Sir, – Lissadell, William Butler Yeats and seagulls have been very much in the news of late. It might be of interest to your readers to point out that in the opening lines of his poem On A Political Prisoner, Yeats wrote:
“She that but little patience knew,
From childhood on, had now so much
A grey gull lost its fear and flew
Down to her cell and there alit,
And there endured her fingers’ touch
And from her fingers ate its bit”.
The “prisoner” of the poem was Countess Markievicz of Lissadell.
In Demon and Beast, another poem by Yeats, written in November, 1918, two months before the above, we read:
“But soon a tear-drop started up,
For aimless joy had made me stop
Beside the little lake
To watch a white gull take
A bit of bread thrown up into the air”.
Clearly, seagulls’ behaviour has not changed much in a hundred years.
I wonder if the members of our Cabinet meeting at Lissadell felt any sense of shame on realising that, according to the Department of Education website, students entering fifth year in our schools in September 2015 will not study any of Yeats’s poems for their Leaving Certificate.– Yours, etc,
JIM RYAN,
Dungarvan,
Co Waterford.