Sligo: Yeats Country

I am spending this weekend in Sligo, a beautiful part of the west coast of Ireland, along our Wild Atlantic Way. This visit to Sligo coincides with the 150th anniversary of the birth of WB Yeats. The poet was born on 13 June 1865 in Sandymount on the shores of Dublin Bay, but it is Sligo that is known as 'Yeats Country.'

William Butler Yeats found lifelong inspiration in Ireland, in our mythology, our folklore and our landscape. Whenever his poems and plays have a geographical setting, it is invariably in Ireland.

Certain places in Ireland were especially important to him. There was Coole Park in County Galway, home of his friend and artistic collaborator, Lady Augusta Gregory, where he saw the wild swans 'All suddenly mount And scatter wheeling in great broken rings Upon their clamorous wings.'

Then there was the Tower House at Ballylee not far from Lady Gregory's home, which Yeats purchased in 1917 and spent much time there with his family during the 1920s. It became a powerful symbolic presence in his later poems.
I, the poet William Yeats,
With old mill boards and sea-green slates, And smithy work from the Gort forge, Restored this tower for my wife George; And may these characters remain When all is ruin again.

Yeats's first, and most important, place of inspiration, however, was Sligo. It was there that he spent the happiest days of his childhood visiting his maternal grandparents, the Pollexfens, a local merchant family, and absorbing the folklore of the area from conversations with local people there. The Yeats children would arrive in Sligo each time on one of their grandfather's steamships after a 30-hour voyage from Liverpool.

When they were back in London, Yeats and his sisters longed for Sligo, 'for a sod of earth from some field they knew, something of Sligo to hold in their hands.' The poet's painter brother, Jack B, once said that there was 'a bit of Sligo' in everything he painted.

WB Yeats's early poems have many references to locations in Sligo:

'The old brown thorn-trees break in two high over Cummen Strand';

'But turn from Rosses' crawling tide';

'Where dips the rocky headland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake.';

'Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car.'

'The host is riding from Knocknarea';

And, Yeats's best-known poem is set in Sligo:
I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there of clay and wattles made':

Yeats was probably thinking about 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' when he described his earlier work as 'a flight into faeryland from the real world' ... the cry of the heart against necessity'. He hoped that he would one day write poetry 'of insight and knowledge', and he did!

Sligo was not just a juvenile obsession in Yeats's work. It reappears in his more mature poems. Lissadell House, the Sligo home of the Gore-Booth family, later came to symbolise the virtues of the Anglo-Irish tradition for which he developed an increasing fondness as he grew older.

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,'
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

And at the end of his life, it was the distinctive Sligo landmark, Ben Bulben, that inspired one of his last great poems, in which he insisted that 'ancient Ireland knew it all' and urged us to:
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.

He felt an affinity with the church at Drumcliff, not because it had a Pollexfen connection, but because his paternal great-grandfather had been a rector there. He left instructions that his body be transferred to Sligo, which would be his final resting place:

Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
...
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

Yeats's lifelong creative engagement with Sligo highlights the importance of childhood memories and affections as a wellspring of creativity. Yeats's childhood experiences certainly left a lasting mark on the poet and on his writing. And that's why we now call Sligo 'Yeats Country'!

Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador in London.