The interior of tower and cottage at Thoor Ballylee in South County Galway may have closed for the winter, but the spirit of the Nobel Prize-winning poet WB Yeats lives on.

Stockholm University was the venue for a major conference of the International Yeats Society remembering the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the circumstances of its giving to WB Yeats, featuring keynotes from Professors Roy Foster, Marjorie Howes, Margeret Mills Harper, and Paul Muldoon.

This was not the only recent ceremony connected to Yeats’s award. This autumn the award to the winners of a major new poetry competition to mark the 100th anniversary of Nobel Prize took place at Thoor Ballylee. The Yeats Thoor Ballylee Poetry Prize is an initiative of the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society, who are custodians of the poet’s medieval tower house, near Gort, in Co.Galway.

Film maker and Thoor Ballylee Society board member Lelia Doolan noted: “Yeats wrote in a letter ‘I am of late feeling greatly inspired within the walls of an old tower house that I own in the West of Ireland – Thoor Ballylee’, and so we feel very happy to honour with this prize his old home, to commemorate his enduring, vivid legacy and to offer an invitation to poets worldwide to connect, through their work, with this wonderful place.”

From its launch on Yeats’s birthday, the award attracted hundreds of entrants from around the world. The prize was open to anyone, but poems were to be unpublished, in English, and no more than 40 lines. There to present the prizes to the winners was poet and chief judge Mary Madec, and guest of honour Caitriona Yeats, harpist, granddaughter of the poet, and old friend of Thoor Ballylee.

The winners were Breda Joyce, with third prize, Kitty Donnelly, with second prize, and Catherine Phil MacCarthy with first prize. As it happens quite a few of the entered poems employed local scenery, and made Yeatsian connections. Yeats’s poem ‘A Coat’, about determining to take off his rhapsodist’s song cloak, an embroidered coat made out of mythologies to stand in plain view is echoed here in interesting ways by the winner of the third prize, Breda Joyce, in the following poem:

On the Seventh Day

For six-days of the week,

my father served behind a counter,

sentenced to pay back loans

that sank his broad shoulders.

But when Sunday came,

he put on wellingtons

to walk the land,

stony fields that crouched

behind limestone walls.

When a mist rose from the Corrib

and veiled the hills near Inchagoill,

my father wore his heavy coat.

Later, when he could no longer walk,

the fields observed a Sunday silence.

In the upstairs room his breath laboured

against the cold lakeside air.

So let us remember him

not at some fancy hotel table,

but in fields where his uneven steps

followed sheep through gaps,

his shadowed eyes brooding

in the half-light where Connemara hills

have become an embroidered cloak

that wraps his presence round us.           

Anna O’Donnell, chair of the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society, joined poet Mary Madec and Caitriona Yeats to present the prizes to the winners: Catherine Phil MacCarthy, Kitty Donnelly, and (the sister of) Breda Joyce.

Poetry Prize Details

For more see our dedicated page with competition rules.

Tower

Although the tower interior and exhibitions are closed for the winter, visits are still possible to experience the bridge, garden, and river walk up to the old mill. A full programme of events will continue next year. Meanwhile as a voluntary organization Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society relies on your time and contributions. Join us, help out, or donate to keep Yeats’s spirit alive at the tower.