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- Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams … Some of the most famous lines in Irish poetry come from the pen of William Butler Yeats, poet, patriot, dramatist and senator. This illustrated collection of forty of his best-loved works, on Love, Politics, Old Age, Myth and Legend includes people, places and events that were important to him.
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BEST - LOVEDYEATS
SELECTED BY MAIRÉAD ASHE FITZGERALD
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Portrait of WB Yeats by John Singer Sargent, from Selected Poems by WB Yeats, MACMILLAN 1932
The Enchanted Land, illustration by Emma Byrne
The Lake Isle of Innisfree, courtesy of Reflexstock
The Romantic Idealist, illustration by Emma Byrne
Reeds, courtesy of Reflexstock
Coole Parke and Thoor Ballylee, illustration by Emma Byrne
The Woods at Coole Park, courtesy of Reflexstock
War and Politics, illustration by Emma Byrne
The execution yard at Kilmainham Gaol, courtesy of Reflexstock
Old Age and Death, illustration by Emma Byrne
Yeats’s grave, Drumcliffe Graveyard, Sligo, and
Ben Bulben, courtesy of Reflexstock
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
List of Illustrations
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS THE POET AND IRELAND
The Enchanted Land
The Stolen Child
A Faery Song
Lines from The Land of Heart’s Desire
The Hosting of the Sidhe
The Song of Wandering Aengus
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
The Fiddler of Dooney
Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland
The Romantic Idealist
He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
The Pity of Love
The Sorrow of Love
The White Birds
Down by the Salley Gardens
The Ragged Wood
When You are Old
No Second Troy
The Lover Pleads with his Friend for Old Friends
The Folly of Being Comforted
Never Give all the Heart
The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water
O Do Not Love Too Long
To a Child Dancing in the Wind
Two Years Later
Memory
Coole Park and Thoor Ballylee
The Wild Swans at Coole
In the Seven Woods
My House
A Prayer on going in to my House
A Cradle Song
A Prayer for my Daughter
To be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee
War and Politics
September 1913
To a Shade
An Irish Airman Foresees his Death
Easter 1916
Sixteen Dead Men
The Rose Tree
In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz
Old Age and Death
Sailing to Byzantium
The Wheel
Youth and Age
What Then?
From Under Ben Bulben (Cast a Cold Eye etc.)
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
DESIGNER’S NOTE
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
Copyright
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
THE POET AND IRELAND
William Butler Yeats was born in 1865, the son of John Butler Yeats, an artist whose forebears were Protestant churchmen in Sligo, and Susan Pollexfen who belonged to a Sligo merchant family. The Yeats family was to make a unique contribution to the cultural and artistic life of twentieth century Ireland: William Butler Yeats became the greatest poet writing in English in the twentieth century; his brother, Jack Yeats was one of the most gifted Irish painters of modern times; his sisters, Elizabeth and Susan, devoted their lives to artistic endeavours and were the founders of The Cuala Press.
THE ENCHANTED LAND
William Butler Yeats’s relationship with his native county was one of the main influences in shaping his future as a great poet. For the young emerging poet, Sligo was a place of enchantment. While his artist father, adored by his son, but mercurial and unreliable, moved his family between Sligo, Dublin and London, long summers were spent in Sligo, and it was Sligo that fired William’s poetic imagination.
He filled his mind with the lore of the people of the Sligo countryside, people who had within them, as he wrote, ‘the vast and vague extravagance that lies at the bottom of the Celtic heart’.
He filled notebooks with the stories and folklore he heard from people such as Mary Battle, a local woman who had a fund of ancient lore. The old Celtic romances, stories of the Sídhe, the fairy hosts, the great heroes of the myths of the Celts, CuChulainn, Caoilte and Oisín, along with the fair Niamh were to inspire his poetry. Yeats’s work, in turn, inspired and influenced others during the Irish Literary Revival.
The Otherworld, the land of eternal youth
‘where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song’
was part of everyday life to the people amongst whom Yeats spent his days as a boy. The countryside around Sligo was the gateway to that magical Otherworld; its placenames, Knocknarea, Ben Bulben, Glencar; Innishfree, the little island in Lough Gill and the woods around it, were to be immortalised in his poetry throughout his life, so that, together, they make for a part of Ireland which came to be known as ‘The Yeats Country’.
Yeats’s passion for the Celtic past provided him with a way of seeking answers to life’s endless quest for the mystical. That same quest was to lead him to explore the occult in the 1890s and to membership of the Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn.
His friendship with the old Fenian, John O’Leary, led Yeats into nationalism and he promoted the idea of a distinctive literature so that Irish people would realise their spiritual and cultural heritage.
THE ROMANTIC IDEALIST
In 1889 Yeats, at the age of twenty-three, met Maud Gonne in London, and with that meeting, as he wrote, ‘the troubling of my life began’. He endured a tortured and hopeless love for her for over thirty years, during which time she was his muse, his inspiration, the embodiment of Ireland itself in his work. Gonne, unconventional, beautiful and independently wealthy, was the daughter of a British Army major based at the Curragh, County Kildare. Dedicated to the cause of independence for Ireland, she threw herself into political activity. Yeats proposed marriage to her in 1891 without success and was to do so many times over the years. Unknown to Yeats, Gonne had a daughter, Iseult, in 1894, by her French lover, Lucien Millevoye. He was shocked and grieved when she married Major John MacBride in 1903. The couple separated in 1905 and Gonne was widowed in 1916 when MacBride was amongst the executed leaders after the Easter Rising. Yeats proposed marriage to her again, and on being refused, he proposed to her daughter, Iseult, who likewise declined his proposal.
The love poems he wrote to Maud Gonne are haunting, filled with symbolism, longing and sadness.
COOLE PARK AND THOOR BALLYLEE
Yeats’s meeting with Augusta Lady Gregory in 1896
