Leaving the Oyster Festival at Clarenbridge I was delighted to return to a place which has a cherished position in Irish Culture, Coole Park,Co. Galway, the seat of the remarkable Augusta Gregory handmaiden of the Irish Literary Revival, Founder of the Abbey Theatre and muse to the poet William Butler Yeats who wrote five poems about or set in the house and grounds: "The Wild Swans at Coole", "I walked among the seven woods of Coole", "In the Seven Woods", "Coole Park, 1929" and "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931". Disgracefully in 1941 Coole House, then in the ownership of the Irish State, was demolished on “economic grounds” in an act of wanton philistinism. Happily hindsight today has not tried to defend this act and as well as the magical Coole Lake where the “Wild Swans” congregate each autumn the “Seven Woods” interspersed with turloughs (seasonal Karst lakes) lend the grounds an appropriate mythical quality.
Coole Park outside Gort in County Galway was the home of Lady Augusta Gregory, dramatist and co-founder with Edward Martyn and W.B. Years of the Abbey Theatre. The area is also a National Nature Reserve due to its great wildlife importance - its native woodlands and turloughs. The visitor centre uses multimedia presentations, models, exhibitions and audio visual to inform the visitor of both the natural and literary heritage of the area.
Lady Gregory
Coole Park
Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory (15 March 1852–22 May 1932), née Isabella Augusta Persse, was an Irish dramatist and folklorist. With W B Yeats and others, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote numerous short works for both companies. She also produced a number of books of retellings of stories from Irish mythology. Born into a class that identified closely with British rule, her conversion to cultural nationalism, as evidenced in these writings, was emblematic of many of the changes to occur in Ireland during her lifetime. However, Lady Gregory is mainly remembered for her role as an organiser and driving force of the Irish Literary Revival. Her home at Coole Park, County Galway served as an important meeting place for the leading Revival figures and her early work as a member of the board of the Abbey was at least as important for the theatre's development as her creative writings were. Her motto, taken from Aristotle, was "To think like a wise man, but to express oneself like the common people."
Autograph Tree
Coole Park, in the early 20th century, was the centre of the Irish Literary Revival. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge and Sean O' Casey all came to experience its magic. They and many others carved their initials on the Autograph Tree, an old beech still standing today. Although the house no longer stands, one can still appreciate the surroundings that originally drew so many here.
Coole estate was purchased in 1768 by Robert Gregory on his return to Ireland following service with the East India Company. It remained with the Gregory family until 1927 when it was sold to the state. Residing there at that time was Lady Augusta Gregory, already a legend in her lifetime as a dramatist, folklorist and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre with W.B. Yeats and Edward Martyn.
Born Augusta Persse, of the Protestant landed class; she was introduced to Irish myth and history, and taught some Gaelic by Mary Sheridan, who was nurse to her family. At the age of twenty-eight she married Sir William Gregory, aged sixty-three, who owned Coole Park. Twelve years later he died, and as a widow she devoted herself to making Coole a place where writers could gather. In collaboration with Yeats she wrote Cathleen Ní Houlihan and The Pot of Broth; her own output included numerous folk tales, which were taken from the songs and stories of travelling men and beggars at Coole, or from the cottagers in the Kiltartin district.
Lady Gregory's love of Coole and its 'Seven Woods', immortalised by Yeats, is manifested in her writings and those of her literary guests.
"These woods have been well loved, well tended by some who came before me, and my affection has been no less than theirs. The generations of trees have been my care, my comforters. Their companionship has often brought me peace."
Lady Gregory, Coole, 1931
She was one of the most important figures in the Irish Literary Revival of the early 20th century, not only because of her achievements as a playwright, but also because of the way she transformed Coole into a focal point for those who shaped that movement, making it a place they would return to time and time again to talk, to plan, to derive inspiration.
But the woods and lakes at Coole were richer than Yeats divined. The 'Seven Woods', which so enchanted Lady Gregory and her guests, held whispers of a more ancient ancestry, of which the literary visitors were scarcely aware: remnants of the earlier natural forest cover, and the disappearing lake and river are part of the finest turlough complex not merely in Ireland but in the entire world. The most unique features of Coole Park are the turloughs (seasonal lakes or also called disappearing lakes) which are said to be the best examples of turloughs in the world. The park is situated on a low lying Karst area of land and due to this the park has been designated a Special Area of Conservation.
Turlough in Coole Park
During the Gaelic Literary Revival in the late 19th and early 20th century Coole became a haven in which famous literary figures sought refuge from time to time, drawn by the hospitality and enthusiasm of Lady Gregory. Here they came together, as the class to which most of them belonged lost its political pre-eminence, to create from the embers of a dying order a new pre-eminence. The names of many of those who contributed to the Literary Revival are engraved on Lady Gregory's Autograph Tree - the Copper Beech in the walled garden. The first name to be carved on it was that of Yeats himself, whom she asked to cut his initials in the summer of 1898.
Many drew inspiration from Coole. Lady Gregory tells us that when Synge visited Coole he never went out on the roads; all his time was spent in the woods. However, it was Yeats who drew most from Coole, from the time he first arrived in 1897, in a state of physical and psychological exhaustion from which he was nursed back to health by Lady Gregory. He once described Coole to fellow poet John Masefield as the most beautiful place in the world. While he stayed, he really lived in another world. As he wandered the woods and grounds, lost in that landscape of the imagination, he would rarely respond to a greeting from somebody he didn't know, and would only listen 'if you talked of the faeries'.
For Yeats, Coole Park was more than the place we see today; indeed it was more than the place he saw himself. Not just because the house has gone and much else has changed since his time, but because he used the place and other symbols he most loved to express his vision of another world altogether - they were 'epiphanies of a truth beyond the limits of the accident that is Ben Bulben, Coole Park or Lissadel etc.'
'Under my window ledge the waters race,
Otters below and moor-hens on the top,
Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven's face,
Then darkening through 'dark' Raftery's 'cellar' drop,
Run underground, rise in a rocky place
In Coole demesne, and there to finish up
Spread to a lake and drop into a hole.
What's water but the generated soul?'
W.B. Yeats 'Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931'
Nearby to Coole Park in 1918 Yeats’s bought and renovated an Irish keep or tower house. Thoor Ballylee was Yeats's monument and symbol; in both aspects it had multiple significance. It satisfied his desire for a rooted place in a known countryside, not far from Coole and his life-long friend Lady Gregory. To live in a Tower complemented, perhaps, his alignment with a tradition of cultivated aristocracy which he had envied and a leisured peace which he had enjoyed. A Dialogue of Self and Soul" dramatizes the conflicting claims of life and death.
While the Soul represents all that would lead Yeats out of life, the Self encompasses the part of Yeats' nature that is responsive to the beauty, as well as the horror, of life. In Section I the Soul's command to ascend "the winding ancient stair" and seek deliverance from the endless cycle of rebirth is countered by the Self's contemplation of Sato's sword, a symbol of the passions man experiences in lifetime after lifetime.
A Dialogue Of Self And Soul by William Butler Yeats
My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
"Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul
The tower or castle that Yeats bought was a sixteenth century Norman castle built by the family de Burgo, or Burke. It consisted of four floors with one room on each, connected by a spiral stone stairway built into the seven-foot thickness of the massive outer wall. Each floor had a window overlooking the river which flowed alongside. At the top here was a flat roof reached by a final steep flight of steps from the floor below. The tower had to be restored before Yeats could live in it. By the summer of 1919 Yeats and his wife and daughter had moved in. Yeats mentions Ballylee in a letter to Maud Gonne May 1918.
Thoor Ballylee
‘We hope to be in Ballylee in a month and there I dream of making a house that may encourage people to avoid ugly manufactured things - an ideal poor man's house. Except a very few things imported as models we should get all made in Galway or Limerick. I am told that our neighbours are pleased that we are not getting 'grand things but old Irish furniture'.
After the Yeats family moved out in 1929 it fell into disuse , but was restored as 'Yeats Tower' in 1965 and fitted out as a Yeats museum, containing an interesting collection of first editions as well as items of furniture. The adjoining cottage is fitted out as a tea room and shop. The tower has been wired for sound and a pre-recorded commentary can be played on a push-button system. In addition part of the ground floor has been adapted for an audio-visual presentation on the years of Yeats's occupancy.
Coole Park was often referred to in stories and poems e.g. W.B Yeats was so inspired by the beauty and tranquillity here that he wrote a poem called "The Wild Swans at Coole".
“THE TREES are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.
The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.”
Wild Swans at Coole Lake
In Yeats's early poetry, up to the volume, In the Seven Woods (1904), we can see the influences of English Romanticism, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Symbolism. Two further influences were the occult and the languorous world of the Celtic twilight poets of the 1890s.
Yeats saw himself as writing for Ireland and out of an Irish poetic tradition. However, his Ireland is the shadowy world of Celtic legend, rather than a contemporary reality. "The Song of Wandering Aengus" captures the essence of Yeats's early poetry.
Yeats's middle period poetry can be read in the volumes from The Green Helmet (1910) to Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). Subject matter and attitude change. Love is dealt with in a more direct, questioning manner. Yeats still writes about Ireland, but it has become a real Ireland aspects of which irritates or puzzles him by their complexity. He now writes about real events, such as the death of Robert Gregory; and real people (Lady Gregory) and real places (Coole Park). With these changes comes a noticeable change in style from the meditative rhythms of the earlier verse to the more muscular rhythms and tighter syntax of this middle period. We can hear this new distinctive voice in the two poems below, "No Second Troy" and "Easter 1916".
W.B. Yeats with his daughters
The final phase of Yeats's poetry begins with "The Tower" (1928). Yeats constructs himself as a very self-conscious bard in poems like "The Tower" and "Sailing to Byzantium". He publicly celebrates Ireland's culture which he sees embodied in Coole Park and Lady Gregory and which for him become emblematic of a nostalgically remembered Anglo-Irish Ascendancy dispensation. He contemplates old age and its difficulties, and meditates on the function of art in life. Yeats was also an Irish Senator, reflected in the poem, "Among School Children", together with "Sailing to Byzantium", can serve as exemplary verse from the last phase of Yeats's poetry. Yeats died in Menton, France in 1939 and was buried in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin after a private funeral but according to his wishes his body was moved after the war in 1948 to Drumcliffe, Co. Sligo. In his poem "Under Ben Bulben" Yeats outlined how and where he was to be buried and even included the epitaph he wanted inscribed on his gravestone:
Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman pass by.
For more on W. B. Yeats and his poetry see;
http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/04/w-b-yeats.html
For where W. B. Yeats died see;
http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/09/e-1027-roquebrune-cap-martin.html
The past cannot be undone and the wrong which was done with the needless destruction of this shrine to the Irish Literary revival cannot be undone but the newly opened visitor centre and the really excellent FREE exhibition strive to compensate for the tragic demolition of Coole House in 1941 by the Department of Forestry.
Site of Coole House
"Me and Nu"
The recently restored Visitor Centre includes one of the original stables which still contain elaborate stalls for five horses. A loft overhead was used for storage of hay and also carpentry and other tools. The Visitor Centre contains an audio/visual presentation, "Lady Gregory of Coole", a literary history of Coole Park, and also a multi-media exhibition, "Coole Park through the eyes of 'Me and Nu', Granddaughters of Lady Gregory". The presentations last approximately 30 minutes each. The exhibition is very cleverly constructed based on the short autobiography of childhood by Lady Gregory’s daughter “Me and Nu” Anne Gregory's recollection of what living at Coole in the West of Ireland with her grandmother, Lady Gregory, was like. Her account is very cleverly constructed and it serves to increase the stature of Lady Gregory, who, in addition to being the cornerstone of the Irish literary revival, was evidently a wonderful grandmother. By following and telling the story of Coole Park and its many storied visitors through the eyes of the Grandchildren the exhibition will appeal to young and old alike. There is also an excellent tea room, shop and other facilities which like the grounds are free.
Visitor Centre
The woman Shaw once described as "the greatest living Irishwoman" died aged 80 in 1932 at home and is buried in the New Cemetery in Bohermore, Galway. The entire contents of Coole Park were auctioned three months after her death and the house was demolished in 1941. Lady Gregory's plays fell out of favour after her death and are now rarely performed. She kept diaries and journals for most of her adult life, and many of these have been published since her death. They are a rich source of information on Irish literary history for the first three decades of the 20th century and her diaries covering the period of the founding of the Abbey are the only extant contemporary record of these events written by a major participant. In one sense, the magic of Coole has been in abeyance since the demolition of the house in 1941, a time when more immediate concerns occupied the minds of most people. Coole-Garyland is now a statutory Nature Reserve managed by the National Parks & Wildlife Service and is well worth a visit. It is a special place with a unique atmosphere inhabited by the ghosts of the Irish Literary revival whose presence is still felt there and whose contribution to our culture is incalculable.
One such ghost is Lady Gregory’s only son, Major Robert Gregory who died in 1918 and was commemorated by Yeats’s in “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.”
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
Bust of Gaius Maecenas
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