William Butler Yeats: Under Ben Bulben Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all. Whether man die in his bed Or the rifle knocks him dead, A brief parting from those dear Is the worst man has to fear. Though grave-digger's toil is long, Sharp their spades, their muscles strong, They but thrust their buried men Back in the human mind again. III You that Mitchel's prayer have heard, "Send war in our time, O Lord!" Know that when all words are said And a man is fighting mad, Something drops from eyes long blind, He completes his partial mind, For an instant stands at ease, Laughs aloud, his heart at peace. Even the wisest man grows tense With some sort of violence Before he can accomplish fate, Know his work or choose his mate. IV Poet and sculptor, do the work, Nor let the modish painter shirk What his great forefathers did, Bring the soul of man to God, Make him fill the cradles right.

Measurement began our might: Irish poets, learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds. Sing the peasantry, and then Hard-riding country gentlemen, The holiness of monks, and after Porter-drinkers' randy laughter; Sing the lords and ladies gay That were beaten into clay Through seven heroic centuries; Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be Still the indomitable Irishry. Under bare Ben Bulben's head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid. An ancestor was rector there Long years ago, a church stands near, By the road an ancient cross.

No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye Irish Gravestone Inscriptions, Tracing your Irish Ancestors: Verses on the gravestones of Poets Verses on the gravestones of Poets Path: HistoryFromHeadstones > Case Studies > Poetry from Headstones > Verses on the gravestones of Poets Verses on the gravestones of Poets If poets cannot fashion a lyrical leave taking for themselves then what hope do the rest of us have? The ability to sum up a life in a few unforgettable phrases is, after all, their stock-in-trade. Sometimes the mots justes that the writer has lined up for his epitaph do find their appointed place on his or her headstone. We have already encountered William Butler Yeatï¿½s memorable epitaph: These lines come from his poem Under Ben Bulben and the final stanza reads: Under bare Ben Bulbenï¿½s head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid. An ancestor was rector there Long years ago, a church stands near, By the road an ancient cross.

No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Yeats got his wish to be laid to rest in his beloved Sligo, but his final burial came after a convoluted process that began with his death in France in 1939 and culminated in his disinterment and relocation to Ireland in 1948. Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, also crafted his final farewell in the poem Requiem, and its final three lines are inscribed upon his tombstone on a Samoan hillside. Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie: Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longï¿½d to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

Rupert Brooke, the war poet, has written one of the most famous and affecting elegies in the whole literary canon: If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is forever England Yet these prophetic lines do not adorn his gravestone. He did die, and does lie buried, in a foreign field, but his inscription is of a more prosaic nature. He succumbed to blood poisoning on April 23, 1915 on the French hospital ship Duguay-Trouin moored in Trebuki Bay on the Greek island of Skyros. He was carried to his grave in an olive grove in a torch lit procession. He is buried in a cairn grave with a crude wooden cross bearing the legend: Here Lies a Servant of God Sub-Lieutenant in the English Navy Who Died for the Deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks In the Protestant cemetery in Rome, the graves of two of Englandï¿½s greatest and most infamous poets can be found, Keats and Shelley.

contains all that was Mortal of a in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies Desired these words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water." John Keats, Protestant Cemetery, Rome Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange Percy Bysshe Shelley Protestant cemetery Rome Oscar Wilde had long been a refugee from the country of his birth. He died in France, and is buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, beneath an elaborate Jacob Epstein sculpture, upon which the following lines are inscribed: And alien tears will fill for him Pity's long-broken urn, For his mourners will be outcast men, And outcasts always mourn. Oscar Wilde Pere Lachaise, Paris The national bards of Scotland and England, Robert Burns and William Shakespeare, lie in their native lands, their tombs engraved with poetry somewhat less memorable than their own majestic muses might have warranted: O Rabbie Burns, the Man, the Brither And art thou goune--and gone for ever; And has thou crossed that unknown river, Life's dreary bound?

Like thee, where shall we find anither The world around? Go to your sculptur'd ash of state; But by thy honest tombs, ye Great, In all the tinsel tr turf I'll wait, Thou man of worth. And weep the sweetest poet's fate, E'er lived on earth. To the Memory of Robert Burns the Ayrshire Bard who was born at Doonside On the 29th of January 1759, and died at Dumfries on the 22nd of July 1796 Good frend for Jesus sake forbeare, To digg the dust encloased heare! Blest be the man that spares thes stones, And curst be he that moves my bones. William Shakespeare Stratford on Avon Ulster has its own Nobel Prize winning poet in the living form of Bellaghyï¿½s Seamus Heaney. Amongst the fraternity of deceased versifiers, we offer two candidates for the mantle of bardic champion: James Orr, the Bard of Ballycarry and Francis Davis, the Weaver Poet.

While truth and right bless Erin's plains Or freedom's sons her standard rear, Or while they spumat slavry's chains, The name of Orr they ~ revere The venal lay his soul despised, For virtue fair the lyre he strung, For truth and right he ever prized, And truth and right he nobly sung His friendship true and ever kind To kindred bosoms still was shown; His generous heart which God refined, Made love and sympathy its own If genius and truth, taste combined, With candour fair can honour claim, Posterity his brows bind With bays of never ending fame His name Broad Land ~ revere, Nor fail to have him memoryed, Who oft in numbers strong and clear Her rural scenes immortalized No more his Brethem kind and bright Shall him invest with honours grand No more hell teach the rules of right, That guide to light the sacred band No more alive hell tune the lyre, And bid dull care away depart, Or wake the strains which mirth inspire And soothe to peace the troubled heart Near Templecorran's ruined fane That with the wild blast nods he lies Where solitude and silence reign, Till the last trump shall bid him rise "When lost amang nettles, yell

 fmd if ye search My stane o' remembrance is marked with an arch" Sacred to the memory of James Orr, The Bard of Ballycarry, Obiit 24 April 1816 AE 46 Erin, loved land!

from age to age Be thou more great, more fam'd and free This monument to the Poet, the Patriot and the Philanthropist was erected by the contributions of various liberal individuals in Broadisland, Carrickfergus, Isle Magee, Larne, Belfast, Ballymena, & of the following Masonic Lodges, viz the Grand Lodge of Ireland and Nos 41, 43, 107, 162, 175, 177, 258, 248, 253, 615, 1012, and 1014, Orr's own Lodge.

Templecorran cemetery, County Antrim With the soul of a loving and chivalrous knight Whose instinct is genius, whose language is light A child of the people has builded a name, And the weaver has woven a garment of fame In memory of Francis Davis, Ireland's weaver poet, born 1810, died 1885 Love of the right and hate of the wrong To Francis Davis, a self taught scholar, a gifted poet and an ardent patriot, this cross has been erected in token of admiration for his brilliant genius and purity of purpose by the memorial committee of the Belfast Young Ireland Society Milltown cemetery, Belfast Freedom and Flourishing: Do I understand the meaning of W B Yeats' epitaph? Tuesday, October 29, 2013 Do I understand the meaning of W B Yeats' epitaph? I know that poetry can sometimes convey thoughts and feelings that tend to get lost in prose. Nevertheless, I don’t read much poetry. Reading poetry has always seemed like something that I could do when I become older. Even so, I have recently been reading some of the poetry of W B Yeats.

My interest was aroused by the epitaph on his gravestone in the cemetery of St Columba’s Parish Church at Drumcliffe in County Sligo, when we visited Ireland during August. What could Yeats have meant by suggesting that we should cast ‘a cold Eye’ on ‘Life’? Before trying to answer that question it may be worth considering why we should care what Yeats meant. I think we should show some interest because he has been widely held to have been a literary genius. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, for what the Nobel Committee described as ‘inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation’. His poem, ‘Easter 1916’ , about the participants in the rebellion that occurred at that time in Ireland, comes to mind as a poem that might warrant that description. Beside the grounds of St Columba’s is this artistic feature, sculpted by Jackie McKenna.

The figure is called ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, after Yeats’ poem of the same name, and the poem is laid out in front of him: ‘Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’. Yeats seems to be widely esteemed in this part of the world. This statue of Yeats can be found in Sligo. There is also a Yeats memorial building in Sligo, with displays providing information about his links with that region and other aspects of his life. There is a Yeats exhibition at the National Library in Dublin, which contained among other things his response to a questionnaire about creative effort. I was permitted to take some photos: Yeats’ suggests that his creative efforts always involved day-dreaming. He never waited passively for inspiration and always worked systematically regardless of inspiration. He claims that his critical ability was always active in his creative efforts.

Yeats’ epitaph is the last stanza of his poem, ‘ Under Ben Bulben’ . Ben Bulben is a mountain close to where Yeats is buried. In a small booklet, entitled ‘The Eye of the Heart’, available at St Columba’s church, Derick Bingham suggests that Yeats is saying: ‘If you are looking for answers as to what lies behind life and death, I can’t help you. You must look somewhere else. Horsemen, pass by’. That is one possible interpretation. However, reading the epitaph in the context of the poem, it seems that the horseman referred to is mythical superhuman creature ‘with an air of immortality’. We are told in the poem that such horsemen and women now ‘ride the wintry dawn’ ‘where Ben Bulben sets the scene’. I think the key to the meaning that Yeats was intending to convey is in the following lines: ‘Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities, Poets Graves|Poets & Poetry Forum William Butler Yeats is buried in the Protestant churchyard, Drumcliff, Co. Sligo, Ireland. Yeats' Grave at Drumcliff Yeats was born in Dublin into an artistic family.

His father John B. Yeats was a painter and so was his brother Jack B. Yeats. Yeats himself studied at the Dublin School of Art, but at the age of 21 he abandoned art in favour of a literary career. His early work was influenced by Shelley , Spenser , the Pre-Raphaelites and by his love of Irish folklore and legend. His early collections include Crossways (1889), The Rose (1893) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). His unrequited love for the beautiful revolutionary Maude Gonne inspired much of his finest love poetry. Yeats proposed to her on a number of occasions but she refused him. He later proposed to her daughter and was refused again. In 1917 he married Georgie Hyde-Lees who was an exponent of automatic writing. Yeats' work continued to develop throughout his career becoming more condensed, more cynical and more concerned with contemporary politics. Although Yeats was abroad during the 1916 Easter Rising it had a major affect upon him inspiring the famous lines: ' All changed, changed utterly:/ A terrible beauty is born'.

His later collections include: The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair (1929) and Last Poems (1939). Yeats died in the South of France on 28 January, 1939 and was buried at Roquebrune Cemetery. In 1948 his body was exhumed and brought back to Drumcliff. However, there have been suggestions that the remains brought back from France were not those of Yeats but, instead, those of a French dentist. As Yeats requested in his last poem - he was buried within sight of Ben Bulben. Yeats' grandfather had been the rector at Drumcliff between 1811-46. Headstone of W.B. Yeats W.B. Yeats In 1891 Yeats helped to found the Irish Literary Society and was also instrumental in setting up, with the help of Lady Gregory, the Irish National Theatre. In 1923 Yeats received the Nobel Prize for Literature. W.H. Auden wrote a moving memorial for him entitled In Memory of W.B.Yeats - containing the well known line: 'The day of his death was a dark cold day'.

About the poems of W.B. Yeats About the poems of W.B. Yeats Transcript 'If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better gather that destiny through the words that have shaped the heart’s desire of the world.' And that’s exactly what William Butler Yeats did: he caught the heart’s desire. He caught it in language which is beautiful and which is dripping in imagery - and, particularly in the early poems - mysticism. The Song of Wandering Aengus, The Stolen Child. Joyce said of him that he had a surrealist imagination few painters could match. He was born in 1865 to John Butler Yeats the son of a rector in the Church of Ireland and to Susan Pollexfen whose shipbuilding family came from Sligo- where Yeats at his request is buried, beneath Ben Bulben's head. His epitaph? 'Cast a cold eye/ On life, on death/ Horseman, pass by'. Yeats learned early that art is what matters. His father was a solicitor and he gave up his practice to study painting in London.

Indeed Yeats later studied art in Dublin before in one of literature's luckiest volte - face he decided on poetry. The publication in 1889 when Yeats was twenty-four of The Wanderings of Osian was a seminal moment, not only in Irish literary history, but also its political history. Yeats's book, based on the Fenian cycle, brought Irish mythology to the Irish people in English -'the language' as he pointed out 'in which modern Ireland thinks and does its business’. This was at a time in Ireland when there was a powerful movement to rescue the Gaelic language. In Irish literature Yeats resembles a tidal wave. And the tide was not only poetical. In 1904 Yeats set up the National Theatre of Ireland - The Abbey Theatre with Lady Gregory and he worked unceasingly as playwright and director in its cause. In his Nobel speech to the Swedish Academy he chose as his subject ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement ' I would not be here were I not the symbol of that movement...the nationalism we called up was both romantic and poetical.' Well, up to a point.

Yeats had a genius - a generous genius for discovering genius in others and amongst those he discovered were two of Ireland's greatest, Synge and O' Casey .Their plays were poetical certainly - romantic? not necessarily. The Abbey audience, probably the most hyper sensitive in history, rioted - enraged by the portrait of themselves in Synge's The Playboy of the Western World and O' Casey's The Plough and the Stars. Yeats harangued them from the stage - 'you have disgraced yourselves again' - and he persevered. This strength of character and courage in the face of prejudice which was noted by Eliot is fundamental to his astonishing achievements. He once tried to get a 'bill of divorcement' through the Irish Senate. He failed. That he tried at all is remarkable. Finally he refused to allow himself to be destroyed by the agony of his unreciprocated, life-long obsession with Maud Gonne, an obsession that would have felled lesser men. She exploded into his life in 1889 - just after the publication of The Wanderings of Osian. She was young, twenty-two, tall with flaming red hair but it was her passion that 'began all the trouble of my life’.

She took possession of his soul and when the soul is lost, all is lost. He had found the love of his life, she, an ardent republican, had perhaps found a poet for the cause. She was a magnificent creature - brave but dangerous. 'She lived in storm and strife,/ Her soul had such desire/ For what proud death may bring/ That it could not endure /The common good of life'. And therein lies the pity. Her fanaticism swept away much that was good in her life. His enduring love, expressed in poems of genius, gave us the haunting poetry of the exultant yet broken heart - A Woman Homer Sung, No Second Troy, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, The Folly of Being Comforted and many, many more. She married the revolutionary Sean Mac Bride. The confirmation of their marriage was, Yeats said, 'like lightning through me'. Yeats, in his fifties, finally married Georgie Hyde-Lees with whom he had two children.

Easter 1916, his greatest political poem, of which he wrote many (Parnell's Funeral, September 1913, The Ghost of Roger Casement) was inspired by the tragic military failure of the rebellion led by Patrick Pearse who, with other leaders of the rebellion including Sean Mac Bride, was executed. The iconic line 'A terrible beauty is born' contains both a warning and a blessing. The rhythms and repetitions in this poem seem to keep pace with the destiny of the men: 'Hearts to one purpose alone / Through summer and winter seem/ Enchanted to a stone/ To trouble the living stream'…Too long a sacrifice /Can make a stone of the heart/O when may it suffice?’ Yeats, uniquely amongst poets, wrote some of his greatest poetry in his sixties and seventies. Eliot wrote of this late work: 'Maturing as a poet means maturing as a whole man... out of his intense experience he now expressed universal truths.

An artist by serving his art with his entire integrity, is at the same time rendering the greatest service he can to his country and to the whole world.' The late poems include the The Municipal Gallery Revisited, The Statues and The Circus Animals Desertion - a poem in which the thread is pulled taut between life and art 'Maybe at last being but a broken man/ I must be satisfied with my heart’ and continues, 'Now that my ladder's gone/ I must lie down where all ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.' Where else?

Project MUSE - Michael Longley’s Early Epitaphs Michael Longley’s Early Epitaphs Renée Fox In a 1996 essay called “A Tongue at Play,” Michael Longley recalls the short poems of rhyming couplets included in his first volume of poetry, No Continuing City (1969), as “closed circuits”: “They had about them the air of ‘end of the road’ rather than ‘en route,’ and enjoyed already the brevity of epitaphs.” 1 For a poet now renowned for his elegies, the poem as epitaph might not seem an odd place to begin, and indeed, some among Longley’s critics have used the two terms interchangeably. 2 Yet, explicitly epitaphic verse—poems that thematically consider the epitaph or pay homage to writers of epitaphs, as well as these “epitaphic” couplets—has a dominant presence in Longley’s publications before 1970, a presence that gives specific poetic form to an increasingly prevalent concern among established Irish poets about the fractured and isolated state of contemporary Irish poetry.

Longley’s epitaphic poems are experiments in the silencing and disconnecting capacities of language, expressing most fully Longley’s sense of his first collection as a self-reflexive preoccupation “with form . . . exploring its capacities to control and its tendencies to disintegrate” (TAP 112). What Longley describes as a purely formal concern with disintegration, however, resonates more expansively as a meditation on the imperfections and ambitions of Irish poetry as Ireland hovered on the brink of political crisis. Longley’s early interest in the epitaph emerged as a response to the aesthetic pressures of Irish national discord, and in particular to the ways in which poetry should—or should not—seek to write across and erase the violence of such fundamental cultural rifts. A theory of the epitaph emerges from Longley’s own analyses and [End Page 125] revisions of his epitaphic poetry, one that both parallels changing ideas about the politics of Irish poetry and elaborates in complex formal terms a political agenda that engages with, but ultimately rejects, lingual discontinuity as the precondition for writing modern Irish poetry.

The formal ambiguities of several of Longley’s epitaphic couplet poems express Longley’s authentic, if soon abandoned, desire to find poetic form for the static and disconnected sensibility that constitutes one vision of Irish poetic identity. Longley’s early couplets, those poems with the “brevity of epitaphs,” were first printed by Phoenix Pamphlet Poet Press in 1968 as a separate collection called Secret Marriages: Nine Short Poems, and later included in No Continuing City (1969). 3 His comments about the couplets in “A Tongue at Play” are lifted almost verbatim from his introduction to Secret Marriages, which—as the only analytical introduction Longley has written to one of his own collections—suggests that Longley registered the difference of these poems as a lack: the act of writing an introduction indicates he perceived a demand for supplementation and a failure in the poems’ independent efforts at communication. The retrospective “A Tongue at Play” remembers all of No Continuing City as a preoccupation with formal disintegration.

4 The introduction to Secret Marriages sees this smaller collection as the more immediate culmination of the same preoccupation: the short, rhymed couplets of most of its poems are “tiny units, reduced stanzas, circuits which are almost closed, relying more on their own interrelationships than would the usual cursive and open-ended kind.” Although shifts in the order of phrasing between earlier introduction and later essay turn our attention from the couplet poems in particular to their impact on Longley’s later career, both link the “brevity of epitaphs” to the inevitability of a subsequent “blank page and silence”; in the introduction, the silence is a melancholic “dead silence.” Longley’s introduction to Secret Marriages attempts to speak over that silence, but it inscribes an intrinsic relationship between morbidity and form in the language it uses to fill the gaps left by [End Page 126] these poems.

The couplets, he tells us, are the result of “murderous deletion,” gestures of “dead silence,” marked by “brevity,” about “extremes of experience or remote notions,” and conveying to Longley “definite warnings about [his] future.” 5 In describing the relationship between silence, brevity, and the “preoccupation with form” as epitaphic, Longley hints at a theory of poetic form that has much in common with theories of the epitaph itself. Paul de Man has argued in an essay about Wordsworth’s obsession with the epitaphic that the poet’s meditations on the deaths of others most often are meditations on his own death, the inscriptions on tombstones imagined as precipitant cautionary tales, and the experience of death “actually an experience of language, an encounter with rhetoric and grammar,” a “linguistic predicament” in which “death, burial, and mourning take place.” 6 In other words, de Man uses the epitaph as a way to imagine death as a formal, literary phenomenon rather than the “social, material, and emotional” phenomenon that critics of de Man’s work have suggested it should be.

7 It is in this sense of the epitaphic as an intrinsic correlation between death—or absence—and form that the poems of No Continuing City become epitaphic in more than just length. We now see Longley as a quintessential modern elegist, for whom, in one critic’s words, the elegy has become “the ultimate vehicle through which the very validity of his poetics, and more informatively of art itself, might be measured.” 8 No Continuing City oscillates between elegy and epitaph, using the latter as a way to experiment formally with, and push to its limits, the poetics of absence that had become almost a commonplace criticism of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish poetry. 9 [End Page 127] Where the elegy as a form traditionally commemorates, mourns, and offers consolation, forging a connection between poet and lost object through “The words I write in memory” and “summoning” the dead into aesthetic life, the epitaph does precisely the opposite.

10 As Deborah Fried writes, the poetic epitaph is aware “of its divorce from voice, or its condition as a distant trace of a voice now stilled.” 11 In other words, rather than recalling to life and connecting with a no-longer-silenced voice, the epitaph stands in for, and thus reinforces the silence of the dead. To call poetry “epitaphic” is to foreground its status as a representational art, haunted, as Karen Mills-Courts has suggested, by our contradictory desire for “language to be incarnative,” an art whose present language forces us constantly to confront the loss of presence. 12 If we think, for instance, of Yeats’s famous “Under Ben Bulben,” we see the poem’s halfheartedly elegiac gestures (“Many times man lives and dies / Between his two eternities”) collapse into epitaphic sensibility: Though grave-diggers’ toil is long, Sharp their spades, their muscle strong, They but thrust their buried men Back in the human mind again. 13 If we take the contextual and clichéd suggestion of these lines at face value, then death is just a beginning.

14 “Gyres run on,” heavens open, and most important, when the Irish artists “learn [their] trade,” their ability to aesthetically revive the dead will keep Irish glory resuscitating ad infinitum: Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be Still the indomitable Irishry. And yet, an elegiac reading of this poem requires a translation of these lines that belies their quite literal sense: only if gravediggers become artists, their buried [End Page 128] men the heroes of the past, and the human mind the world of artistic legend, do we have the consolation of elegy. If we simply read the lines, however, their corporeal, even grotesque image stands in sharp contrast to the heightened “two eternities” of man in the poem’s first stanza.

These are lines of memento mori rather than reincarnation; lines that maintain the presence of death in the human mind, rather than obviate it: “They but thrust their buried men / Back in the human mind again.” The contrast between the consolatory elegiac conventions behind these lines and their Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-style imagery amplifies the distance between recalling to life and recollecting death. The contrast also amplifies the epitaphic paradox of a physical presence—the body, the tombstone, the inscription—that conjures only absence. The actual epitaph at the poem’s end—“Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!”—expands this paradox to include the historical impossibility of the epitaphic inscription.

Forcing us to stop and read even as it orders us to “pass by,” collapsing life and death into a single unit, and insisting that we cast our eyes both retrospectively and proleptically (at a thing that has not ended and a thing that cannot be looked at, respectively), these lines embody Fried’s suggestion that the epitaph “represents both the before and after, so to speak, of both living and dead.” 15 In other words, epitaphs, despite their inscriptions in perpetuity—or more accurately, because of them—resist history as a narrative or progressive possibility. The peculiar present tense at the end of “Under Ben Bulben”—“By his command these words are cut”—which manages to be retrospective, anticipatory, static, and ongoing all at once, situates the poem’s epitaph well outside of teleology at the same time that it models the epitaph’s own erasure of narrative time.

“What death does to men,” Fried argues, “the style of epitaph does to language: makes it repetitive, incantatory, static, self-righteous but stunned, unable to untie the strands of cause and effect, literal and figurative.” 16 Poems that predicate themselves on death, whether elegiac or epitaphic, will always stand outside the chronological movement of time because they inhabit “after” and “now” simultaneously. While Longley’s early elegiac poetry intermingles past and present in order to generate a sense of historical continuity, his epitaphic poetry, to quote Longley’s “Rip Van Winkle,” “find[s] all history collapsed.” This tension between a poetics of continuity and a poetics of historical collapse reveals itself microcosmically in Longley’s multiple revisions of “Emily Dickinson.” This poem takes as its subject matter one of the foremost epitaphic poets in literary history, and for Longley to have struggled so much [End Page 129] with this poem is, thus, particularly telling.

17 In its first collected incarnation (Ten Poems, 1965), the poem had four stanzas; by Room to Rhyme, in 1968,where it was included under the category “Loneliness,” and No Continuing City (1969), Longley had pared it down to three; and by the time of its inclusion in Longley’s 2006 Collected Poems—it did not appear in the 1998 Selected Poems—it was down to two. Fran Brearton points out that this kind of post-printing revision is unusual for Longley 18 —the poet admits, in the brief introduction to the Collected Poems, that he prefers “not to tinker with past efforts.” 19 And yet, he seems unable to stop tinkering with “Emily Dickinson.” Brearton describes the revision process for this poem as a gradual paring away, until the poem finally becomes “as elusive and secretive as the thing it describes,” and suggests that the poem reveals “the process of poetry for Longley as one in which the urge to explain that process . . .

eventually gives way to the thing itself.” 20 In other words, she sees the reduction undergone by the poem as a visible poetic apotheosis, in which Longley moves closer and closer to the “more precisely evocative use of language” that she identifies as one of his greatest poetic skills. 21 This poem remains one of Longley’s least favorite, however. 22 While it is certainly true that the two-stanza version is a better poem than the four-stanza version, it is also a more epitaphic version, edging strongly toward the silence and a historicism that the two excised stanzas—and many of Longley’s later and more elegiac poems—try to counter.

The stanzas Longley cut are those that liken poetry to “voyages, points to make” and that allow poetry an aesthetic telos (“Within those lovely titles is contained / The large philosophy you tend towards”), 23 whereas the poem in its current thesis-antithesis form begins in the first stanza with the assumption that poetry can be a “perfect progress” to “eloquence,” but almost instantly moves into its final stanza, where poems are “ubiquitous,” and their “increase” simultaneously a process of cyclic growth (“Gradual as flowers”) and inevitable decay (“gradual as rust”) (CP 5). Longley has recently called Emily Dickinson’s poetry “terror-struck”; the shorter version’s [End Page 130] emphasis on the poem as somehow inevitably static, despite increasing, despite writing, despite growing or oxidizing, captures this sense of the poet frozen in language. 24 In the poem’s first incarnation, a presupposition of access to Dickinson’s motivation and craft generates a sense of continuity from poet to poet. In its last version, the initial assumption of such access collapses almost immediately, as Dickinson’s “ubiquitous” poems come to stand in for the poet herself.

The first stanza’s rhymed “poetry” and “mystery” have their immediate parallel in the now-second stanza’s rhymed “dust” and “rust,” indicating that the poem’s initial, inflated desire to peer through the “window” of Dickinson’s words has no fulfillment except disintegration into the monosyllables of decomposition (CP 5). Rather than bridging a gap between poets, words seem to kill off the poet by taking on a “life” of their own—a life, that is, which seems to embrace Dickinson’s own ambivalent sentiments in “A Word” about the relationship between death, language, and authorial control: A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live that day. 25 Although denying an intrinsic tie between language and death, Dickinson’s brief poem nonetheless suggests that the life of the word entails the “death” of the speaker. The poem’s life is marked by absence.

Thus, the poet herself can “grow older,” as Longley writes in the penultimate line of “Emily Dickinson,” but the poems themselves stand outside of this natural and historical movement—as does his own final line, which, in repeating the word “gradual” and placing in parallel two opposing natural processes, ends the poem in a state of permanent stasis. The forty-year span of “Emily Dickinson” revisions illustrates Longley’s lasting sense of No Continuing City as a book longing for a tissue of historical interchange, but ultimately tending toward disconnection, absence, and, as he says, “dead silence.” This tendency emerges as a formal embodiment of what Longley later identified as the inevitably “provincial cast of mind—abstract, imitative, [End Page 131] [and] sterile,” that he and his contemporaries had inherited from the historical conditions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish poetry. 26 Thomas Kinsella elaborated these conditions more overtly in a series of essays written almost simultaneously with Longley’s first published collections.

Between 1967 and 1971, Kinsella published several versions of an essay called “The Irish Writer,” lamenting the discontinuity of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish poetic tradition. “On a bad day,” he says of his poetic predecessors, “it can seem that there are a few madmen and hermits, and nothing more. They can show me nothing about myself, except that I amisolated.” 27 Contemporary Irish poetry, he argues, has been sundered by the division between Irish-language poetry and English-language poetry, the former having a rich “shared history” and the latter, in his view, able to access that history “only at two enormous removes—across a century’s silence, and through an exchange of worlds.” 28 In the first version of Kinsella’s essay, the problem of Irish poetry is the problem of an identity split between Anglo-Irish, Irish, and English: a political crisis expressed over the last century as the breakdown of a common national language and, thus, of a common national history.

Kinsella in 1967 is torn between railing against this divided and unstable Irish national consciousness, and accepting a “gapped, discontinuous, polyglot tradition” as the necessary mode of all modern poetry. By 1971, however, in the midst of sharply rising Northern Irish violence, Kinsella reimagines the “divided mind” of the Irish poet as a vivid national literary asset, inviting modern Irish writers “to make relentless comparisons, and to remain open at all costs to the teaching that life inflicts.” 29 In other words, he asks poets to embrace a violently multiple national identity as an expansive, rather than an isolated or delimiting, condition of Irish poetry. [End Page 132] Kinsella’s shift from a belief in Irish poetry as a poetry of silence and discontinuity to his call for Irish poets to generate connections between disparate languages and opposed traditions clearly emerges from the momentous beginning of the “Troubles.” Though not explicitly engaging with the violent unrest in Northern Ireland, these essays nonetheless reflect a sense that poets have a responsibility to engage politically, deriving their poetic sensibility in response to moments of political crisis.

A few years later Longley expresses this point of view more blatantly: I find offensive the notion that what we inadequately call ‘the Troubles’ might provide inspiration for artists; and that in some weird quid pro quo the arts might provide solace for grief and anguish . . . [rather,] it is the artist’s duty to warn, to be tuned in before anyone else to the implications of a situation” (TS 72). To be politically “tuned in” as a poet is not to write poems about contemporary violence, nor, it seems, to elegize violence. Instead, poetry should express an almost gnostic sense of its political condition, one that, for Longley, is intrinsically based in form as the poet imaginatively transforms “raw” political material into a “deployment of words at their most precise and most suggestive” (TS 72–73). The poet’s “first duty is to the imagination,” Longley stated in the 1980s, thereby acknowledging his responsibility to the crises of his community but insisting nonetheless on the poet’s necessary transformation of such political unrest into an imaginative aesthetic production.

Longley’s later work often uses the historical continuity and consolatory intertwining of memories inherent in the form of the elegy to enact an ideal imaginative counter to what he calls the “cultural apartheids” of the “Troubles” (TS 75). Even as early as No Continuing City, such elegies as “In Memoriam” provide a form for Longley to feel his way toward a utopian vision of Northern Irish art that he later articulates as an aesthetic “confluence of cultures”: In Ulster this confluence pools historical contributions from the Irish, the Scots, the English, and the Anglo-Irish. Reconciliation does not mean all the colours of the spectrum running so wetly together that they blur into muddy uniformity. Nor does it mean denying political differences. As William Faulkner said: “The past isn’t dead and gone. It isn’t even past yet.” But reconstructing the past or constructing identities has too frequently been purely propagandist activity in Northern Ireland. The Cultural Traditions approach involves a mixture of affirmation, self-interrogation and mutual curiosity.

To bring to light all that has been repressed can be a painful process; but, to quote the American theologian Don Shriver: “The cure and the remembrance are co-terminous.” (TS 75–76) “In Memoriam,” an elegy for Longley’s father, precisely transforms this desire for political psychoanalysis—memory as cure—into a meditation on the [End Page 133] memorial consolation of language and poetic form. In the first stanza, the poet twice addresses his father directly: first by claiming that “through your eyes / I read you like a book” and second by expressing his desire to “Let yours / And other heartbreaks play into my hands.” These addresses apostrophically raise the dead, but the poet derives both intellectual—“like a book”—and emotional intimacy from the performance of the addresses themselves. The elegiac consolation of the poem, however, comes to rest on the poet’s capacity to use language to identify with, pity, and assuage the pain of his already dead and distant father.

In the final stanza the poet reaches beyond his own memory to summon to life the women of his father’s memory, comforting himself through his projected ability to comfort his father by “materializing” his legends. In concretizing language, through language, he allows past and present to intermingle fluidly through now-shared memory. Yet, although an elegy like “In Memoriam” formally performs the confluence of disparate memories and the healing of familial rifts that Longley dreams of for Northern Ireland, in the late 1960s and early 1970s his doubts about the political efficacy of elegy are clear. Recall the previous passage, in which he says he finds it “offensive” that “in some weird quid pro quo the arts might provide solace for grief and anguish”: the consolatory project of the elegy is explicitly set against the notion that poetry should “warn” and be able to incorporate the “implications of a situation.” In other words, the Longley of the first collections felt strongly that poetry should understand and aesthetically convey the political wounds of a culture at risk, rather than make an attempt to heal those wounds.

The formal disparity between these two conflicting impulses is readily apparent in a comparison of the elegy “In Memoriam” and No Continuing City’s only literally epitaphic poem, called “The Headstone.” “In Memoriam” begins by naming its elegiac object, “My father,” and declaring that poetic language, “similes,” will not “eclipse him” but instead “sink roots into my mind.” “The Headstone,” in contrast, begins with an inscription of namelessness, an insistence on the absence of history, and a recognition that love grows increasingly “harder to make clear” through the language on the tomb (CP 27). In invoking the dead, “In Memoriam” makes language an elemental bridge between the living and the dead—even the possessiveness of the “my” in “My father” insists on a fundamental and grammatical bond between mourner and mourned—while in “The Headstone” the relationship between the two is one of illegibility. Unlike the fluid intermingling of father’s and son’s memories in “In Memoriam,” “The Headstone,” denies the possibility of shared history.

Its cryptic epitaphic epigraph—“This stone claims five graves”—presents an occasion to consider language as emotional obstruction rather than as a fluid emotional [End Page 134] medium. The engraved stone itself, into which “lives and where they end can so contract,” is an antithesis to the memorial poem, which can move expansively between memories and temporalities. And the stone is all we know of these five dead people, who “someone” loved—lives and relationships that once were have been reduced to unparseable words on a gravemarker: A HEADSTONE Inscribed ‘This stone claims five graves’ It told us, through the histories it lacked, That always it grows harder to make clear We loved, however carefully is stacked The precious lumber that we shoulder here, However biographical the gear: That lives and where they end can so contract. The sad allotment and the words we read Owned not one date or title to undo The silence of those people in their bed: But someone kept like us this rendezvous— The sinking he had launched their coffins into Prolonged by love, till death mislaid his dead.

(CP 27) The epitaph inscribes just the kind of loss that the elegy tries to transcend. The poem even begins with the impersonal pronoun, “It tells us,” to emphasize a lack of human consciousness behind the stone. Its very language reinforces the permanence of death by dramatizing the ephemeral connection between poetry and memory in what seems like a direct critique of elegiac method: “however carefully is stacked / The precious lumber that we shoulder here, /However biographical the gear,” the passage of time in this poem obscures our capacity to “make clear/We loved.” From the elegiac “In Memoriam,” in which the dead can be “read like a book” and the past brought back to life through language, we have moved into a poem where language is a barrier to memory, where “the words we read / Owned not one date or title to undo / The silence of those people in their bed.” The overdetermined rhymes in “The Headstone”—such as “history it lacked” and “contract,” “words we have read,” “bed,” and “dead”—repeatedly insist on language as an inscription of death.

The love that we see reviving the dead in the elegy here only prolongs “the sinking” of the coffins into oblivion. Death here does not invite representation or allow for memorial revaluation of life; as the last phrase of the poem, “death mislaid his dead” makes clear, death occasions only loss, emphasized here quite literally in the word “mislaid.” The epitaphic poem presents the relationship between language and the dead as one of distance, [End Page 135] representational uncertainty, and substitution. When the epitaphic words on the headstone replace both the dead themselves and memories of the dead, the poetic incarnation that “undoes silence” in the elegy disintegrates into poetic representation that only reinforces that silence. “The Headstone” transforms Kinsella’s lament about the divisive and silencing condition of Irish poetic history into an epitaphic embodiment of the insufficiency, even the violence, of language that attempts to bridge gaps in time, space, and experience.

Just as Kinsella in 1967 identifies “continuity and shared history” as “precisely what is missing from Irish literature, in English or Irish, in the nineteenth century and today,” so do Longley’s early epitaphic poems see continuity and shared history as aesthetic illusions generated out of, and equally shattered by, the representational capacities of language. 30 Longley culminates this vision in the short couplet poems of Secret Marriages (1968), exploring both in form and in subject matter the ways in which language magnifies, rather than transcends, isolation, absence, and stasis. Although many of these poems take classic mythological or fairy tale stories as their points of origin, the clipped ambiguity of the poems works to transform these familiar tales from public and communal stories into private and alienating subjective conditions. “Persephone,” for instance, which articulates the “delirium” of language without history, connectivity, or the power of revivification, explicitly locates itself outside the narrative drama that most poets take up when they write Persephone poems, avoiding the story that allows for the connection between personal experience and mythic tale: 1.

I see as through a skylight in my brain The mole strew its buildings in the rain, The swallows turn above their broken homes And all my acres in delirium. Longley’s poem traces neither the violence of the stolen child nor the compromise of her half-return, neither the loss of innocence nor the redemption of voice that many poets excavate from the story. This poem is self-consciously not about the story and not about mythologizing personal experience. It is not about progress, relationships, salvation, or transformation, nor about movement of any sort: “Straight jacketed by the cold and numskulled / Now sleep the well-adjusted and the skilled—” followed by “The weasel and ferret, the stoat [End Page 136] and fox /Move hand in glove across the equinox . . .” (SM9). Instead, the poem happens in the wake of myth: when loss has been established, when winter seems eternal despite the crossing of the equinox, and when the narrative processes of story and memory that once led us here have been cut off and forgotten.

As in “The Headstone,” this poem deliberately lacks a history, and its voice, trapped behind a skylight, inscribes silence in its lyric description of the world from which it is isolated. The poem ends, “I can tell how softly they go—/ Their footsteps borrow silence from the snow.” The “tell,” rather than “hear,” in the first line of the couplet emphasizes Persephone’s isolation from the softness of creatures above her, and the notion of “footsteps borrow[ing] silence from the snow” is a self-reflective description of the relationship between lyric form and silence that the poem enacts. The stanzas of “Rip Van Winkle,” which follows “Persephone” in Secret Marriages, use sentence-long couplets to create a similar sense of historical disconnection: their short, contained units are a series of unconsummated beginnings, the blank spaces between the couplets like the gaps of time “killed” during Rip Van Winkle’s years of sleep: You wake to find all history collapsed, The moon in purdah and the sun eclipsed. Turn back the newsreel of the time you killed To the dear departed, Rip Van Winkle.

Project for us the faces of the dead, Unlock the Sleepy Hollow of your head. (SM 10) In the six lines of this poem, history has collapsed rather than continued or progressed, a newsreel is being turned back rather than moving forward, and “the faces of the dead” are projections—that is, two-dimensional representations—rather than living presences that can be conjured. The poem’s journalistic ethos—the newsreel, the projections, the short sentences—as well as its reference to the moon in “purdah” gesture toward the connection between poem and wider world that the language of the poem immediately denies: a moon in “purdah” is a moon concealed and isolated. Rip Van Winkle comes back to life with neither history nor the cosmos available to entrench him in time or space. This poem begins with Rip Van Winkle waking but, rather than allowing his resurrection to unfold and progress, the single-sentence, transitionless couplets pronounce the poem’s obsession with the “dear departed,” with time being killed, and with images of the dead.

The grammatical ambiguity of the poem’s second couplet, in which an imperative eases into the language of eulogy, fuses the newly returned-to-life Rip Van Winkle with the “dear departed” and—as in the first [End Page 137] couplet—transfers the energy of the poem from the life of the moment to the death and lack inhering in lost years. Although its strangely accusatory speaker expects Rip Van Winkle to be the bearer of these lost memories, by the poem’s end even the communal memory of the fairy tale has broken down: the speaker’s insistence that Rip Van Winkle access his memories of the dead catapults us from the story of twenty years’ sleep into the tale of Sleepy Hollow and the headless horseman, suggesting in a gruesomely allusive way that Rip Van Winkle has been cut off not only from memories of others, but also from his own story and history. In both “Persephone” and “Rip Van Winkle,” the couplet form emphasizes the ways in which language can both lyrically and violently intercede in the progression of mythical and historical inheritance.

In “Narcissus,” Longley instead engages with the distance poetic tropes create between art and actuality, using the antonymic idea of reflection—simultaneously denoting depth and superficial image—to suspend the poem in a harshly ironic snapshot of that elegiac transformation where language becomes the lost object that it represents: “Unweatherbeaten as the moon my face / Among the waterlogged, the commonplace, // Old boots and kettles for inheritance / Drifting into my head on the off-chance—.” The process of representation is disconnected from actual, concrete presence as the poem displaces all apparent “reflection,” in the psychological sense, onto the surfaces of Narcissus’ reflection in water: A wide Sargasso where the names of things (Important guests at all such christenings) Submerge in mind and pool like treasuretrove. My face as sole survivor floats above. (SM 11) The poem’s two reflective mediums—“mind and pool,” creative source and two dimensional surface—become interchangeable and indistinguishable.

The potentially incarnative “names of things” sink to the bottom of both without actually being incarnated, vanishing in unfound “treasuretroves” and replaced by the representation of Narcissus’ face in the water. As pure representation, “un weather beaten” and unchanging with time, his face can be the only “sole survivor” of the poem’s systematic substitution of image for thing imagined. The poem envisions this act of substitution as a kind of shipwreck, but not as the violent movement of such a catastrophe. Rather, in alluding to the Sargasso, Longley locates this poem in the mysterious doldrums of the Bermuda Triangle, a site of stasis and disappearance. The loss of real things to imagined versions becomes a sign of dangerous stagnancy, one both artistic and political: Jean Rhys’s famous Wide Sargasso Sea was published only two years before Secret Marriages, and the Sargasso, like the reference to “purdah” in “Rip Van Winkle,” ties the aesthetic concerns of “Narcissus” into a wider idiom of colonial oppression.

[End Page 138] Describing his response to a question about the place of political opinion in his poetry, Longley wrote in “A Tongue at Play” that “A bad poem about a hydrogen bomb tells us infinitely less than a good poem about a blackbird” (TAP 120). Longley has, in fact, written many poems that deal explicitly with Northern Irish violence, but his most intricate responses to what he calls “the total experience of living” express themselves through the constellations of language and image that he chooses (TAP 121).Might we then think of these abandoned epitaphic poems, fraught with historical gaps, representational crises, and silence, as Longley’s idiosyncratic experience of dying? In the ironically titled “Remembrance Day,” the last poem of Secret Marriages, conventional written and symbolic memorials of the dead kill off both fallen heroes and any redemptive power of memory: 1. Conveyed here in what ship of death —Citations and their death throes, Epitaphs each last breath— Our godforsaken heroes, Outlandish dead beneath whose Medals memory lies bruised.

(SM 13) “Citations” become “death throes,” last words become “epitaphs,” and medals crush memory—the tight rhymes of “death throes” and “heroes,” of “death” and “last breath,” as well as the parallel placement of “Citations” and “Epitaphs,” underscores the inscription of silence and absence in the very language that is supposed to somehow transcend loss and console the living.

The poem’s final image of swallows “Lifting blood on their breasts/ Up to the homely gables,” however, would seem to counter the first section’s killing off of the dead by presenting the redemptive—if gruesome—possibility of heroes’ blood being recycled into the foundation of a swallow’s nest, a new home: “Imagine among these meadows / Where soldiers sink to dust / An aftermath with swallows / Lifting blood on their breasts / Up to the homely gables, and like / A dark cross overhead the hawk.” However, in the dismal final line of his introduction to Secret Marriages, Longley denies the poem any elegiac consolation, as well as any ultimate validity: “I imagine the possibility of swallows breeding near a battlefield and using blood as well as mud to build their nests. On second thought this doesn’t seem quite so likely” (SM3).With this odd dismissal, it should come as no surprise that “Remembrance Day” is one of only two poems Longley chose not to include in his Collected Poems.

As the poem shifts in all of its later publications from its two-sestet form in Secret Marriages to the same tight couplets of “Persephone,” “Rip Van Winkle” and “Narcissus,” its new epitaphic form echoes Longley’s sense that in these poems, the potential [End Page 139] for language to forge connections and generate historical meaning “doesn’t seem quite so likely.” In the self-contradictory and deflating lines of his introduction, Longley recasts Secret Marriages, and by extension, No Continuing City, as collections edging toward a theory of what Irish poetry should not be: a poetry of “tiny units,” poetic “apartheids” 31 closed off from one another rather than “cursive and open-ended,” tending toward reduction, retreating into “dead silence” (SM 2). 32 Yet, whether or not these poems convey Longley’s ideal psychology of Irish poetry, they strikingly reflect a moment in Irish history when the search for an authentic poetic form also was, as Kinsella wrote, a search for ways to aesthetically conceptualize the gaps, discontinuities, and “divided mind” of Ireland.

Although Longley’s epitaphic poetry rejects the aesthetics of unity that his later poetry embraces, it remains a hauntingly perfect formal experiment in the poetics of political division and isolation. [End Page 140] Renée Fox Under Ben Bulben by William Butler Yeats | Poetry Foundation Under Ben Bulben by William Butler Yeats Swear by what the Sages spoke Round the Mareotic Lake That the Witch of Atlas knew, Spoke and set the cocks a-crow. Swear by those horsemen, by those women, Complexion and form prove superhuman, That pale, long visaged company That airs an immortality Completeness of their passions won; Now they ride the wintry dawn Where Ben Bulben sets the scene. Here's the gist of what they mean. II Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all. Whether man dies in his bed Or the rifle knocks him dead, A brief parting from those dear Is the worst man has to fear. Though grave-diggers' toil is long, Sharp their spades, their muscle strong, They but thrust their buried men Back in the human mind again.

III You that Mitchel's prayer have heard `Send war in our time, O Lord!' Know that when all words are said And a man is fighting mad, Something drops from eyes long blind He completes his partial mind, For an instant stands at ease, Laughs aloud, his heart at peace, Even the wisest man grows tense With some sort of violence Before he can accomplish fate Know his work or choose his mate. IV Poet and sculptor do the work Nor let the modish painter shirk What his great forefathers did, Bring the soul of man to God, Make him fill the cradles right. Measurement began our might: Forms a stark Egyptian thought, Forms that gentler Phidias wrought. Michael Angelo left a proof On the Sistine Chapel roof, Where but half-awakened Adam Till her bowels are in heat, Proof that there's a purpose set Before the secret working mind: Profane perfection of mankind.

On backgrounds for a God or Saint, Gardens where a soul's at ease; Where everything that meets the eye Flowers and grass and cloudless sky Resemble forms that are, or seem When sleepers wake and yet still dream, And when it's vanished still declare, With only bed and bedstead there, That Heavens had opened. When that greater dream had gone Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude Prepared a rest for the people of God, Palmer's phrase, but after that Confusion fell upon our thought. V Irish poets learn your trade Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds. Sing the peasantry, and then Hard-riding country gentlemen, The holiness of monks, and after Porter-drinkers' randy laughter; Sing the lords and ladies gay That were beaten into the clay Through seven heroic centuries; Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be Still the indomitable Irishry. Under bare Ben Bulben's head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid, An ancestor was rector there Long years ago; a church stands near, By the road an ancient Cross.

No marble, no conventional phrase, On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye WB Yeats: Fresh doubt that Sligo grave contains poet's remains - BBC News BBC News WB Yeats: Fresh doubt that Sligo grave contains poet's remains 18 July 2015 Close share panel Image copyright Getty Images Image caption WB Yeats died in France at the age of 74 and left funeral instructions that his family were to wait a year before bringing his body back to Ireland Recently discovered documents have cast fresh doubt on the authenticity of the final resting place of one of Ireland's most famous poets, WB Yeats. Yeats died in France in 1939 and he had asked to be buried in a temporary grave before being repatriated to Ireland. But after the outbreak of World War Two repatriation was delayed until 1948. The Irish Times has reported that newly discovered French documents suggest Yeats's remains were mixed up with the bones of others before the exhumation. Shrine The newspaper said the details are contained in personal correspondence between French diplomats who were involved in the repatriation, which was handed over to the Irish Embassy in Paris last month.

The poet's official grave is in Drumcliffe Parish Church cemetery in County Sligo and the site has become both a shrine and a tourist attraction. The headstone is inscribed with the poet's famous self-penned epitaph: "Cast a cold eye on life, on death, horseman, pass by." Image copyright © Suzanne Mischyshyn/CC Geograph Image caption The grave of WB Yeats has become a literary landmark in County Sligo Yeats, who had strong family links to County Sligo, had asked to be reinterred in Drumcliff when press interest in his death had subsided. The poet instructed his wife: "In a year's time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo." But his widow faced legal and technical problems sorting out the repatriation during WW2 and at some point during this period it is believed the poet's remains were moved from his original grave in Roquebrune, southern France. Identification difficulties After negotiations and assistance from the French governments, skeletal remains were exhumed from Roquebrune in 1948 and brought to Sligo by the Irish Naval Service.

Image caption Britain's Prince Charles visited the Sligo grave earlier this year as part of a series of events marking the 150th anniversary of the poet's birth Doubts about the authenticity of the bones have been in the public domain for many years, but the recently discovered diplomatic correspondence sheds new light on the difficulty of the identification process during the exhumation. The Irish Times reported that the documents were found in the personal papers of the former French foreign ministry official, Jacques Camille Paris, who later became the first Secretary General of the Council of Europe. The newspaper said the diplomat's son, Daniel Paris, "turned the documents over to the Irish Embassy in Paris in a discreet ceremony last month". The poet's closest surviving relative, his granddaughter Caitriona Yeats, would not comment on the report but she pointed to a letter written by his children, Anne and Michael Yeats in 1988 , in response to earlier controversy over the remains. In that letter, the Yeats family said they were "satisfied beyond doubt that our father's body is indeed buried in Drumcliff Cemetery". Image caption WB Yeats photographed in 1937, two years before his death in southern France

Question: Which Irish poet’s epitaph ends “Cast a cold eye, on life, on death. Horseman pass by”?
Answer: William Butler Yeats