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p. 216, ‘The Three Hermits’ dc: 5 March 1913 fp: TSS, Sept. 1913 Pass the Door of Birth again: the poem presents different views about reincarnation (notably in ll. 22–8), which Yeats would have met in A. P. Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism (1915), 205–6, and in
H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled (1900), I, 179
p. 217, ‘Running to Paradise’ dc: 20 Sept. 1913 fp: P(Ch), May 1914 Windy Gap: possibly the one in Co. Sligo opposite Carraroe Church or the valley among hills south of Galway Bay (see Glossary). See W. B. Yeats, The Speckled Bird: with variant Versions, ed. William H. O’Donnell (1977), 41; cf. also M, 243. Sheila O’Sullivan (YUIT, 276) thinks that the poem continues the theme of ‘The Happy Townland’, p. 137, the two opening lines echoing a popular riddle: ‘As I was going through Slippery Gap/I met a little man with a red cap’ running to Paradise: possibly from
Lady Gregory, A Book of Saints and Wonders (1906), which gives a version of a tale from The Book of Leinster (tr. Whitley Stokes in Anecdota Oxoniensis, Lives of the Saints from the Book of Lismore (1890), 194) about St Brigit, who sees Nindid the scholar running past her; he tells her he is going to Heaven. See YUIT, 277 And there the king… beggar. the refrain may come, Sheila O’Sullivan suggests (YUIT, 277), from Lady Gregory’s translation (Kiltartan Poetry Book (1918), 57–8) of Douglas Hyde’s poem ‘He meditates on the Life of a Rich Man’: ‘A golden cradle under you… means herds and flocks… at the end of your days death… what one better after tonight than Ned the beggar or Seaghan the fool?’ skelping: beating a bare heel: as a young man in London Yeats inked his heels so that the holes in his socks would not be noticeable; here, however, a clever but poor (barefoot) child is probably indicated, seen to grow dull when wealth (‘an old sock full [of money]’) has been achieved
p. 218, ‘The Hour before Dawn’ dc: 19 Oct. 1913 fp: RPP Cruachan: the capital of Connacht (Connaught) in Co. Roscommon. See notes on The Old Age of Queen Maeve, p. 523 Maeve’s nine Maines: Queen of Connaught, she had nine sons, the Maines, by Ailill (see 1. 36). In tradition there were seven or eight sons Hell Mouth: the Cave of Cruachan, known as the Hell Gate of Ireland Goban’s mountain-top: see notes on ‘The Grey Rock’, p. 541 Midsummer Day: 24 June, the Feast of John the Baptist It’s plain… shift a point: Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1941), 113, thought these lines echoed the tramp’s speech in Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen: We’ll be going now, I’m telling you, and the time you’ll be feeling the cold, and the frost, and the great rain and the sun again, and the south wind blowing in the glens, you’ll not be sitting up in a wet ditch, the way you’re after sitting in this place making yourself old with looking on each day, and it passing you by. You’ll be saying one time, it’s a good evening, by the grace of God,’ and another time ‘It’s a wild night, God help us; but it’ll pass surely’
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© 1996 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Jeffares, A.N. (1996). Responsibilities 1914. In: Jeffares, A.N. (eds) Yeats’s Poems. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26155-0_10
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