Closing Remarks at The Poet Laureate and National Poets Event
Sligo, 13th June 2015
I want to thank Susan O’Keeffe and the Yeats Day 2015 Committee for this exquisite hand-bound collection of Yeats’ poetry. It will take a cherished place in the library at Áras an Uachtaráin.
Yeats’ poetry sought spiritual sources for our Irishness. It sought those sources in the imaginative wells of an ancient Ireland, but also in the sources of the transcendent belief systems of the world. In particular, he was impressed by the mythological vision, the sacred texts of what some now call ‘the East’.
In drawing from these sources his work was visionary. Engaging with the riches of the past did not impede the stretching of the imaginative powers towards versions of a future Ireland that might have wonder and beauty at its core.
What better demonstration of the road that we have travelled since the time of Yeats, with tentative steps and not without its stumbles, that it should be six women poet laureates and national poets who would lead this celebration of Yeats and his legacy this evening.
The company of women, both in its ideal and in its companionship as the energy of life world, was so important to W. B. Yeats. Over the years since Yeats’ death, there have been disappointments in our attempts to realise the full generosity of the national vision he would have wished for us, but we have also made important strides towards equality and towards liberty.
Our culture remains as the greatest sources of our achievement as well as the most promising space for our renewal and our reimagining, and within culture poetry remains as essential to our identity as a people and as relevant as it ever was.
This is a night for poetry and the tributes of poets. As we remember our national poet in the company of the national poets and laureates of this and our neighbouring island, I wish to offer as the final words of this wonderful night some of the words of another great poet,
W.H. Auden, who in his Elegy for W.B. Yeats wrote:
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
The snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.