The ornate, stained glass lantern that poet William Butler Yeats used when climbing and descending “the winding stair” in his Co Galway home at Thoor Ballylee, Kiltartan, has been returned to Ireland after nearly a century in the United States.
Yeats gave the lantern to the Kelly family of nearby Dromore, Peterswell, when he left Thoor in 1928 to move to France for health reasons. John Kelly had worked as the Yeats family gardener at Ballylee and his sister Mary Kate was employed there as a cook each summer.
“Yeats gave all the furniture and articles to the Kellys,” John’s daughter, Jan Kelly, recalled in an email to Geri Critchley when she entrusted her friends Geri and Jay Critchley to carry the lantern across the Atlantic Ocean and back to Ballylee this autumn. “Aunt Mary Kate took much of it by horse and wagon over to [her house in] Rathcosgrove – furniture painted green, dishes etc, and the lantern.”
Jan’s late father took the lantern to the US when he emigrated after the Yeats family abandoned Thoor Ballylee. “Yeats’s lantern reigns supreme” among the objects Jan Kelly had in her apartment in Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, says Critchley.
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“Yeats’s lantern connected her to Ireland and her father. It was her most prized possession in her apartment’s museum. She knew it was time to return it to its right place, where it belonged, but it was not an easy process to let it go. Jay and I picked it up from her apartment in June but since we were not going to Ireland until September, she brought the lantern back to her apartment to spend the last two months with it”.
[ Roy Foster on WB Yeats and Thoor Ballylee: ‘When all is ruin once again’Opens in new window ]
Thoor Ballylee was the only home and property that Yeats ever owned. An abandoned Norman castle, it was becoming derelict when he bought it from the Land Commission in 1916. Thoor was his own translation of the Irish word túr, meaning tower. He preferred it to the word castle. A narrow, spiral, stone stairway adjoins the inside of two of the tower’s 7ft-thick exterior walls. “I think the harsh sound of ‘Thoor’ amends the softness of the rest,” Yeats told a friend in 1922.
Ballylee is three miles northeast of Gort and close to Kiltartan and to the Coole Park home of Yeats’s long-time friend and collaborator Lady Augusta Gregory. (It is misnamed Bally-na-lee in the 1974 Faber Book of Irish Verse and in Bob Dylan’s 2020 composition I Contain Multitudes).
Yeats wanted Thoor Ballylee to be “a fitting monument and symbol”, he told his New York lawyer friend John Quinn in July 1919. “I declare this tower is my symbol,” he wrote in the poem Blood and the Moon, in his collection The Winding Stair and Other Poems. “I declare”, he added, “this winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair.”
In the same poem he also declared: “I have set a powerful emblem up.” And in a letter to Sturge Moore, who designed the front cover for his 1928 collection The Tower, he wrote: “I like to think of that building as a permanent symbol of my work plainly visible to the passer-by.”
Yeats first mentioned climbing “the narrow winding stair” in his poem In Memory of Major Robert Gregory, written shortly after the death of Augusta Gregory’s only son in the final months of the first World War in 1918. He asked for “God’s blessing on this tower” at around the same time in A Prayer On Going Into My House. The stair and the building that he took to calling “my house” then became recurring motifs in the two collections that he published in the decade after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923: The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933).
In Meditations in Time of Civil War (in The Tower collection), Yeats again mentions “a winding stair” and “this laborious stair and this stark tower” in the verses My House and My Descendants. In the final lines of My Descendants he says that he chose Thoor because of his “old neighbour’s friendship” with Lady Gregory and that he had it restored for his wife George. He added: “And know whatever flourish and decline/These stones remain their monument and mine”. In his notes on Meditations in Time of Civil War, he wrote: “These poems were written at Thoor Ballylee in 1922, during the civil war.”
The Tower, published on February 14th, 1928, was part-written after he climbed the winding stair to “pace upon the battlements” that enclosed the tower’s flat roof. He wrote that the people mentioned in the title poem “are associated by legend, story and tradition with the neighbourhood of Thoor Ballylee or Ballylee Castle, where the poem was written”.
And in the notes he wrote for The Winding Stair and Other Poems collection, he wrote: “In this book and elsewhere, I have used towers, and one tower in particular, as symbols and have compared their winding stairs to the philosophical gyres ...” The collection’s third poem, A Dialogue of Self and Soul, begins with the line: “I summon to the ancient winding stair”.
The stained glass lantern may have been designed, if not assembled, by the artist Sarah Purser, who knew Yeats and his siblings and father. The lantern is not mentioned in the 25th anniversary booklet of Purser’s stained glass collective An Túr Gloine (The Glass Tower), published in 1928, or in the comprehensive Purser biography published by John O’Grady in 1996, but she did design, paint and assemble some of An Túr Gloine’s stained glass panels and windows.
These include two windows in St Brendan’s Cathedral, Loughrea, and one in Labane Catholic church, both of which are near Ballylee in south Galway. Thoor’s large, wide windows had curtains that were designed and made by Yeats’s two sisters, Susan and Elizabeth, in their embroidery and printing business Cuala Industries in Dublin.
The lantern was returned to Ballylee this September by Jay Critchley, a multi-media artist and a decades-long friend of Jan Kelly. He carried the fragile artefact from Provincetown, at the northern tip of Cape Cod, in a “Grow Greener” shopping bag, protected by layers of bubble wrap and other padding.
Thoor was broken into by Black and Tans during the War of Independence and ransacked by anti-Treaty IRA men in 1923 during the Civil War when Yeats was a senator in the first Free State parliament
“I was a wreck, constantly looking over my shoulder as I clutched my seemingly sort of normal shopping bag,” he says. “I didn’t let the bag out of sight.”
Jan Kelly also gave the Critchleys a black-and-white photograph of Yeats sitting at Thoor Ballylee with his children Anne and Michael, framed by the tall trees that her grandfather Peter Kelly had planted. She said that her father, John, was the only person in Peterswell with a bicycle and he was often summoned to take handwritten messages to Lady Gregory three miles away at Coole Park and to wait for a reply.
The Critchleys handed the lantern to Rena McAllen of the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society on the last day of this year’s Gregory Yeats Autumn Gathering at Thoor. As a director of the society, she said that she was “delighted to have Yeats’s beautiful lantern back in its original home” and she “marvelled at the magnificent stained glass workmanship”.
Rena McAllen thanked Jan Kelly for returning her most treasured family heirloom to its original home and she thanked the Critchleys for transporting the “precious Yeats artefact” from Massachusetts to Ballylee. She said the lantern would be in the Kiltartan Gregory Museum, at Kiltartan Cross, on the old Galway-Gort road, this winter and it would be on display at Thoor Ballylee during the 2025 tourist season, 60 years after the building was opened to the public.
[ From the archive: Arise and go – my journey to WB YeatsOpens in new window ]
Yeats left his tower for the last time in August 1927 and George departed during the following summer. Their son Michael placed Thoor Ballylee in the hands of the Kiltartan Society Trust in 1963 and the building was restored and opened to the public in 1965, the centenary of Yeats’s birth.
Thoor was broken into by Black and Tans during the War of Independence and ransacked by anti-Treaty IRA men in 1923 during the Civil War when Yeats was a senator in the first Free State parliament. During the previous summer he had told John Quinn in a letter: “Everything is so beautiful that to go elsewhere is to leave beauty behind.”
Jan Kelly’s uncle Anthony is credited by the Kiltartan historian Sr Mary de Lourdes Fahy with salvaging from the abandoned building and cleaning the stone slab on which is carved one of Yeats’s lapidary legacies:
I the poet William Yeats / With old millboards and / sea green slates / And smithy work from / the Gort forge / Restored this tower/ for my wife George / And may these characters / Remain / When all is ruin once again
Ray Burke is former chief news editor at RTÉ
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