S2 Ep7: D2 YC Yeats's Grave

Location: Yeat's Grave, DrumcliffeYeats's grave is marked in front of you with Ben Bulben visible through the cemetery trees. If the church is open, ensure you pay it a visit. If the excellent booklet by Derick Bingham entitled 'The Eye of the Heart' is still in print, it's well worth a read.The resting place of Ireland's greatest poet, William Butler Yeats, is as near perfect a location as you'd expect for such an evocative wordsmith. In the final two stanzas of Under Ben Bulben, Yeats declared: - Irish poets, learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds. Sing the peasantry, and then Hard-riding country gentlemen, The holiness of monks, and after Porter-drinkers' randy laughter; Sing the lords and ladies gay That were beaten into clay Through seven heroic centuries; Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be Still the indomitable Irishry. 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! DIRECTIONS: We'll be turning left on to the N15 coming out of the car park and heading towards Rosses' Point via Rathcormack village.