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i am not basho, ireland

Since, via jonquil, I learned that today is Lady Gregory's birthday, and since via toft, eumelia, and several others I have encountered the following meme, here is a poem which was (as the title indicates) partially written at her estate in County Galway. (And because I was there and at Yeats' tower in January 2006, have some photos of what remains.)


Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931

Under my window-ledge the waters race,
Otters below and moor-hens on the top,
Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven's face
Then darkening through "dark" Raftery's "cellar" drop,
Run underground, rise in a rocky place
In Coole demesne, and there to finish up
Spread to a lake and drop into a hole.
What's water but the generated soul?

Under the border of that lake's a wood
Now all dry sticks under a wintry sun,
And in a copse of beeches there I stood,
For Nature's pulled her tragic buskin on
And all the rant's a mirror of my mood:
At sudden thunder of the mounting swan
I turned about and looked where branches break
The glittering reaches of the flooded lake.

Another emblem there! That stormy white
But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight
And in the morning's gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So arrogantly pure, a child might think
It can be murdered with a spot of ink.

Sound of a stick upon the floor, a sound
From somebody that toils from chair to chair;
Beloved books that famous hands have bound,
Old marble heads, old pictures everywhere;
Great rooms where travelled men and children found
Content or joy; a last inheritor
Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame
Or out of folly into folly came.

A spot whereon the founders lived and died
Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,
Or gardens rich in memory glorified
Marriages, alliances and families,
And every bride's ambition satisfied.
Where fashion or mere fantasy decreees
We shift about--all that great glory spent--
Like some poor Arab tribesman and his tent.

We were the last romantics--chose for theme
Traditional sanctity and loveliness;
Whatever's written in what poets name
The book of the people; whatever most can bless
The mind of man or elevate a rhyme;
But all is changed, that high horse riderless,
Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode
Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.

--W. B. Yeats



Like many stories of the C20th in Ireland, Lady Gregory's is bittersweet. She was a great patron and friend of Yeats and many others in the so-called Irish Renaissance of the early part of the century (which many people note was actually an Anglo-Irish renaissance), but her son was killed fighting for Britain in World War I, leaving only her young grandson, and her estate house was eventually destroyed by Republican partisans.