IRELAND: Cast a Cold Eye

Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!

That is the epitaph that Poet William Butler Yeats wrote for himself, and, according to his careful directions (“No marble, no conventional phrase”), it is engraved on his simple tomb in the churchyard of Drumcliff, in the poet’s native Sligo. But ever since his death in 1939, his admirers have refused to cast a cold eye on his memory. Last month an American economist, John J. Kelly, remarked at a Dublin dinner party that he would subscribe $1,400 towards a Yeats memorial if Ireland would put up an equal sum. Ireland’s men of letters soon raised the money, but the question of what shape the memorial should lake started a literary Donnybrook.

Lord Killanin, an art patron and onetime Fleet Street reporter, suggested that Thoor Ballylee, the Galway castle where Yeats lived for twelve years, should be turned into a Yeats museum. Valentin Iremonger, one of Ireland’s leading younger poets, calbd this “pernicious sentimentality.” Said Iremonger: “We ought to honor our dead by loving our living, not by erecting a necropolis in the County Galway.” Iremonger thought he had a better idea: an occasional monetary award for deserving poets. Thomas McGreevy, director of Ireland’s National Gallery, thought the ideal memorial would be a retreat where poets and scholars could work in peace—a kind of “Castle in the Water” such as Yeats had dreamed up long ago with Maud Gonne, the great Irish beauty and patriot whom Yeats adored as his “phoenix.”

The last word will probably lie with Ireland’s Academy of Letters and the U.S.’s Mr. Kelly, who is known to favor a monument in St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin. But, snapped Lord Killanin, “statues have a habit of disappearing or being decapitated in Ireland.”