personal and creative life forever a marriage that begins in the most extraordinary and unlikely and ill-omened way he marries very quickly in a state of near panic having proposed to him being refused by his old ghan to me or about human remains obsessed he marries a woman nearly as young as her whom he does not know very well and who on their honeymoon in the ashton forest is convinced practically as he is becoming convinced that this has all been a terrible mistake there wasn't much action on the honeymoon and she big year Georgia Georgia is he called her began to get impatient and then she got as I say it my book Anna struck me the most ingenious device a wife ever invented to awake the interest of a bored husband Georgian happily discovered that Yeats had written to Isolde during their honeymoon there had been no physical intimacy yet between the couple she began to channel the spirit world to her new husband as if she were a medium and that afternoon the marriage was consummated she began automatic writing and he did believe to the spirits from the other world were flowing out through her hand and writing this these words for him to use in metaphors for his poetry the minute that stuff started happening everything changed I I think really everything changed he became completely in trance depth obsessed by it you know and they started realizing that something was coming that was systemic and that had was a new way of looking at the world through these symbols and bursts Yates loved symbols and that these were going to be symbols he could use not only philosophically but also poetically gratitudes the unknown instructors what they undertook to do they brought to pass all things hang like a drop of dew upon a blade of grass he'd begun to think about what Gong and he thought again so - one of the greatest matrimonial strokes in literary history we may smile at the idea of Yeats and George being involved in the OED aboard of the medium or the voices from beyond from the other side but you know what as far as I can see all poetry partakes somewhat of that idea over three years of intense automatic writing sessions followed George filled thousands of pages that would provide Yates with symbols and metaphors for some of his greatest work including one of the most potent and visionary poems of the 20th century the second coming hardly are those words art when a vast image out of spiritus Mundi troubles my sight I just love tick sorta so panic in the poem you know and on the symbolism of it where is like a movie and actually be sane enough or it's just ambiguous enough tests are to be disturbed in other way I am a coin of what's my policy of their poem is in those corners where he's plumbing the depths of his own some constant get to here with subconscious and we're all gonna know he's talking about or we don't you know that's I think that's the power of the poem turning and turning the widening gyre the Falcon cannot hear the falconer Things Fall Apart the center cannot hold mere anarchy is loosed upon the world the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drawn Joyce said that the thing Yeats had and he Joyce didn't her was the power of imagination that was unequaled no surrealist poet can equal a choice son I think there's a lot in that and you will get us in poems that produce an image from his wide reading from local researchers and make it a concrete and even bring it into a contemporary political context and that's where a lot of being the most famous poems comes from the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drilled the best lack all conviction will award the fall of passionate intensity surely some revelation is a hug surely the Second Coming is at hand he did think something terrible might be coming but he also thought that would be its cycle and then something else would come after that the rough beasts come around again the doctor stops again but now we know at twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle and what rough beast its hour come round at last slouches toward Bethlehem to be born out of an obsession with the mystical arts that some would deem foolish Yeats gleaned images that spoke of the modern world and that continued to resonate once again out of the base he had forged the precious Yeats once described his own art as an accident in the search for reality his marriage at the age of 52 to George and their experimentations in the accout had opened a new world for the poet to explore she just found just the way to inspire him he was always a great poet even you back to his early days but the final years were the greatest and much thanks to her she was dauntingly intelligent I mean I think this stuff captured him but it also captured her attention and thus declared that Arab lady last night where under the wild moon on grassy mattress I had laid me with in my arms great Solomon I suddenly cried out in a strange tongue not his not mine a lot of these exchanges are about sex in fact and about the sexual fulfillment together with spiritual searching which will make their marriage a unit and when it last that murders over maybe the bride bed brings to spare for each an imagined image brings and finds a real image there yet the world ends when these two things those several are a single light when oil and wick are burned in one therefore a blessed moon last night gave sheba to her solomon but part of the yates that we know is a production made by georgie aids i sort of got this these suspicions after a while looking at all these manuscripts that she married him in part because she she didn't want to be bored you know and she thought somebody else might just be not be interesting enough to be married to and they created a relationship that was a very homey and good relationship out of this very strange beginning as the automatic writing sessions progressed george also began to take more control the instructors were now laying the groundwork for the couple to conceive children within two years their daughter anne and son michael broke for most of his life Yates had lived between Ireland and England but the Irish Revolution led to a new commitment Yeats dedicated himself to the nation and a consciously public role in it in 1919 he moved the family to the tower he had bought in County Galway characteristically it afforded him a lofty view of the country others described it as his phallic symbol in the bog he be absolutely alone so completely alone that even when M as infant was in the room and silent he had still to be alone because no personality must be third tall it wasn't a matter of merely being spoken to or interrupted when he is but had been absolute isolation in a room wherever he was waiting I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour and heard the Seawind scream upon the tower and under the arches of the bridge and scream in the arms above the flooded stream imagining in excited reverie that the future years had come dancing to a frenzied drum out of the murderous innocence of the scene in a prayer for my daughter Yates returned to his fearful prophecy that the world was descending into anarchy but it was the actual brutality and violence of the Civil War playing out around his home that provoked Yates to respond uniquely to the contradictions of revolution there's peace in meditations in time of Civil War a section called the stairs nest is my window and it's about in the midst of all is I mean actual shooting around the tower this bird is building its nest and the bees are building in the crevices of the masonry the bees build in the crevices of loosening masonry and there the mother Birds bring grubs and flies my wall is loosening honey bees come build in the empty house of the stair it's very tender for Yeats me not really a port of tenderness usually it's very vulnerable and sweet and a sense of an endangered life and barricade of stone or of wood some 14 days of civil war last night they trundle down the road the dead young soldier in his blood come build in the empty house of the stair with the Civil War now over the poet took a direct hand in trying to build the nation his role in the new state as a senator and his contribution to the cultural life of Ireland was recognized by the awarding of the Nobel Prize we came to the phone and said he didn't know the new and I said this is great honor not only for you but for the country legacy he was getting slightly peeping over the telephone citing impatient or was all about so I said you've been awarded the Nobel Prize a very great honor to you in a very great honor to Ireland and to my amazement the first question the only question is with how much smiley how much is it if you see him in pieces of documentary film little little tips he's got the top hat on or whatever the image of him which he cultivated as a aloof self-absorbed almost unworthy presence it give him the freedom to observe as ever from behind this mask as he recorded however Yeats was coming to know in Ireland that he didn't like conservative Catholic and materialist he was beginning to publicly turn his face away from his oldest love the tower published in 1928 was an intense personal testimony an attack on the poet himself and the world that now revered him Yeats would tear down the image of the smiling public man in 1928 at the age of 63 Yeats was to discover perhaps his greatest theme the tragedy of a raging spirit trapped in the body of an old man the sense of development all the time the intellectual artistic creative energy that comes pouring out even after very serious illnesses like in the late 20s is is is quite extraordinary the first poem of Gators are you by heart or sailing to Byzantium which is a great poem of life and death that is no country for old men the young in one another's arms birds in the trees those dying generations the first stanza of this terrific sense of me the Salmon Falls the microcredits eats fish flesh and foam the terrific vitality and surge in it an aging man is but a poultry thing a tattered coat upon a stick unless solo clap its hands and sing and louder sing it ends up with him out of nature imagining himself singing in a golden burned but seeing of what has passed or passing or to come and throughout a book the tower there's a sense of a frailty not only of human life but of human civilization Yates now rebelled against the injustice of nature itself that an old man was still provoked by desire but denied its experience how can those terrified vague fingers push the feathered glory from her listening thigh and how can body Laden that white rush but feel the strange heart beating where it lies a shudder in the loins engenders there the broken wall the burning roof and tar and Agamemnon dead he's really unafraid as a poet he's unafraid to do things that other people would find um in bad taste and he just goes there anyway whence did all that fury come from empty to our virgin womb st. Joseph thought the world would melt but like the way his finger smelt couldn't be more different from what the dominant church of the Ireland of his day is saying about sex and this of course has to be factored in to why it's the early poems that appear on the intro certain Leaving Cert and why so many of the obituaries after he he dies strike a very pious and regretful note about you know how could the man who wrote down by the Sally Gardens and all the rest of it have ended up by writing this the word filth was actually used certainly um privately if not publicly kathleen ii Houlihan had been ditched for crazy jane a foul-mouthed dirty old woman while de Valera and the nation listened to count John McCormick singing panis angelicus Yeats was turning to the fallen angels of the peasantry and their bawdy songs I met the bishop on the road and much said he and I those breasts are flat and fallen now those veins must soon run dry live in a heavenly mansion and not in some foul sty she personally exists just to flaunt at something in the faces of the censors she's a she's an old woman who proclaims loudly to anybody who wants to listen and even those who don't that old women to have sexual desires and a woman can be proud and stiff when on love intent but love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement for nothing can be soul or hole that has not been read we remember amongst many other things yes is lying about sex and the day and being the only to fit subjects for the rational mind or they goes for the thinking mind can't remember what the rest of it is who cares what the rest of it is sex on the dead but Yates had a problem for someone who would devote his life to thinking about writing about and engaging in sex in terms of desire he was about to enter what he would call his second puberty physically he was an old man he was convinced that creativity and sexual potency were connected and that he needed to keep himself vivid by keeping himself sexually engaged in 1934 at the age of 68 Yates underwent a new surgical procedure the sty neck operation although in today's terms little more than a vasectomy at the time it was believed to rejuvenate the potency of elderly patients after the operation Yates said that he wanted to make up for what he termed the wasted nights of his youth one can trivialize this one can sneer at us as I think many of us Dublin contemporaries did but one must also see it as a powerful voltage in his work his wife George that the operation to restore his vigor was unsuccessful but as one writer said she may not have been the best judge one thing is certain Yates his creative potency was to flourish a string of relationships with younger women quickly followed the operation including one with Margo Roddick and unpublished poet and with the successful young Roger Edith Manon even more important relationships would follow I don't think that George were worried worried that these other relationships would replace the one that he had with her I don't think she was really jealous which is kind of a mystery to me but if but I think it's true there were two aristocratic women who became intrinsic theatres life in 1935 he had fallen in love with the poet Dorothy Wellesley whose work he greatly admired a year later journalist Edith Shackleton healed him into Yeats his life he had always been drawn to the levelled lawns of these wealthy hostesses within those English houses his writing continued unrestrained you think it horrible that lust and rage should dance attendance upon my old age they were not such a plague when I was young what else have I to spur me into song he would come with a germ of something see in his mind and then work it hard he used to work a lard quite a lot he had the beautiful deep voice one could hear him beating out the rhythm of their of it plans when he was composing them when he was working in his room upstairs while George kept the family home back in Dublin Yates spent months at a time with the other two women in his life she is always there as the partner in his life and not in I think a kind of passive or doormat way but in a very real sense of partnership and he was endlessly understanding of what he needs in terms of generation self generation generation through infatuations or passions for others in his last five years Yates wrote more poems than during the entire decade of the 20s but was failing health he had been ordered by his doctors to the south of France facing his final winter Yates was fully aware of his own mortality an agent man that would appall facing a tattered coat on a cloak to enlist soul clubbers hands and sing louder sing for every chatter this mortal dread nor have they found his singing school but a monument was only nificent well I think that's great stuff especially at my age I'm 83 I won't say I think about death every day but across it might arise in the listener when it came to his own mortality Eddie he wasn't that daunted sound of a stick upon the floor a sound of somebody who moves from chair to chair and was stick upon the floor a sound that somebody retires from chair the chair another book at anus hands around the sound of him he makes guess I cut in stones he said he wanted a passionate syntax and the treble in his voice and also the forward movement of the argument is just irresistible I think well none has a ring but not the name the last poems that were published after his death though they shocked and surprised people we can now see as some of his greatest works above all out of which comes a sense of understanding the extraordinary journey of his own life I mean one thinks of the circus animals desertion is great the great sweep of that poem in terms of it's autobiographical impulses but it does end up with you know a vision of the poet coming towards the end of his life those masterful images because complete grow in pure mind but out of what began a mind of refuse or the sweepings of a straight old kettles old bottles and a broke can old iron old bones old rags that raving [ __ ] who keeps the till now that my ladder is gone I must lie down where all the ladders start in the file rag-and-bone shop of the heart then he's getting ready for leaving the earth and I keep saying how absolutely marvelous it was that Yates was able to make coincide the end of his physical life his life on Earth and the end of his artistic life because on his deathbed he was writing poems how can I that girl standing there my attention fixed son Roman or on Russian or on Spanish politics yet here's a travel man that knows what he talks about and there's a politician that has both read and thought and maybe what they say is true of war and Wars alarms but old that I were young again and held her in my arms I was power earn your trade sing whatever is well made scorn the swords now growing off all out of shape from toe to toe their own remembering hearts and heads baseball products or base bets sing the peasantry and them hard riding Country Gentlemen the holiest of monks and after Porter drinkers Randy laughter sing the lords and ladies gate or beaten into the clay through seven heroic centuries casts remind in other days that we in coming days may be still the indominus ville are you Cherie during the last days of his life Yates was surrounded by the women who loved him most in a selfless act George had invited Dorothy and Edith to come to his bedside in France as she said to help light the flame the scene was almost a reenactment of one of the eighties who Colin plays come hither come sit beside the bed you need not be afraid for I myself sent for you Esther in Guba of all the people in the world we too and we alone may watch together here because we have loved him best bedtime I arrived he was really very ill and he died two days later it was on the night he died I'd watched over him for half the night and and mrs. Yates brought me is in front and pen that he used for many years and his pocket diction is always travelled with him as keepsakes one of the jaw droppers is that he died shall we say on a Saturday and nobody growing Dublin what's a Sunday during Jack and Jack get on his bike and rides round two sisters and up to the door and what he does it he just opens his arms and says 'gone Yeats and George had often discussed his death according to George his actual words were if I died bury me up there at Rockland and then in a year's time when the newspapers have forgotten me dig me up and plant me in survival WH Auden may have been closer to the actual truth when he wrote a v8 centering posterity he disappeared in the dead of winter now he is scattered among a hundred cities the saga of what happened to Yeats his body after he was buried is still uncertain and slightly contested he was buried in rock Green Cemetery his wife took as people did in these small rocky cemeteries without much room at least effectively on the grave this you must remember was 1939 she expected him to be disinterred and brought back to Slagle as a later point the Second World War intervened in the aftermath of world war ii edith Shackleton healed returned to visit the ghosts of her famous lover she had stood at the graveside eight years previously but now to her horror Yates's grave was gone what appears to have happened is that during the war many bodies had been moved to the cemeteries asuri where skeletons were stored to make room for the italian war dead in 1948 when an article in The Times reported that the body of Yates was to be brought home to Ireland Edith questioned how sure the family could be of finding the body of Yates and the same question would weigh on the minds of the family of Alfred Hollis the Englishman who'd been buried next to eighths in 1939 must bring quite a lot of upset and disturbance for everybody over the last well 6070 years now and because it's not just my family it's the eighth's family as well and there's been quite a lot of upset and disturbance for everybody over there I think this is it I can see the mortuary chapel and the ledge here where the terrace steps down I mean there's not much that's still here but that's still there so I think we can locate it quite precisely it's yates grave and my great uncle's grave here I think alfred was in his mid forties but he had TB and he was severely disabled by it he was very weak and he came down in 1939 for well obviously for the climate and the cure and they died here within a couple of days of each other and then were buried next to each other just after the war finished my grandparents came back with my mother who was then 17 and her sister Coral and they came to look for the graves and they've completely gone and this was a major surprise they had no idea of what was gone on but they during the wartime but they went to the obey the local priest and they went to the town hall to try and discover what had happened and they were told that because of the fighting that took place around here and because of the that the records have been destroyed nobody knew what had happened to the bodies my grandparents just left it at there and thought well that's one of the casualties of war that's just another war story and they went home and then in 1948 a year later my grandfather read in the times a piece about the Yates family having traced DX's body and were bringing it back for a funeral in Sligo and of course that my grandfather was a bit more confused and surprised and couldn't understand how this grave had been discovered and this one hadn't so he wrote to Michael Yates and WB's son replied the position with regard to the cemetery at Rock Brune would appear to be more than a little confused as far as the remains of my father are concerned they had been traced and are now lying in a vault and ready to be taken home as soon as transport can be arranged I'm very sorry I cannot be more informative about this matter but I have very little direct knowledge of conditions in wrote Brune the whole matter was dealt with for us by the French authorities in Paris through the French Legation in Ireland and there was no occasion for me to travel to ruin my grandfather who was a bit of a tenacious chap he decided to dig further and they discovered that the French doctor who had identified what they believed to be Yates bodies had used the presence of a corset which was made of leather and steel strips and that was a corset that Alfred had worn because he'd got curvature at the spine through his TB now WB Yeats had worn a truss for a hernia problem which of course is a quite a different and less substantial contraption and so my grandfather then was fairly convinced that they've got the wrong body this story's cropped up again and again occasionally the journalists come back and you know have a look I visited from cliff and about seven years ago with a cousin of mine so if he's there been to visit him and if he's here I've been to visit him whatever the whereabouts of the body the Irish government was determined to reclaim WB Yeats it was a symbolic homecoming the newly formed Irish Navy was sent out on its first operation to fetch home the remains of the poet of the nation everything he wrote was read after certain years he won sufficient money for his need friends that have been friends indeed but then sank Plato's ghost but then in a fitting end the official in charge of bringing Yates home was the minister of External Affairs seán MacBride the son of Maud gonne de Valera attended the funeral and Ireland reclaimed the body the irony of the homecoming would not have been lost on Yeats and so Arland created a myth of the poet that as a nation we would come to know as if edged in stone a strange memorial for a man so passionately in love with life and death and love itself on limestone quarried near the spot by his command these words are cut cast a cold eye on life on death horsemen pass by you know one of the things that uh that I like about that is that it's um a quatrain without a last line it announces something to the passers-by but it also quite obviously leaves something out and and I think that's interesting I think I think one of the reasons that Yeats is a powerful poet is that he doesn't tell us everything that we need to know he demands that we do some of the work and that tombstone does that is he telling you to pass by or is he telling you to stop and think the workers done rule hold he thought according to my boyish plan let the fools rage I swerved in not something to perfection brought but loader sang that ghost what then I know nice to meet my face somewhere among the clouds about does that I fight owner hate cause like God I don't love my country is too for us my countrymen kill Tartans home now like Enda brain loss or later happier and your lawn or Judy Biden fight on public manner cheering crowds alone I bounced over years to come sing quite surprised a waste of breath the years behind and five you

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Length: 54min 23sec (3263 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2016