Free The Second Mister by Paddy FitzGibbon Page B

but nonetheless managed to encumber the World with The Man who dreamed of Faeryland and the unspeakable tale of the doddery old priest Peter Gilligan.
    As late as 1903 in Baile And Ailinn he could still fall prey to the well known, and usually fatal, poetic tendency to surrender all judgement, and abandon all taste, for the sake of a good noise.
    Listen to this:
“ They know all wonders, for they pass
The towery gates of Gorias,
And Findrias and Falias,
And long-forgotten Murias .”
    I do not suppose that modern science has yet extended the study of genetics to early twentieth century or medieval verse, but those lines of Yeats must have something in common with the following piece which has been battering the brain of man for half a millenium:
“ Aoibhinn bheith I mBinn Éadair,
Firbhinn bheith ós a bánmhuir,
Cnoc lánmhar, longmhar, líonmhar,
Beann fhíonmhar, fhonnmhar, ághmhar”.
    These last two lines have always sounded to me like six fully armoured medieval knights falling off their horses in quick succession.
    Then suddenly, around 1911, the poetry changes radically. It is said that the change occurred as a result of certain events in the poet’s love life, or the lack thereof. Gone are the hosts riding from Knocknarea, and Caoilte is no longer tossing his burning hair. Now Yeats has a colder but even more intense engagement with reality.
    The man who once had dreamed of faeries at the fair of Dromahair had come a long way when he wrote in September 1913 :
“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.”
    He never looked back after that and went on to pen some of the most powerful and moving poetry ever written: The Wild Swans at Coole, Colonos’ Praise, The Tower, the two Byzantiums…the list goes on and on.
    So, what is to be said of the occasional howler to be found in his earlier work? Very little, in fact. Every writer takes a tumble from time to time (even James Joyce, perhaps the most careful writer of all). I think it is very much to Yeats’ credit that he managed to cast off the baggage of Faeryland and angelical beings. His closeness to the reality of his historical situation enabled him to create phrases that so accurately reflected his times that they became clichés ( “… the best lack all conviction ,” or “…A terrible beauty is born “).
    I have been reading Yeats for over 50 years. Yes, he was one of the World’s greatest poets. Yes, his works are one of civilisation’s finest adornments.
    I still have no idea as to what can have made that wretched fowl flutter so.

A MAIDEN…

A N EPILOGUE TO
PATRICK KAVANAGH'S POEM
“ THE GREAT HUNGER ”

A LL POWER TO CROMWELL

O LYMPIC IDYLLS

M Y WILL

P AY HEED…

D ISCIPLINE

P LATYPUS

W ISDOM

C ARA MÓR *
    D uring the distant days of my brathood, I greatly admired the songs of Elvis Aaron Presley. Elvis was born on the 8 th of January 1935, several years after Kruger Kavanagh had returned to Dunquin from his American exile. Is there a connection between these two great men ? Yes, but only a very minor one, as I will presently demonstrate.
    Kruger emigrated firstly to Springfield, Massachusetts, I think shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. During his time abroad, according to his own telling, he got to know everyone of importance in the U.S., but scarcely anyone else. He had some connection with a theatre company in New York and is believed to have at least visited Hollywood. These facts provided him with an impressive corpus of reminiscences which he made good use of after his return home in the late Twenties.
    He established a guest house in Dunquin where for forty or fifty years he played host to the great, the good and the not so good. As one of the latter, I first stayed with him in June 1961. On my second evening there, a Rolls Royce came over the hill from the direction of