Three Irish Artists

William Butler Yeats

You often spoke for, and often against, The embattled Ireland of your time. At the Playboy riot you took offense. And for their antiliterary crime Stoutly scolded that unruly audience. Truth is embodied in myth, you thought: Cuchulain battling the waves, Leda’s rape, Naoise’s calm heroism, how Deirdre sought By witty stratagem the final escape Into death. Immortality, but humor too: Witty satire in The Cat and the Moon, The bishop, Crazy Jane, and all that crew. With head and feet you tapped out your tunes, And those tunes live on. “Horseman, pass by,” Reads your epitaph. Your words will never die.

John Millington Synge

That traveling man, who knew his Ireland well, Found beauty in the lives of simple folk. At turf fires he listened, but seldom spoke. From Aran islanders he learned how to tell Stories of those elemental lives in plays Both sad and merry, full of folklore fun, And a teasing irony, that finally won Even stubborn hearts, and earned the praise Of countrymen not used to such sharp wits And suspicious of anything the church Might disapprove, or womanhood besmirch. Such Irishness drove Yeats to angry fits. The Abbey welcomed this solitary man Who left us plays none would wish to ban.

James Joyce: An Anthology

In that great story ending Dubliners, “The Dead,” A monument to passions of the past, Quietness settles down at last With snow falling on the living and the dead.

In Portrait he had the clever boldness To start things off with infant, “baby tuckoo.” Still growing, the artist to be sees a girl, Wading in water, legs white as a pearl.

Ulysses arrives, the artist now in full bloom, Stretching the language this way and that— The whole world in one city, plus even a cat.

In the Wake the River Liffey carries us, I presume, With maternal care, softly down to the sea, Singing a farewell lullaby in a watery key.