Sir, – With due respect to Diarmuid Ferriter (“Dublin Marathon misattributing a quote to Yeats makes a mockery of him and his Nobel Prize”, Opinion & Analysis, September 15th), the Yeats quotation most appropriate to long-distance runners may be the following, from The Countess Cathleen:
“The years, like great black oxen, tread the world,
And God the huntsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet ...” – Yours, etc,
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CIAN O hEIGEARTAIGH,
Dublin 6.
Sir, – It appears that a terrible medal has been forged. – Yours, etc,
JOHN MORRIS,
Greystones,
Co Wicklow.
Sir, – Someone from Dublin Marathon incorrectly attributed a quotation to Yeats and it appeared on a medal. Diarmaid Ferriter describes an unremarkable mistake (people misquote others all the time, and in all sorts of ways) as a “travesty.” That many people do not take this slight incident as monumentally seriously as he seems to is not, as he suggests, a “worrying reminder about contemporary casualness about truth, evidence and accuracy”. Instead, it indicates that some of us retain a sense of proportion, something not easy to do in the social media age, and do not come to literature or writing as if to some quasi-religious devotional shrine. – Yours, etc,
ANDREW QUINN,
Dublin 13.
Sir, – Diarmaid Ferriter dislikes the fake quote attributed to WB Yeats that will be on the 2023 Dublin Marathon medal. I wholeheartedly agree with him.
There were multiple other Yeats quotes about running – real quotes – that would have caught the essence of the writer and worked just fine. The opening of his 1932 poem, Vacillation, would have been good: “Between extremities/Man runs his course”. Even better, “For I am running to Paradise”, from his 1914 poem, Running to Paradise, a statement that critic ML Rosenthal saw as the definition of Yeats’s poetic art. – Yours, etc,
DENIS COTTER,
Middleburg,
Virginia, US.
Sir, – “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race” (2 Timothy 4:7, New International Version). – Yours, etc,
MARY RYAN,
Dublin 8.
