Drumcliffe and Glencar

Pretty good weather yesterday. It rained hard while we listened to two lectures at the Yeats Summer School, one by the eminent Irish critic, Denis Donoghue, and the other by the American scholar, Helen Vendler (you might have seen Vendler sometime in the New York Times Book Review). Then we were off to Yeats's gravesite at Drumcliffe church, under the massive limestone mountain, Ben Bulben. The epitaph on his grave comes from one of his poems, "Under Ben Bulben."

Glencar waterfall and lake were spectacular--another prominent fairy haunt. And finally we went to the "big house", Lissadel, more or less equivalent to a plantation house in South Carolina except grander by tenfold. It was the home of Constance Gore-Booth, a hero of the "Rising" immortalized in Yeats's "Easter 1916."