BEN BULBEN

“That pale, long-visaged company That air in immortality Completeness of their passions won: Now they ride the wintry dawn Where Ben Bulben sets the scene. Here’s the gist of what they mean.”
Under Ben Bulben, WB Yeats, 1938

HE OLD MAGE Yeats is for me and a myriad others the finest and most musical of late-nineteenth and first-half-of-the-twentieth-Century English-language poets. He may (more on this anon) lie buried in Drumcliff churchyard midway between “bare Ben Bulben’s head” and the farthest Rosses, which latter flicker magically throughout his early Symbolist verse. Every admirer of the fascistic old snob (and I’m wholeheartedly