Yeats 150: Church of Ireland Archives Record Key Events of the Poet’s Life
Yeats 2015 is a year–long event to celebrate nationally and internationally the life and work of William Butler Yeats, who was born 150 years ago on 13 June 1865.
Entering into the spirit of this particular commemoration, the RCB Library in Dublin, which is the main record repository of the Church of Ireland, presents online significant evidence of the poet’s life and connection with places in Ireland (his baptism and burial) that may not have been viewed by the public before as June’s Archive of the Month.
Both Yeats’ baptism in Donnybrook parish church, Dublin, a month after his birth, on 12 July 1865, and the re–interment of his remains at the graveyard in Drumcliffe, County Sligo, on 17 September 1948 (which took place some nine years after his death at Menton, France, on 28 January 1939) are underpinned by his Church of Ireland identity.
William Butler Yeats was born into an extraordinarily talented artistic family: his father John Butler Yeats, a lawyer by profession, but whose real interest was the arts, gave up the law soon after being called to the bar in Dublin to devote himself to artistic studies, becoming a renowned portraitist. Yeats’s sisters Susan (Lily), born in 1866, and Elizabeth (Lolly), born in 1868, would become innovative craft–workers and printers, while his brother Jack born in 1871 became one of Ireland’s most celebrated painters. Their mother Sarah Pollexfen was from the well–established business family of Pollexfens and Middletons in Sligo, who married John Butler Yeats on 10 September 1863 in St John’s parish church, Sligo. The family would move between Dublin, London and Sligo while Yeats was growing up but it was in Sligo where Yeats and his siblings would spend much of their youth and which he regarded as his spiritual home.
It was here in the little parish churchyard at Drumcliffe (where Yeats’ paternal great–grandfather, Revd John Yeats had been rector between 1811 and 1846) that the poet was finally laid to rest in September 1948. In the latter years of his life Yeats and his wife spent a good deal of time in the south of France, where he died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, on 28 January 1939. It had been his express wish that should he die in France, he was to be buried quickly (and temporarily) with a minimum of fuss, having advised his wife: “If I die here bury me up there (at Roquebrune) and then in a year’s time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo”.
After a protracted period of almost a decade, complicated by the intervention of the Second World War, and in accordance with his wishes, Yeats’ body was finally returned to Ireland and his spiritual home in Sligo. On 17 September 1948, a simple Church of Ireland burial service conducted by the then rector of the parish, the Revd James Wilson, and assisted by the bishop of Kilmore, Elphin and Ardagh, the Rt Revd Albert Hughes, was attended by hundreds of people from all walks of life, as well as his family. The record of burial was subsequently entered onto the parish burial register.
The RCB Library’s online exhibition will feature the baptismal and burial entries, together with other illustrative material documenting his Church of Ireland roots.