#Maud gonne william butler yeats full
#Maud gonne william butler yeats software

In the four films Yeats (1865-1939) is presented as public man, poet, lover and occultist, a figure of towering achievement, eccentricities and pretensions. My friend said it was rather beelike, like a bee in a glade.” And the way he was reciting was very peculiar. Yeats “had a very distinctive Irish country accent, from Sligo,” noted Patrick McAfee, a visitor earlier this month. The readers include Seamus Heaney, Sinead O'Connor and Theo Dorgan, but it is the voice of Yeats himself, reciting “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” at a sing-song pace, that comes as a revelation.

#Maud gonne william butler yeats full

'When you are old and grey and full of sleepĪnd nodding by the fire, take down this book.' The opening of each poem commands silence: Here the words roll across one screen, while evocative pictures fill the others. Yeats once said, '“Write for the ear, I thought, so that you may be instantly understood as when an actor or folk singer stands before an audience.” The bustle of the Dublin streets falls away, replaced by recordings of a dozen famous poems.Īll his verse was meant to be heard, not read. The first stop is at a chapel-size octagon of screens. The four films are shown in cosy rooms that can seat only five or six at a time, in spaces decked out like his study, a backstage corner of the Abbey Theatre and Thoor Ballylee, the chronically damp tower in County Galway where Yeats tried to set up home. The exhibition draws its power not only from nimble navigational tools but also from the intimacy of the encounters. And thanks to various loans, paintings by Yeats (he was briefly an art student) and by his accomplished father, John Butler Yeats, and brother, Jack B. “There was also the practical problem of scholars coming to George Yeats for access to them,” she added. Catherine Fahy, one of the curators, said the family believed his papers belong to Ireland. The papers now occupy 38 yards of shelves his personal library of 3,000 volumes has its own space. Those gifts continued from his daughter, Anne, an artist and stage designer who died in 2001, and from his son, Michael, an Irish senator who died in 2007. Soon after the poet's death in 1939, his widow, George, began giving his papers to the National Library. The exhibition, which opened in 2006 and might move to the United States if the library can find a suitable host, was mounted in part as a gesture of gratitude to the Yeats family.

#Maud gonne william butler yeats software

With audiotapes, four short films and software that bring light and breath to aging manuscripts, it amounts to a digital resurrection, allowing Yeats to stride again along the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The notebook is one of thousands of elements in a dazzling exhibition, “The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats,” more like a life-size, walk-through Web site than an ordinary museum show. If needed, Gonne's handwriting can be deciphered on a pop-up screen that types out her fevered scrawl. With the stroke of a finger on a touch screen, a visitor can flip through pages written 100 years ago and summon an image of this letter, or any other entry. Next to the display case the entire notebook has been digitally reincarnated. Yet every syllable - every comma-deprived sentence, every curve in her script, every ampersand - is legible.

Now, a century later, that book is on display at the National Library of Ireland, opened to a page that is just barely visible under the indirect lighting prescribed for aged ink treasures.

Yeats used it to keep track of their shared fixation with the occult and each other. As far as actual marriage, Gonne became expert at wielding the word “no.”īound in white vellum, the notebook served as their metaphysical marital bed. Under airtight, light-shielding glass, is a notebook given to William Butler Yeats in 1908 by Maud Gonne, the beautiful, brainy feminist Irish revolutionary and object of Yeats' infatuation across five decades, the muse - well, really, the furnace - for his poetry of yearning and his willing partner in what they called a mystical marriage. For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.