Villa Torre Clementina, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin

Villa Torre Clementina

Floating dreamily above the Sentier Littoral which joins Cap-Martin on the French Riviera with the fabled Principality of Monaco is the wonderful Belle Epoque Villa Torre Clementina which this year celebrates its 106th Birthday. Cap-Martin, within the commune of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, is a beautiful wooded peninsula on the Mediterranean, just below the perched Roquebrune village. The train station is down here, along with the beach, some campsites and shops. The peninsula itself is largely covered with very expensive walled estates, some dating back to the 19th century and the Belle Époque.




Roquebrune

To inhale the atmosphere of that era head along the Avenue l'Imperatrice Eugenie or on the costal footpath to Monaco down below. The Sentier Littoral offers an invigorating two hour walk around the length of Cap Martin all the way to Menton. En route you will catch just the barest glimpse of the superb villas whose estates cover the main area of the Cap. Somewhere above is the ravishing Villa Torre Clementina restored by Frederick R. Koch, an American collector and philanthropist. Designed in 1904 by the architect Lucien Hesse for Ernesta Stern, 1854-1926 (who is buried in Menton churchyard) this neo-Romanesque confection and superb gardens with pavilions and a pergola are on the French register of historic monuments. Born in Trieste (then Austrian) in 1854 she married the wealthy Parisian banker Louis Antoine Stern (1840-1900) in 1874.The Villa Torre Clementina was named after the setting of a villa the Hierschel family built in the Veneto, Villa Hierschel dei Minerbi, which had in its grounds an ancient 15th Century refuge tower for sailors and villagers from marauding Ottoman corsairs, the Torre Clementina. The family were Jewish traders who had originally settled in Trieste.


Ernesta Stern

The villa was designed by the Parisian society architect Lucien Hesse shortly after 1904 (date of allotment of the private estate of Cap-Martin) for Ernesta Stern who as a writer published stories under the name Venetian Maria Star. The interior of the villa, inspired by the Orient and the gardens are the work of Raffaele Mainella, a painter of landscape and genre, born in Benevento (Italy) in 1858 and who worked mainly in Venice. The garden is characterised by a long path through which the three parts of a geometric garden listed in the pine forest and featuring a dozen display areas. The entire villa with its interiors, doorways, and gardens with paths, fountains and ornamental lakes, plants, sculptures, ornaments and other lapidary is inscribed on the French register of Historic Properties and is protected by law since 1974. It was used as a backdrop and set by film director René Clément for the movie Les Félins.


Maria Star


Palazzetto Stern, Grand Canal, Venice

Ernesta Stern husband’s wealth paid for extravagant homes in Paris, Côte-d'Azure and a rebuilt Palazzo in Venice. The life of Ernesta de Hierschel, whose married name was Stern, and that of Palazzetto Stern, on the Grand Canal beside the Calle del Traghetto di San Barnaba were closely connected for a number of years: between 1909 and 1912, Ernesta Stern, who attended the most fashionable literary salons in Paris and who herself presided over a salon that drew such names as Proust, Reynaldo Hahn, Fauré, Paul Bourget, D'Annunzio, Madeleine Lemaire, Lina Cavalieri, Marchesa Casati Stampa and Princess de Polignac, decided to build, on the ruins of another building, the neo-gothic palazzo that still bears the name of her husband. She entrusted the architect Giuseppe Berti and the painter-architect-decorator Raffaele Mainella with its construction and decoration, down to the tiniest details. The friendship between Ernesta Stern and Raffaele Mainella was dominated by the genius of the latter, but it was also strongly influenced by the new cultural movements that Ernesta saw burgeoning in Paris and which she wanted to introduce into Italy.


Villa Hierschel dei Minerbi with the Torre Clementina in the grounds

This cultural exchange between Venice and France reached its height when Ernesta Stern decided to «bring Venice to France», entrusting Mainella, who continued to work in a «Byzantine-Veneto» style, with the decoration of her homes and parks both in Paris and on the Côte-d'Azure. The vitality of this exchange did not last long, however, since the First World War stifled many initiatives, but the traces it left are rich and important for this history of Venice and its cultural exchanges with Europe at the time. The Palazzetto Stern is now an expensive Venice hotel. Their Paris house was Hôtel Stern, a hôtel particulier at 68, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré which was demolished around 1920 but some of its contents are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.





Frederick Robinson Koch (born 1933) is an American collector and philanthropist, the eldest of the four sons born to American industrialist Fred C. Koch, founder of what is now Koch Industries, and Mary Robinson Koch. Unlike his father and brothers, all three of whom studied chemical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and pursued business careers, Frederick studied humanities at Harvard College (B.A. 1955), following which he enlisted in the U.S. Navy serving in Millingham, near Memphis and then on the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga. Upon return to civilian life Koch enrolled at the Yale School of Drama where his focus was playwriting and from which he received an M.F.A. degree in 1961.




Villa Torre Clementina

Through personal and foundation acquisitions Koch assembled large and important collections of rare books and literary and musical manuscripts, fine and decorative arts and photographs, with works of the nineteenth and twentieth century’s predominating. His Frederick R. Koch Foundation is a major donor in New York to the Pierpont Morgan Library, and the Frick Collection and, in Pittsburgh, to The Carnegie Museum of Art. Of particular note are The Frederick R. Koch Collections at the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library at Harvard University, and at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library that Yale president Richard C. Levin describes in the Beinecke's collection catalogue as "one of the greatest collections to come to Yale since the year of its founding." In 1986 Koch funded the full reconstruction of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan Theatre in England, from its 1879 remains. In 1990, according to the New York Times, the Frederick Koch Foundation auctioned at Christie's the original manuscript of Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh, along with 150 other books and manuscripts by Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham, A.A. Milne, and others. The Waugh manuscript was said to be the last manuscript by the writer still in private hands. Koch also owns among his private collections the archival estate of George Platt Lynes and a vast archive of society photographer Jerome Zerbe.


Villa Torre Clementina

Since the 1980s, Mr. Koch has bought, restored and maintained a number of historic properties in the United States of America and abroad, including a Woolworth mansion in Manhattan; the Habsburg hunting lodge, Schloss Blühnbach (near Salzburg), the Romanesque Villa Torre Clementina in Cap Martin, France and Elm Court, a Tudor Gothic manse in Butler, Pennsylvania. In 2005 Koch sold Sutton Place near Guildford (Surrey, England), the former residence of J. Paul Getty and the legendary meeting place of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn (purchased from another art collector, Stanley Seeger) which Koch restored and operated as the Sutton Place Foundation, open to the public, for more than 25 years.


Elm Court, Butler,Pennsylvania.

Public records confirm Koch's extensive property ownership: in Manhattan at 825 Fifth Avenue and 6 East 80th Street, a grand townhouse commissioned by Frank W. Woolworth as a wedding gift to his daughter, Jessie Woolworth Donohue, and designed by C.P.H. Gilbert; a sprawling mansion in Butler, Pennsylvania north of Pittsburgh, called "Elm Court"; the stunning "Villa Torre Clementina" facing the French riviera just outside Monaco; and, "Schloss Bluhnbach", a 70,000 square foot castle near Salzburg which was the summer residence of Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand until his death at Sarajevo which triggered the start of WWI.



Unlike his three brothers, who are fairly well known for their business, philanthropic, political and sports endeavours, little is known about the apparently more reticent older Koch brother, Frederick R. Koch, Jr., who was named after his father, Fred C. Koch. In addition to his various collections of houses, art, photography, books and manuscripts, Koch is known as an avid theatre and opera lover who is spotted regularly in front rows of New York and London theaters, frequently with long-time companion, John Olsen, a former advertising executive for Ralph Lauren.


Schloss Blühnbach, Salzburg the former Krupp Family Estate where Gustav Krupp died

Koch served for many years on the boards of directors of the Spoleto Festival and The Royal Shakespeare Company, and remains an active, long-serving board member of the Metropolitan Opera and the Film Society at Lincoln Centre.


Frederick R. Koch


Woolworth Mansion, New York City

His brothers, Charles G. Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer, and David H. Koch, executive vice president, are principal owners of the company. Charles and David Koch each own 42% of Koch Industries, and Charles has stated that the company will publicly offer shares "literally over my dead body". From 2005 to 2008, Koch industries donated $5.7 million on political campaigns and $37 million on direct lobbying to support fossil fuel industries. Greenpeace says that Koch Industries donated nearly $48m to climate opposition groups between 1997-2008. According to Greenpeace, Koch Industries is the major source of funds of what Greenpeace calls "climate denial". Koch Industries and its subsidiaries spent more than $20 million on lobbying in 2008 and $12.3 million in 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group.

The four Koch brothers have a history of conflict and dissension resulting in spectacular court battles. CNN news tells the story here of how money does not buy you happiness;

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1997/02/17/222188/index.html

The dispute over the value of Koch Industries at the time of buyout was settled in 2001 with Bill and Frederick Koch receiving a joint payout of $1.5 Billion in addition to the initial payout of $430 million dollars Fred Koch was estimated to have received in 1982. At the time of the payout Frederick Koch was resident in Monaco which doesn't have Capital Gains or indeed any personal taxes. Taxes in the immortal words of Leona Helmsley are obviously for the little people?




Frederick Koch & Vilma Soler at a society event in Washington D.C.

In 1925, Fred C. Koch joined an MIT classmate Lewis E. Winkler at an engineering firm in Wichita, Kansas, which was renamed the Winkler-Koch Engineering Company. In 1927 they developed a more efficient thermal cracking process for turning crude oil into gasoline. This process threatened the competitive advantage of established oil companies, which sued for patent infringement. Temporarily forced out of business in the United States, they turned to other markets, including the Soviet Union, where Winkler-Koch built 15 cracking units between 1929 and 1932. During this time, Koch came to despise communism and Josef Stalin's regime. In his 1960 book, A Business Man Looks at Communism, Koch wrote that he found the Soviet Union to be "a land of hunger, misery, and terror." According to Charles Koch, "Virtually every engineer he worked with was purged." According to Jane Mayer's article in The New Yorker, Koch "wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini's suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. He and his wife Mary were associated with and founder members of the stridently right wing John Birch Society.



Roquebrune Cap Martin is situated 2 kilometres from Menton and Monte Carlo, this seaside resort rises to 300m. altitude starting at the water's edge and going all the way up to its perched village. The luxury of the villas, some of which resemble palaces remind us that here, in Roquebrune, statesmen, royalty, writers, and artists all came looking for inspiration and rest: Winston Churchill, Coco Chanel, Sacha Guitry, Jacques Brel, Silvana Mangano et al. Today the atmosphere is more Euro trash with Russian Oligarski and good time girls from Kiev and Wolverhampton on the make or as Somerset Maugham tellingly remarked about neighbouring Monte Carlo “A sunny place for shady people” ! However the fabled part of the Riviera between Monaco and the Italian border is still a place of some allure with its clement micro climate, alluring coastline and vistas and the historic towns of Menton, Eze, Roquebrune and Cap-Martin with their dramatic backdrop of the Alpes-Maritimes contrasted by the azure sea which gives the coast its name. No doubt like Ernesta Stern and her Villa Torre Clementina it will continue to attract the rich and famous (and their hired help) and be a place apart into the 21st Century.




See also;

E-1027 Roquebrune Cap Martin

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/09/e-1027-roquebrune-cap-martin.html

W B Yeats

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/04/w-b-yeats.html





For more on Architecture and Design see ArchiBlogs in the Blog sidebar>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.

W B Yeats

W.B. Yeats

One of the "advantages" of being a native Dubliner is that you hail from the city which gave the world the largest number of Nobel Laureates for Literature in the 20th Century. Make a note, not Paris, not London, not New York but the small city known as Dear Old Dirty Dublin had no less than four! Surprisingly that elite group does not include Oscar Wilde or James Joyce but WB Yeats (1923), George Bernard Shaw (1925), Samuel Beckett (1969) and Seamus Heaney (1995). The popularity and enduring appeal of the poetry of William Butler Yeats was brought home to me recently by the reaction I got on Facebook and Twitter when I featured some excerpts. It is clear his phrases, insights and lyricism still endure and resonate in the modern world.



William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin. His father was a lawyer and a well-known portrait painter. Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but he spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family's summer house at Connaught. The young Yeats was very much part of the fin de siècle in London; at the same time he was active in societies that attempted an Irish literary revival. His first volume of verse appeared in 1887, but in his earlier period his dramatic production outweighed his poetry both in bulk and in import. Together with Lady Gregory he founded the Irish Theatre, which was to become the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge. His plays usually treat Irish legends; they also reflect his fascination with mysticism and spiritualism. The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The King's Threshold (1904), and Deirdre (1907) are among the best known.



Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body's laid asleep.
For the elemental creatures go
About my table to and fro,
That hurry from unmeasured mind
To rant and rage in flood and wind;

WB Yeats – To Ireland in the Coming Times (1893)



After 1910, Yeats's dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and esoteric style. His later plays were written for small audiences; they experiment with masks, dance, and music, and were profoundly influenced by the Japanese Noh plays. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize. Whereas he received the Prize chiefly for his dramatic works, his significance today rests on his lyric achievement. His poetry, especially the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life (the symbol of the winding stairs), and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life.



William Butler Yeats was the eldest in a family “that had once had money, social influence and a history in Ireland.” By the 1860s, the family had only the history left. Yeats’s life coincided almost exactly with the decline of his class, as “a sense of cultural and social marginalization and insecurity haunted the Irish Protestant universe” from the 1860s on. “The new world of self-confident Catholic democracy” was taking over of Irish public life and redefining “Irishness.” As his sister Lily remarked with some bitterness some years after independence, “We are far more Irish than all the Saints and Martys – Parnell – Pearse – Madam Markiewicz – Maud Gonne – De Valera – and no one ever thinks of speaking of them as Anglo-Irish.”

The decline of the Irish Protestant universe was complicated, for Yeats, by his father’s preference for the bohemian life of an artist over the respectable career in law he had qualified for at Trinity College Dublin. For much of Yeats’s childhood – spent in Sligo, in London, and in Dublin – there was scarcely enough money for food and clothing, let alone money to pay for a good education; he speaks of having felt humiliated and of his youth as “a truly dreadful time.” His post-secondary schooling consisted of an undistinguished art school he abandoned when he was 20.



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.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

WB Yeats - The Song of Wandering Aengus

HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W.B. Yeats - He Wishes for The Cloths of Heaven

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her did not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

WB Yeats – Down by the Salley gardens.

Yeats was interested in folktales as a part of an exploration of national heritage and for the revival of Celtic identity. His study with George Russell and Douglas Hyde of Irish legends and tales was published in 1888 under the title Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. Yeats assembled for children a less detailed version, Irish Fairy Tales, which appeared in 1892. The Wanderings Of Oisin And Other Poems (1889), took its subject from Irish mythology.



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".

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save;
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

WB Yeats - September 1913

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being as she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

WB Yeats – No Second Troy

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.

WB Yeats - An Irish Airman foresees his death




The site of the demolished Coole House

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.

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way -- the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire. a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy –

WB Yeats – Among School Children

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--- Those dying generations --- at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

WB Yeats - Sailing to Byzantium

Round Lough Derg's holy island I went upon the stones,
I prayed at all the Stations upon my marrow-bones,
And there I found an old man, and though I prayed all day
And that old man beside me, nothing would he say
But fol de rol de rolly O.

WB Yeats - The Pilgrim

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.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/09/coole-park-galway.html

I HAVE heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods
Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees
Hum in the lime-tree flowers; and put away
The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness
That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile
Tara uprooted, and new commonness
Upon the throne and crying about the streets
And hanging its paper flowers from post to post,
Because it is alone of all things happy.
I am contented, for I know that Quiet
Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart
Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer,
Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs
A cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-lee.

WB Yeats - In the Seven Woods, 1904


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


The woods at Coole

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.


Thoor Ballylee

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory's wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind.
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.
I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,

WB Yeats – A Prayer for my Daughter


W.B. Yeats with his daughters

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.

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.

WB Yeats - A Dialogue Of Self And Soul



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.”

The Wild Swans at Coole




Wild Swans at Coole Lake

I bring you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams,
White woman that passion has worn
As the tide wears the dove-grey sands,
And with heart more old than the horn
That is brimmed from the pale fire of time:
White woman with numberless dreams,
I bring you my passionate rhyme.

WB Yeats - A Poet to His Beloved

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

WB Yeats - The Second Coming



“The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos,
both Beautiful, one a gazelle.”

William Butler Yeats' - In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz





Lissadell House, Co. Sligo



The remarkable story of Constance Gore-Booth, the first women MP and government minister.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/10/first-female-member-of-parliament.html

“That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?”

“Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.”

WB Yeats – Easter 1916



I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree - WB Yeats



Yeats made these recordings for the wireless in 1932, 1934 and the last on 28 October 1937 when he was 72. He died on January 28 1939. The photograph shows him sitting before the microphone in 1937.

A bloody and a sudden end,
Gunshot or a noose,
For Death who takes what man would keep,
Leaves what man would lose,
He might have had my sister,
My cousins by the score,
But nothing satisfied the fool
But my dear Mary Moore,
None other knows what pleasures man
At table or in bed.
What shall I do for pretty girls
Now my old bawd is dead?

WB Yeats - John Kinsella's Lament for Mrs Mary Moore.

WINE comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

W.B. Yeats - A Drinking Song

A poem often associated with the not entirely unrequited love between Yeats and Maud Gonne. One of the great unrequited (almost) love stories in literature is of the poet William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne McBride. In 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, then a 23-year-old heiress and ardent Nationalist. Gonne was eighteen months younger than Yeats and later claimed she met the poet as a "paint-stained art student." Gonne had admired "The Isle of Statues" and sought out his acquaintance. Yeats developed an obsessive infatuation with her beauty and outspoken manner, and she was to have a significant and lasting effect on his poetry and his life thereafter.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/12/love-song.html


Maud Gonne

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

When you are old - WB Yeats

Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Suppression of breath
He knows death to the bone --
Man has created death.;

WB Yeats - Death

Where Yeats died and was originally buried;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/09/e-1027-roquebrune-cap-martin.html


Drumcliffe Church

Yeats died on January 28, 1939 at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France 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, where Yeats’s great-grandfather was the Church of Ireland Rector for more than 30 years in the early 19th century. Here Yeats is buried under a gravestone inscribed with one of his last poems, “Under Ben Bulben": In this poem Yeats outlined how and where he was to be buried and even included the epitaph he wanted inscribed on his gravestone:







V
Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers' randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.

VI
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 Yeats see the online exhibition from the National Library of Ireland.

http://www.nli.ie/yeats/


Ben Bulben, Co. Sligo

Urbi et Orbi

The Sage worse for wear after the festivities

Not having a balcony or an adjacent St. Peter's Piazza I am delivering my MMX New Year Greetings on the Blogosphere this year.

A year's end (marked this year by a Blue Moon) is a bit like an Irish Alcoholic drowning in a vat of Guinness, it dies with mixed feelings. We take stock of what has been lost, what has been gained, what almost happened and what almost didn't happen.

So I look forward to 2010 and thank you for being there, go boldly forth and live long and prosper.

Or as my fav. poet once said;

Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.

William Butler Yeats
The Municipal Gallery Re-visited

Best wishes to you and yours for 2010.

Athbhliain faoi Mhaise Duit.

Bonne année.

Shana Tova.

عام سعيد

Felix sit annus novus.


Murty the Moose joins in these New Year Greetings!

See also;

A love song

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/12/love-song.html

Where Yeats died and was originally buried;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/09/e-1027-roquebrune-cap-martin.html

Where he was inspired and nurtured;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/09/coole-park-galway.html

A Love Song

W.B. Yeats

One of the great unrequited (almost) love stories in literature is of the poet William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne McBride. In 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, then a 23-year-old heiress and ardent Nationalist. Gonne was eighteen months younger than Yeats and later claimed she met the poet as a "paint-stained art student." Gonne had admired "The Isle of Statues" and sought out his acquaintance. Yeats developed an obsessive infatuation with her beauty and outspoken manner, and she was to have a significant and lasting effect on his poetry and his life thereafter. She eventually rejected him and married Major John McBride a hero (to the Boers) of the Boer War and who was executed in 1916 for his part in the Easter Rising against English Rule in Dublin.

Their son, Seán McBride, who grew up in France and retained a French accent to the end of his life was variously IRA Chief of Staff, Foreign Minister of Ireland, Founder Member of the Council of Europe, Founder member of Amnesty International, Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and at the time of his death the only holder of both the Nobel and Lenin Peace Prizes. An even rarer achievement was that his Special Branch file was opened before he was born!

The joke about Yeats and Maud Gonne (best recited in an Irish accent) was that " the poor fellow has gone maadd over Maud Gonne!"

A Drinking Song

WINE comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939).

Responsibilities and Other Poems. 1916.

See also;

Where Yeats died and was originally buried;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/09/e-1027-roquebrune-cap-martin.html

Where he was inspired and nurtured;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/09/coole-park-galway.html


Maud Gonne

Coole Park, Galway

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