![]() ![]() “And then in a year’s time, when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo.” “If I die, bury me up there ,” Yeats told George. What more does the reader need to know? In them he found creative stimulus.” “What were these relationships? They were passionate. Hassett’s book recounts Yeats’s romances with nine women, “and there were others,” he says. ![]() "These interesting women rallied around him, trying to keep him alive, trying to keep him inspired," recounts Joseph Hassett, author of W B Yeats and the Muses. Surrounded by women Like his alter ego Cuchulain in the play he had just written, Yeats was dying surrounded by women. But he took a turn for the worse, and on January 27th George asked Wellesley to "come back and light the flame". ![]() A week before his death, Wellesley wrote that she "had never seen in better health, wits, charm or vitality". To Wellesley, George gave the manuscript of Yeats's last play, The Death of Cuchulain, which Yeats completed just before New Year's Day. George also gave Yeats's fountain pen and small Oxford dictionary to Heald. On the night of January 28th-29th, George Yeats gave Heald the manuscript of Are You Conten t ? and The Spirit Medium, poems written on either side of a sheet of paper in the last days of Yeats's life. Lady Dorothy Wellesley, to whom Yeats also had a romantic attachment, invited them to dine at her nearby villa, La Bastide. George handled the train tickets and logistics, after which Heald showed up to keep the ageing poet company. Seamus Heaney’s article about Yeats in this newspaper on January 28th, 1989, marking the 50th anniversary of Yeats’s death "It was a simple place," says Oxford professor Roy Foster, author of the two-volume W B Yeats : A Life. Yeats and his wife spent his last two winters at the Idéal Séjour. "My glory was I had such friends," he wrote in The Municipal Gallery Re visited, the poem he penned for the occasion. At the dinner where it was presented, Yeats said it would enable him and George to winter in the south of France, where the climate would be more kind to his angina-stricken heart. In 1937, Yeats's Irish friends had collected money to make his old age more comfortable. They took turns holding vigil over his body that night. Yeats's wife, George, and his last mistress, Edith Shackleton Heald, were at his bedside. The room had a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the Mediterranean, his final vista. William Butler Yeats died 75 years ago today at 2.30pm in a small upstairs room at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Roquebrune Cap Martin. ![]()
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