Manuscript info, links

A microfilm of the manuscript for the poem, along with others, is here. Unfortunately, there's no electronic version of it available yet, but maybe in a couple of years, depending on whether Google Print carries on with its efforts after the NYPL project. You'd think it would be easy enough to enable web access to these things, after it was scanned in...

Also, a pretty good review of 'W. B. YEATS: A Life: Volume II: The Arch-Poet, 1915–1939', by R. F. Foster is here. Entertaining, at the least. Published in the Hudson Review, which thoughtfully provides full-text versions of most of its contents. The review is nice, but the better parts are at the start, when the author, Brian Phillips, talks about the death and subsequent burials of Yeats.

The epitaph on his headstone? Just as in his death-anticipating poem “Under Ben Bulben”:

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!

Gustave Moreau's unicorns:




From a French site. Showing, I assume, a subtle kind of sexuality associated with the virgins who could tame unicorns. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure that it is all that subtle, but it's certainly romanticised.