Yeats Trail 04: Lissadell

Lissadell House was built in the 1830s and was the home of the Gore-Booth family. During the Famine 1845-’49 Sir Robert Gore-Booth, 4th baronet, the original owner, provided food for starving tenants.

His grandson, Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth, 6th baronet (brother of Constance and Eva) also sought to provide for his tenants, supporting the growth of the cooperative movement and of local businesses. Their mother Lady Georgina Gore-Booth helped provide employment for local women to support their families through needlework and sewing products. This supportive and cooperative tradition was passed on to her daughters Eva and Constance, who themselves would become advocates of political and social justice.

W.B. Yeats visited Lissadell in the Winter of 1894, for a few days in both November and December, at the invitation of the family, who were impressed by his early work as a poet. There is also a suggestion that he may have visited Lissadell as a child when horse riding and cricket matches took place there.

During his visits he befriended Eva and Constance and he came to admire both, initially for their bravery and skills of horsemanship, and later for the remarkable impact both had on the political and social upheaval of the early 20th century.

Constance (Countess Markievicz) was a founding member of Fianna na hÉireann, a boy scout movement with republican aims. Later, she became a dedicated revolutionary figure and a leader of the Irish Rising in 1916. After the Rising, she was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. While still in prison, she became the first female Member of Parliament, although she refused to take her seat in accordance with Sinn Féin’s abstentionist policy. When the first Irish Parliament was formed, she became Minister for Labour, one of the first women anywhere in the world to do so.

Eva was the younger of the two sisters and was described as the ‘gazelle’ in the poem below. She was a poet and artist and Yeats encouraged her to write, telling her that ‘whenever the feeling is weightiest you are at your best’. Her first book of poetry was published in 1898 and many of her drawings, as well as her poetry, can be seen at Lissadell House.

She devoted much of her adult life to fighting social injustices for working women, first in Drumcliffe – where her encouragement of suffrage rights for women met with male opposition, and later in Manchester, where her efforts – combined with support from Constance – led to the defeat of a bill against women’s rights proposed by a certain Winston Churchill.

from The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)

In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markievicz

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer’s wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams –
Some vague Utopia – and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.