Abstract
Yeats was the nearest thing to an immortal spirit that I have ever met. I have known holy men, saintly according to their religion who were sanctified, but Yeats was enchanted. You felt something not of this earth earthly when you looked at those eyes, whose gleam it was so hard to catch, swiftly-glancing with all the intensity of Eternity. When I saw that noble aquiline face with the nose so broad between the eyes, I thought of his ancestry from Cornwall where the names Yeats, Gates and Keats are originally one and where there is Phoenician blood with all the magic of the men who brought strange knowledge from the bright strands of the East to the Shadowy Waters of the far West—men who gave Merlin to King Mark and Yeats to humanity.
Arrow (Dublin) vi (Summer 1939) 19–20.
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Notes
When Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), the Irish dramatist, was charged with homosexual offences his friends urged him to catch the train for Dover while yet there was time. It has been asserted that the authorities held their hands to give him time to make his exit. It is certainly a fact that not until after the last train had left for Dover was the warrant issued for his apprehension. Wilde, however, would not ‘run away’ and ‘hide’ and ‘let down’ his sureties. He had a fortnight’s freedom between two criminal trials; and being ordered out of each hotel he tried within a few minutes of his arrival, he went to stay with his mother in Chelsea. Hesketh Pearson in The Life of Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen, 1946) p. 306 says that ‘W. B. Yeats called at the house in Oakley Street one day with letters of sympathy from people in Ireland.’.
See also M. Montgomery Hyde, ed., The Trials of Oscar Wilde (London: William Hodge, 1948) pp. 77–81.
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© 1977 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Gogarty, O.S.J. (1977). Impressions. In: Mikhail, E.H. (eds) W. B. Yeats. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02995-2_16
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