Irish poets to feature on London Underground

The rush hour journey on London’s Underground is usually the time when commuters’ attention flags as they stare into space, avoiding eye contact, retreating into their imagination.

This week, however, they received spiritual sustenance in the form of half a dozen Irish poets, led by WB Yeats, whose birthday 150 years ago is being celebrated throughout the year.

Avoiding the crush, commuters may particularly link with Yeats's He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, still one of the most popular love poems, frequently cited during radio stations' favourites lists.

The Underground poems were unveiled last month at a reception in the Irish Embassy on Grosvenor Place, near Buckingham Palace by the Irish Ambassador to London, Dan Mulhall.

The location was appropriate since one of the poets included in the list, Eavan Boland, spent part of her childhood in the building when her father, Frederick, served as ambassador between 1950 and 1956.

If the journey of commuters to work can feed off Yeatsian dreams, the one home can do so on Boland's Legends for Eavan Frances, one of her two daughters, born in 1978.

“Our children are our legends, You are mine. You have my name. My hair was once like yours. And the world is less bitter to me because you will re-tell the story,” she wrote.

The Underground posters will also include a translation of Antoine Ó Raifteirí's Irish verses by one of Yeats's closest friends and allies, Lady Gregory, along with Louis MacNeice's epigraph to Holes in the Sky (1944); along with poems by the contemporary Irish poet Paula Meehan.

Later this month, Transport for London will be publishing a paperback edition of its popular Penguin anthology, Poems on the Underground.

Copies of the posters are available from the Poetry Society and London Transport Museum.