37 Cows in the Library
Posted by Christine on Mar 2, 2015 in Ireland | 3 comments Those are Yeatsian cows in the picture above. They graze on the plain “Under Ben Bulben,” the same plain where St. Columba fought “the Battle of the Book,” on the other side of the stone wall from Drumcliff Churchyard, where the poet William Butler Yeats is buried (see “33 Under Ben Bulben”). On a brilliant sunny day last August, I found them there unwittingly adding to the peacefulness of the scene. When cows are not grazing, they do something else that’s important to their health and digestion: they chew their cud; they ruminate. From Merriam Webster online… Ruminate transitive verb 1: to go over in the mind repeatedly and often casually or slowly 2: to chew repeatedly for an extended period intransitive verb 1: to chew again what has been chewed slightly and swallowed: chew the cud2: to engage in contemplation The other day at a lecture on Yeats and the National Library of Ireland, I heard a fascinating story about him, one he recounts in the 1933 preface to Letters to the New Island, a collection of essays on literary and cultural themes first published in 1933. The “New Island” is, of course, Ireland in the post-independence, post-partition, post-trauma era. Yeats remembers sitting in the reading room of the National Library—the same one on Kildare Street where I go to do research and to read—in the 1890s when he was twenty-six or -seven, day-dreaming over a book, when “some old man, a stranger to me” said to him, probably in a stern and peeved tone, “’I have watched you for the past half hour and you have neither made a note nor read a word.’” As Yeats explains, the old man “had mistaken…me for some ne’er-do-weel student.” Though the young and ostensibly idle Yeats was not yet the Nobel Prize winning poet of world renown, he was already writing, publishing, and editing poetry. Poems such as “The Lake Isle of Inisfree,” “The Stolen Child,” and “Down By The Salley Gardens” and many others had come out in magazines and in books by this time. At the moment when the old man called him out, he was working on editing a volume of William Blake’s poetry for publication. Whatever Yeats’s distraction from a more visibly “appropriate” library task, there are critics and biographers even now who would love to know the substance and range of his thoughts as he sat there in the gloriously elegant...read more