By Sharmini Jayawardena
I’m taking a listen to and tapping my toes and clicking my fingers and humming away to tunes on my fave radio 📻 show, on my fave radio station – Smooth‼️
Lo and behold, I’m told that St Patrick’s Day is on 17th March 2018!
Takes my mind back to a fave poet of mine, you guessed it, or guessed him, right! You can fairly (more like fairy🧚♀️ 🧚♂️ ) say he’s as crazy 🤪as myself then.
William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939)
I remember his play, (I now find it’s a One Act play) – Cathleen Ni’Hounihan, Amazing 😉 I get down to reading it, everything being at your fingertips – online.
Nothing but beautiful!
St Patrick’s Day is celebrated on 17th March, to commemorate the death of the patron saint of Ireland, St Patrick.
St Patrick’s Day Revelry
Then I come across this really crazy feature on Yeats and his love Angel 👼🏼😇 , I’d like to call her, Maud Gonne! Even more amazing.
It’s a really well written bit of work, in, The New York Times! Under Art & Design dated 20th July 2008, written by Jim Dwyer. It is aptly titled: ‘Yeats Meets the Digital Age, Full of Passionate Intensity’.
I’m not going to spoil it for you by attempting a synopsis here. Go ahead and have fun at the expense of who should be one of your fave of all poets! It reads –
‘William Butler Yeats’s Relationship With Maud Gonne Is Explored at the National Library of Ireland’
‘So, here, under airtight, light shielding glass, is a notebook given to William Butler Yeats in 1908 by Maud Gonne, the beautiful, brainy feminist Irish revolutionary and object of Yeats’s infatuation across five decades, the muse – well, really, the furnace – for his poetry of yearning and his willing partner in what they called a mystical marriage. As far as actual marriage, Gonne became expert at wielding the word “no.”’‼️‼️
‘Bound in white vellum, the notebook served as the metaphysical marital bed. Yeats used it to keep track of their shared fixation with the occult and each other. One morning in July 1908 Gonne wrote from Paris to report that she had been seized by a vision. “I had such a wonderful experience last night that I must know at once if it affected you & how?” she wrote. “At a quarter of 11 last night I put on this body & thought strongly of you & desired to go to you.”’‼ WoW 😲
‘…When her letter arrived, he would learn they were not quite synchronized. “Material union is but a pale shadow compared to it,” she wrote. “Write to me quickly & tell me if you know anything of this.”’
‘Yeats knew it well.’ ‼
*Yeats in particular and the Irish ☘ in general are known for their belief in the mystical and the mythical creatures of Celtic folklore, the leprechauns, the Banshee and a plethora of other creatures and beliefs in the mystic.
