Coole

Hear curator Colm Tóibín read W.B. Yeats's poem "Coole Park, 1929"

Coole was the last book Gregory published during her lifetime. The volume begins with Yeats’s “Coole Park, 1929,” his most magisterial meditation on Gregory’s powerful character and her influence on him and other writers of the Irish Revival. Go to the exhibition label to learn more. 

Run time two minutes

I meditate upon a swallow's flight,

Upon a aged woman and her house,

A sycamore and lime-tree lost in night

Although that western cloud is luminous,

Great works constructed there in nature's spite

For scholars and for poets after us,

Thoughts long knitted into a single thought,

A dance-like glory that those walls begot.

There Hyde before he had beaten into prose

That noble blade the Muses buckled on,

There one that ruffled in a manly pose

For all his timid heart, there that slow man,

That meditative man, John Synge, and those

Impetuous men, Shawe-Taylor and Hugh Lane,

Found pride established in humility,

A scene well Set and excellent company.

They came like swallows and like swallows went,

And yet a woman's powerful character

Could keep a Swallow to its first intent;

And half a dozen in formation there,

That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,

Found certainty upon the dreaming air,

The intellectual sweetness of those lines

That cut through time or cross it withershins.

Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand

When all those rooms and passages are gone,

When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound

And saplings root among the broken stone,

And dedicate - eyes bent upon the ground,

Back turned upon the brightness of the sun

And all the sensuality of the shade -

A moment's memory to that laurelled head.