Ciaran Mac Mathuna is a national treasure. His Sunday morning programme of music and musings is an aural garden of delights - unmissable, the perfect wake-up call.
Recently he had Seamus Heaney reading the famous poem Donal Og, translated from the Irish by Lady Gregory. You know the one: "It was late last night the dog was speaking of you, the snipe was speaking of you in her bare marsh"; and the ending: "You have taken the East from me, you have taken the West from me, and my fear is great you have taken God from me." Powerful stuff and full of memories for me.
Heaney said the poem was a favourite of Ted Hughes, Britain's last poet laureate, who, he said, probably heard it from an Irish colleague at Cambridge.
Camden Town
He might also have come across it through a Cornish painter, Harry Gordon, who had a gallery in Camden Town, London, just around the corner from the flat where, for a time, Hughes lived with his wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath.
How I happened to meet Hughes, Plath and, indeed, Gordon, is connected with the poem.
In 1955, I was lucky enough to become the possessor of a small sketch by Jack Yeats. It was given to me by a nurse who looked after the painter when he was hospitalised some three years before his death. It was just a tiny sketch, done in ink, on a sheet of notepaper, about seven inches by five, but it was unmistakably a Yeats, showing a young horse running free to the seashore with a yacht in the distance. The signature was as big as the drawing itself: "Jack B. Yeats, St Patrick's Day, 1954." I loved it dearly.
In Camden Town, I called at a gallery to see about having it framed. The gallery owner, Harry Gordon, whom I had never met until that moment, nearly had a seizure when he saw the sketch. He happened to be in the throes of preparing an exhibition of paintings based on the poem Donal Og,though he called it An Irish Girl's Lament and attributed it to W.B. Yeats.
Perhaps there's another version of the translation done by Yeats and re-titled by him. I don't know about that, but it's unquestionably the same poem. To have a sketch by the brother of the poet he was working on walk in, as it were, off the street, was for Harry Gordon a kind of miracle, a sign: the exhibition would be a success!
Physical strength
He invited me to the opening and it was there I met Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Hughes gave a tremendous impression of physical strength. He was like an oak tree rooted in the ground - serious, shy, almost awkward, very much the countryman - while his wife seemed a very friendly, talkative American college girl. They had met in Cambridge, where he was teaching, and to which Sylvia had won a Fulbright Fellowship.
Hughes had at that time produced one or two slim volumes of verse but was not very well known. The pair were hard up. Somebody told me their flat was so cramped the baby's Moses basket would have to be taken off the kitchen table so that Ted could do a bit of writing.
I met the pair of them again at another of Harry Gordon's exhibitions. The following year Ted Hughes won a couple of important poetry awards and published the collection Lupercal, which made his reputation. He had got a Guggenheim Fellowship and had lived in America for a few years. Unfortunately, he and Sylvia split up in 1962 and the following year Sylvia Plath took her own life, just it seemed when success and financial reward beckoned for them both.
Collected works
Sylvia's only novel, The Bell Jar, was published just before her death. A number of her books of poems came out posthumously and Ted Hughes edited her collected works later.
Harry Gordon still plies his trade, though not in the Camden Town gallery where we all met. That is now a washeteria.
And what happened to my lovely little Yeats? Some time in the early 1970s I offered it as a present, a token of love. I have already said I loved the little sketch and that was surely true. But there's little point in giving something you don't love; that's just clearing out the attic.
The decent girl wouldn't think of taking such a gift. I insisted, and finally she accepted, but strictly on one condition: if our affair was to end, I would take it back.
Our affair ended.