It was a fine celebration. He had told us that ‘dizzy dreams can spring from the dry bones of the dead,’ but we were not in the mood to speculate thus with him last Friday. There was too much going on; the day was crowded, and sometimes even clangorous with public and private pride. And it was both right and easy that the mood of the occasion was a smiling one; right, because Ireland’s very great son, her immortal, the great poet in English since Wordsworth, was by his own wish coming home from wide and various wanderings—home at last from the French Mediterranean shore—to take up his perpetual rest, completing the bright ring of the poetic life, under the grey hills of his childhood—a conclusive, right event which must lift the dullest spirit; and easy, it was easy to enjoy and savour it, because one knew that nine years would have done their natural work in the hearts that had loved the man, and because our sense of the world’s loss of the poet has been tempered and even removed by increasing awareness of all that it gained through his life.
So Friday was something of a festival, and if that word has a free-and-easy ring, so much the better … What we did get—the important thing—was a shining Galway morning, a lovely light outlining the noble town and the graceful ship with the still figures on its deck—the port’s wife, his son, his daughter, his famous, white-haired brother—and a communcal mood of welcome and gratitude as the great tall coffin came at last to land. …
Thoughts ran inevitably on greatness, and most of that lively company of Yeats’s mourners were surely thinking without a grudge of what a glorious fate it is, when the earthly end has come, to have been a great poet. ‘The years like great black oxen tread the world,’ but the poet escapes from them, taking on immortality; and that day in Sligo we enjoyed vicariously his high fortune, and were glad to know that his dreaming bones were home and safe in Drumcliffe. It had indeed been an exhilarating thing to travel the last bit of the road with him, the road that all his life he had resolved to tread.
—Kate O’Brien, “Yeats Comes Home,” writing for the Spectator
Transcribed by me from pages 81–84 of Great Irish Reportage, John Horgan, ed., © 2013, Penguin Ireland.
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