"He disappeared in the dead of winter," wrote a meteorologically inspired Auden when he heard Yeats was dead:
The brooks were frozen,
the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree,
The day of his death was a dark
cold day.
The day in question was 60 years ago today, January 28th, 1939. William Butler Yeats had been born in Dublin 74 years previously, in 1865, but was mainly associated, as we know, with Sligo, where as a child he had holidays with his maternal grandparents.
We remember him, too, for his passionate and unrequited love for the beautiful Maud Gonne, who visited the Yeatses' home in London in 1889, and whose presence was to haunt the poet and his poetry for the rest of his life.
Unlike many more romantic poets, Yeats was not particularly strong on meteorology. But here and there he mentions the weather almost incidentally. He captures well, for example, the popular fancy that the weather seems always to have been better in the days when we were young; the Old Fisherman recalls that
. . . the Junes were warmer than these are,
The waves were more gay,
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.
In The Unappeasable Host, Yeats becomes more meteorologically excited, and perhaps more empathetic for those of us familiar with the weather of the west. He writes of
Desolate winds that cry
over the wandering sea;
Desolate winds that hover in the flaming West;
Desolate winds that beat the doors of Heaven, and beat
The doors of Hell, and blow there many a whimpering ghost.
Equally passionate is Red Hanrahan's Song About Ireland, which brings back adolescent memories for most of us:
The wind has bundled up
the clouds, high over Knocknarea,
And thrown the thunder on
the stones for all that Maeve can say.
Angers that are like noisy clouds have set our hearts abeat.
The laureate is at his most gentle and meteorologically lyrical, however, in his masterpiece, The Wild Swans at Coole:
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry;
Under the October twilight,
the water
Mirrors a still sky.
But "So what?" you may well say, and you may think again of Auden:
Ireland has her madness
and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen.