The Municipal Gallery Revisited

William Butler Yeats

I

Around me the images of thirty years:

An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side;

Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars,

Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride;

Kevin O'Higgins' countenance that wears

A gentle questioning look that cannot hide

A soul incapable of remorse or rest;

A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed;

II

An Abbot or Archbishop with an upraised hand

Blessing the Tricolour. 'This is not,' I say,

'The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland

The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.'

Before a woman's portrait suddenly I stand,

Beautiful and gentle in her Venetian way.

I met her all but fifty years ago

For twenty minutes in some studio.

III

Heart-smitten with emotion I Sink down,

My heart recovering with covered eyes;

Wherever I had looked I had looked upon

My permanent or impermanent images:

Augusta Gregory's son; her sister's son,

Hugh Lane, 'onlie begetter' of all these;

Hazel Lavery living and dying, that tale

As though some ballad-singer had sung it all;

IV

Mancini's portrait of Augusta Gregory,

'Greatest since Rembrandt,' according to John Synge;

A great ebullient portrait certainly;

But where is the brush that could show anything

Of all that pride and that humility?

And I am in despair that time may bring

Approved patterns of women or of men

But not that selfsame excellence again.

V

My mediaeval knees lack health until they bend,

But in that woman, in that household where

Honour had lived so long, all lacking found.

Childless I thought, 'My children may find here

Deep-rooted things,' but never foresaw its end,

And now that end has come I have not wept;

No fox can foul the lair the badger swept --

VI

(An image out of Spenser and the common tongue).

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought

All that we did, all that we said or sang

Must come from contact with the soil, from that

Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

We three alone in modern times had brought

Everything down to that sole test again,

Dream of the noble and the beggar-man.

VII

And here's John Synge himself, that rooted man,

'Forgetting human words,' a grave deep face.

You that would judge me, do not judge alone

This book or that, come to this hallowed place

Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon;

Ireland's history in their lineaments trace;

Think where man's glory most begins and ends,

And say my glory was I had such friends.