A great night's sleep in the 'Hot Pink' suite! There were some amazing shades and curtains that we had to draw closed to keep the rising sun from waking us up too early. When we poked our heads out on the terrace, the new day appeared as beautiful as the amazing sunset and clouds from the night before. This weather has been extraordinarily dramatic!
We headed down to breakfast at around 9:00 and got a great table on the terrace. The food was great and we were off to a wonderful start to the day. We had been looking forward to staying at the Cliff House, as it was on our 'cancelled' itinerary from a couple of years ago. It ended up being better than expected and we could have spent more time here, but there was more to explore at our next destination, Sheen Falls Lodge!
Off to find Sheen Falls!
Hopefully less than a three hour drive!
and the first sight of our room.......so romantic, ground floor with a private terrace!
A bit of exploring, but off to lunch to stay on a reasonable schedule.
The weather was rather dramatic.........sun and some dramatic cloud structures. We hoped we would get through lunch without a shower........but so beautiful here! Lunch outdoors right at the falls.
After a great lunch and a good hike around the grounds........and then a well-deserved nap and 'relax' in the room, we gathered our energy and headed out again for dinner at the The Stables Brasserie & Bar. The restaurant was rather busy (reservation at 8:00) and the maitre'd suggested we grab a drink in the bar and wait 15 minutes to let two large tables finish their meals.........haha, no problem for us!
We had a nice time in the bar (talking to the bartender about Irish Gin), followed by a very nice dinner. Andrea continued her 'streak' of eating fish every night! and I succumbed to the temptation of an Irish burger........both were great!
William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and politician. One of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature, he was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish literary establishment who helped to found the Abbey Theatre. In his later years, he served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State.
A Protestant of Anglo-Irish descent, Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland. He was educated in Dublin and London and spent childhood holidays in County Sligo. He studied poetry from an early age, when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. He was influenced by John Keats, William Wordsworth, William Blake and many more. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, lasting roughly from his student days at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
From 1900 his poetry grew more physical, realistic and politicised. He moved away from the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with some elements including cyclical theories of life. He had become the chief playwright for the Irish Literary Theatre in 1897, and early on promoted younger poets such as Ezra Pound. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. His major later works include 1928's The Tower and Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems, published in 1932.
Andrea had always loved his work and could actually recite lines from several poems. This became event more interesting to us when we learned of his relationship with Ezra Pounds. The intrigue for us was that we had spent the past several weeks at Villa dei Pini talking quite oftern at dinner about Ezra Pounds........and the conversation informed us far beyond our rudimentary knowledge of his poetry (quite a controversial fellow on many fronts).
In fact, his house was in the city of Rapallo not far from Bogliasco, was visited by two of the fellows........including one poet who had a connection with a elderly family friend of Pound who gave them a very personal tour of the property. (Rapallo has been known as an intellectual resort where many writers and poets lived, being Ezra Pound and D. H. Lawrence among the most illustrious. Actors from Hollywood have also favored the region; past celebrities as Clark Gable and Tyrone Power visited often.)
This brings us back to the strange intervention in Ireland and the relationship between Yeats and Pound. Intellectually, this was one of the more stimulating discoveries.......totally by chance......that we stumbled upon during the trip. We cannot help but expand a bit here with the following wonderful anecdote. Sorry for all the text here, but this is what makes new places and ideas so stimulating! What follows is an article from the New Yorker from 2015.......a bit long for this blog, but definitely worth the read........
On January 18, 1914, Ezra Pound, helped by William Butler Yeats, and, behind the scenes, by Yeats’s patron and friend, Lady Gregory, held a luncheon for Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a man whom Pound regarded as the “grandest of old men” and “the last of the great Victorians,” at Blunt’s manor house in West Sussex. The guest list should come as a reproach to anyone who overvalues his literary fame, since, aside from Yeats and Pound, the other figures—including Blunt, a celebrity in his day—are all but forgotten: Victor Plarr, Thomas Sturge Moore, Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint.
The key gimmick, dreamed up by Lady Gregory, was to roast and serve a peacock, arranged on a tray beside its full plumage, a touch that complemented the “iron-studded barricades,” “medieval relics,” and “Burne-Jones tapestry” in Blunt’s home, as Pound later explained in a letter to his mother. The elder poet was presented with a small stone casket full of poems written by the younger men, poems that struck him as “word problems”: incomprehensibly Modern**,** most of them in vers libre. After the meal, the party—Blunt plus the other six poets, including Pound and Yeats—posed in front of an ancient stone wall for what became a famous photograph. The papers were alerted, and news of the meal spread far and wide, from the London Times to the Boston Evening Transcript.
Pound was a great impresario, and this was among his first and shrewdest stunts. The modernism that he was then designing to be an affront to Victorian literary culture was also intended to be its heir; the Victorians, though reduced to a few surviving eminences, were, whatever their excesses of diction and sentiment, the nearest model for greatness. He had sought to join the “apostolic succession” of poets through Blunt, who, a generation or two earlier, had cunningly arranged his own ancestry, marrying the granddaughter of Lord Byron and becoming a Byronic coxcomb—dieting, coiffing his curls, and dressing himself in Turkish- and Albanian-inspired attire. Pound (who wore velvet jackets with buttons of pearl and was, according to Robert Frost, “a great intellect abloom in hair”) lived, during those years, in Yeats’s Stone Cottage and was employed as Yeats’s secretary, typing and proofing his poems.
These poets were all male, all photogenic, and all given to conspicuous behavior—as when, one evening, Pound ate the centerpiece (tulips, though some have said they were roses) at a pub called the Cheshire Cheese as Yeats expounded upon the fundamentals of verse. We are not far from the first silent film stars, whose own evenings were often choreographed for public consumption. The maneuverings of poets and literary people, jostling for fame behind the keyhole of glimpsed conviviality, is as old as Rome, older even; but Pound had a special gift for P.R.
The peacock dinner is affectionately reconstructed in Lucy McDiarmid’s “Poets & The Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal.” It is the second excellent book to appear in the past year about an illustrious dinner thrown for poets: Stanley Plumly’s “The Immortal Evening” described a night on which the eminent painter Benjamin Robert Haydon entertained Wordsworth, Keats, and Lamb, all of whom had posed for Haydon’s ambitious canvas “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.” The writers had good reason to believe that their appearance in Haydon’s painting would represent the pinnacle of their fame; as it happened, Haydon’s work is remembered mostly for his association with the poets, and especially with Keats, who wrote some of his most famous letters to “My Dear Haydon.” The reconstruction, in book form, of these distant nights stems from the same impulse that brought the original diners together: to seek a material scrap of prior genius. Pound admired Blunt but seemed to be operating under the transitive property of genius, thrilled by the “Victorians and Pre-Raphaelites and men of the nineties” Blunt had known, and by the aura of association with “old Browning” or “Shelley sliding down his front bannisters ‘with almost incredible rapidity.’ ”
The story of the peacock dinner is really about the forms literary professionalism took just before poets could learn their trade in schools, first from literature surveys and, much later, from writing workshops. Yeats was especially important for poets of a slightly younger generation, and stories about meeting Yeats (all of them by men, mind you) make up a distinguished genre all their own. (John Berryman, a much younger poet, said coming to call upon him was like asking “Is Ben Jonson here?”) And Pound, in his old age, living in Venice, received many young admirers of his own. Poets, perhaps more than any other group of creative artists, understand their art vertically, as a succession that one wants either to join or to disrupt. Pound felt both impulses, as did Yeats a little before him and, after them both, writers like Berryman and Robert Lowell. It’s the Burden of the Past, the Anxiety of Influence. Under optimal circumstances, these meetings enter literature, as in Berryman and Lowell’s many marvelous elegies for the poets who were dying out just as they were getting started.
Some people live in the past; poets often live in the future perfect, imagining their current actions from the point of view of future recollection. The peacock dinner is suggested twice in Pound’s Pisan Cantos, which he wrote, accompanied only by his memories, decades later while imprisoned for treason in a six-foot-by-six-foot cage:
You can hear in these lines Pound’s relitigation of the past, clearing himself of “vanity” and “error”: that rash young man who ate the tulips has taken his valiant older self as passionate defender. Everything in later Pound is animated by that search for a “live tradition,” which now includes his own early manhood. In Canto 83, he recalls overhearing Yeats as he composed “The Peacock” downstairs in Stone Cottage, all those years ago:
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Wow........difficult to move on from this, but somehow the beauty of the place and the reflection on those stimuli around us.......that move through us in rather mysterious ways, adds both energy and a sense of expansive awe to realize the breadth of experiences beyond our presence. This has been a very unique exposure!
Once again, the combination of a stimulating day and the presence of brilliant skies and daylight until after 10:00 at night........somehow kept us on the prowl! After dinner we headed back to the main lodge building and the rather romantic 'Sheen Bar.' We decided on a cold limoncello and a rather fantastic 'barrel aged' negroni to wind down the evening........both quite enjoyable.......in accompaniment with some wonderful live entertainment.
What a great day!
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