Yeats Country

By: Arpita Roy

I arrived first in Dublin and took a train, the very next day, to Sligo. For me, Dublin’s wonders could wait. I was in a hurry to be in Yeats Country. When my flight to Dublin got cancelled two days ago, it seemed to affirm my fears that like a lot of things in my life, this dream, too, would dissolve at the faint sense of touch. But to my surprise, I was soon across the Atlantic, on my way to Sligo. In the train, a three-year old and her mother sat in front of me. We talked for a while about our families. The woman was going to her parent’s house. I studied her careful balance as she pulled out a few books for her child, who had now decided that the train journey needed a colorful distraction. After a while, the books were beginning to lose their fancy. The child asked her mother to turn the pages full of cows, giraffes and lambs. She stopped at the page full of pigs and rubbed her small palm over the gloss. Then, she made a small snorting sound. Her mother and I, encouraging, made similar snorting sounds. Like an echo, the two older men across from us, looked at the child and made snorting sounds. Amused, she looked at each of us and at the book. Outside the window, the landscape was lush green. Rain and sunshine took turns: over and over, they woke up and returned to their slumber.

***

The summer of my eighteenth birthday, I had a major spine surgery and had to learn how to walk again. Because for weeks, I could not stay out of my bed for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch, I did not think I would be able to go to college. Instead, I looked at the sky from the window next to the bed. I read a collection of poems by Yeats. I called my mother to help adjust the pillow under my head. Sometimes, a classmate would visit and tell me about their summer. It was the end of school, and everybody had big plans before college. Those days, I thought often about loneliness. I thought often about solitude. I wanted to do things by myself again – to walk, to wake up, to reach for a book – and I wanted to also walk towards a group of people under a sky, perhaps to ask for a direction or to simply marvel at an image in a book.

Nine years later, I left for Ireland two days after my birthday. At this point I was in the United States, pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing in Poetry. The summer of my second year, the Cheuse Center offered me a fellowship to travel to Ireland. So much of it felt like a dream in the days before I set off for the trip. I asked myself again and again what it was that I wanted from these weeks. I knew I wanted to see what Yeats had seen. I wanted to know an answer to loneliness if it were a question at all. I wanted to know the difference between the moments when I sought to be alone and the moments when I felt the need for company. Somehow, I was convinced that seeking Yeats was going to be instrumental in my reflection.

***

At Sligo, I visited first the ‘hazel wood’ from ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’. I found out that this was a popular walking spot for the residents of the area. In front of me was the Lough Gill where a family of swans rested and swam. My Airbnb host had decided to accompany me on this walk. She asked me more about my poetry. I learnt from her about the many birds that lived in the area and the different ways they weaved their many songs. A few days later, in another Airbnb, I would wake up to a chorus of twelve kinds of birds outside my window and think of her. At hazel wood, I thought I saw a man, who looked eerily like Yeats, walk past me. I immediately understood why the woods and waters here were said to be full of magical creatures.

***

During my visit, I spent a good deal of time at the Yeats Sligo Society. I spent more time taking a bus around Sligo, visiting the many places that Yeats had written about, the many that he had not. I watched a dog eat an ice cream at a beach. I walked a path between grass, so untamed and so tall that its length reached above my waist. I happened to be at a pub that was hosting a bachelorette on one side and a quiz on the other. I spent an extraordinary amount of time by myself looking at the swans under the bridge and pigeons over it. But whenever I wasn’t at a museum or a library, it seemed like I found myself with people, enjoying a conversation, wishing I could be a part of this landscape’s story. An Indian man, slightly younger than me, approached me one day as I watched the swans. He was a nursing student and spent a great deal of time walking these roads when free. He rarely saw someone from back home, he said. He missed his family. We talked for a while. Dating was not going well for him. He would be happy to be matched by his parents. He missed his parents.

***

Once, when I was nineteen and had recently started attending college, I sat with my friends next to a broken bridge in the middle of our university campus. It was a little bit past dusk and the mosquitoes were beginning to be lulled into darkness once again. We went around the circle sharing our different dreams and answering many questions we came up with, allowing each other to see a part of our individual world. If you could only visit one place in the world before you die, what would it be? somebody asked. I answered Ireland. We all make plans while awaiting ruin.

***

The afternoon I stood in the ruins of the medieval abbey at Sligo, I asked myself what it was that I wanted from my life. It was important to ask myself this now that I had spent a decade doing the things that I did not think I would ever be able to do again. When I awaited my surgery, I did not think I would wake up from it. When I woke up, I did not think I would be able to walk again. Looking at death constantly can make one lonely. Seeking solitude is a delicate enterprise. A necessarily prerequisite is to know oneself. To know oneself one must know what they are made of. In the ruins, I saw what the structure was made of. 

Later that day I would visit the grave of Yeats. In his poem ‘Under Ben Bulben’ he had given clear instructions of what was to transpire after his death. And true to his word, he rested next to the church as Ben Bulben stood over him, watching. The ancient cross was on the other side. The poem’s final lines were also going to be, he decided, his epitaph. Here they were, etched on the stone:

Cast a cold eye   
               On life, on death.   
               Horseman, pass by!

***

Arpita Roy is an MFA graduate in Creative Writing Poetry. She completed her BA and MA in English from Jadavpur University. Born in West Bengal, Arpita spent her childhood in various cities in India, though Kolkata occupies a special place in her heart.