irish writer william butler yeats

Though William Butler Yeats was born in a suburban house in Dublin, at 5 Sandymount Avenue, the territory of his childhood was, without a doubt, County Sligo. Emphasizing how much this western seaboard county meant to him he later wrote of it: 'I have walked on Sinband's yellow shore and never shall another's hit my fancy.'

Though his great-grandfather, John Yeats, had introduced a Sligo connection into the family in the early nineteenth century by becoming rector to the parish of Drumcliff, it was through his other's family that the poet really came to know the county. Born Susan Pollexfen she came from an old-established family of ship owners and millrs, none of whom were too pleased when her young husband, John Butler Yeats, gave up his career as a barrister to try and make a living as a painter in London. Certainly the change was hard on Susan who, as often as she could, took her children home to Ireland for holidays on board one of her father's ships, either The Sligo or The Liverpool. Later Yeats was to write: 'In a sense Sligo has always been my home.'

There was always room for the Yeats children at Merville, the grey stone eighteenth-century home of their grandparents, William and Elizabeth Pollexfen, which was set in grounds of sixty acres and had in those days fourteen bedrooms. Today it is a part of the Nazareth home for old people and children.

For a child Merville was a treasure house, filled from top to bottom with exciting things collected by their grandfather in his seafaring days. There were the Chinese pictures on rice paper, the ivory walking stick from India, the coral collection and, above all, the jar of water from the Jordan with which Pollexfen offspring were baptized. The children had a room with four windows, two of which looked out over the stable yard and two over the gardens.

Then out beyond the immediate environs of the house was the larger landscape of Sligo with the hill of Knocknarea on one side and the majestic peak of Ben Bulben across the estuary on the other. Here they breakfasted at 9 am and dined at 4 pm and it was considered self-indulgent to eat anything between meals.