Just as “Romantic Ireland” was not really “dead and gone” in “September 1913” because it lived on in the voice of nationalist leader John O’Leary’s most famous disciple, Yeats himself, so will Coole not really be gone because its creative power lives on in the poem itself and in the voice that speaks the poem. It is one more way in which during the following poem, “Coole and Ballylee, 1931,” Yeats could famously claim of himself, Lady Gregory, and Synge, “We were the last romantics.”

The third Coole Park poem in the volume, the slighter “For Anne Gregory,” also focuses on a young woman, but this time in a comic way. Anne, who grew up at Coole, was the daughter of Major Robert Gregory and hence granddaughter of Lady Gregory. With splendid blond hair, she served as inspiration for Yeats’s tribute to her, in which first a Yeats-like older male speaks, then a girl like Anne, and then the first speaker again. As usual, Yeats makes stanza and syntax coincide, with each stanza formed from a single sentence:

‘Never shall a young man,

Thrown into despair

By those great honey-coloured

Ramparts at your ear,

Love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.’

‘But I can get a hair-dye

And set such colour there,

Brown, or black, or carrot,

That young men in despair

May love me for myself alone

And not my yellow hair.’

‘I heard an old religious man

But yesternight declare

That he had found a text to prove

That only God, my dear,

Could love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.’

In reading Yeats’s many poems about women in this volume, one sometimes wonders what the women themselves would say back to the poet. In the case of this poem, we know, for Anne Gregory did provide a retrospective account in her charming brief memoir Me and Nu: Childhood at Coole. Here is how she recalled Yeats’s recital of the poem during one of his extended stays at Coole Park when she herself was a teenager:

Some time after this W. B. Yeats wrote a poem for me alone, and again I wasn’t entirely pleased to start with. I felt it was very doggerelly and not as romantic as I would have liked.

Mr. Yeats sent a message for me to go up to his sitting-room, and then said that he had written a poem called “Yellow Hair” and that he had dedicated it to me, and proceeded to read it, in his “humming” voice. We used to hear his voice “humming” away for hours while he wrote his verse. He used to hum the rhythm of a verse before he wrote the words, Grandma told us, and that was why his poems are so good to read aloud... but on this occasion I was petrified. I had no idea that he was going to write a poem to me, and had no idea at all what one should say when he had read it aloud.

It was agony! For once, I think I did the right thing. Nearly in tears for fear of doing something silly, “Read it again,” I pleaded, “oh do read it to me again.”

Obviously this was all right, for Yeats beamed, put on his pince nez attached to the broad black silk ribbon, and read through it again...

This time I was able to stutter: “Wonderful. Thank you so much. Wonderful. I must go and wash my hair,” and crashed out.

Yeats’s poem and Anne Gregory’s response provide a welcome lighter moment in one of Yeats’s densest volumes of verse. I turn now to the three alternate endings of the volume—the one that ends the main grouping of poems, then the one that ends the following separate sequence, “Words for Music Perhaps,” and then the one that ends the final sequence, “A Woman Young and Old.”

“Stream and Sun at Glendalough” concludes the main grouping of poems before the two sequences. As so often with Yeats’s concluding lyrics, it contrasts images of perfection and even transcendence with more earthly conditions. We may wonder how the poem would be different if the title were “Stream and Sun at Rosses Point” or some other place, perhaps even “Miami Beach.” The same issue arises with Wallace Stevens’s title “The Idea of Order at Key West”—is there another one at Tampa, or on Cape Cod? In this case, set in a beautiful valley of the Wicklow Mountains, Glendalough is one of the most lovely and important ecclesiastical sites in Ireland. In a volume featuring self’s debate with soul and transcendence of life versus immersion in it, knowing that Glendalough is an ecclesiastical site takes the poem out of a purely natural realm and relocates it in Yeats’s favorite position between the ideal and the actual, as in so many poems from “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time” onward. Hence the first stanza pertains not only to nature but also to its opposite, what “Coole Park, 1929” called “nature’s spite” and “Byzantium” called “images.” The first line of the second stanza uses a religious word, “repentance,” to signal a turn away from a beautiful or ideal world and back toward the speaker’s heart, almost always in Yeats the source of continued song. Correspondingly, after the descriptive assertions of the opening stanza, the second and third consist wholly of questions, not statements. They show an attractive humility not always associated with Yeats or his speakers:

Repentance keeps my heart impure;

But what am I that dare

Fancy that I can

Better conduct myself or have more

Sense than a common man?

What motion of the sun or stream

Or eyelid shot the gleam

That pierced my body through?

What made me live like these that seem

Self-born, born anew?

The poem’s second stanza displays a speaker castigating himself for delusions of grandeur, a lifelong danger for Yeats. The final one begins with a rephrasing of Wordsworth’s romantic pondering of whether the eye and ear “half create” or “half perceive” in “Tintern Abbey”—the speaker wonders whether the gleam that pierced his body through originated in nature (the “sun or stream”) or himself (the “eyelid”). The remaining lines invoke images that run throughout not just this volume but Yeats’s collected poetry as a whole. For instance, the idea of a body pierced by a gleam of light appears in “The Cold Heaven” from the Responsibilities volume, where the speaker is “riddled with light,” again in “The Mother of God” from The Winding Stair with the “fallen flare / Through the hollow of an ear,” and the line “Another star has shot an ear” from “A Nativity” in Last Poems. Similarly, the “self-born, born anew” images of the final two lines echo the “self-born” presences or images that mock “man’s enterprise” in “Among School Children” and the “self-sown, self-begotten shape” in the gymnasts’ garden of “Colonus’ Praise” from the Tower volume, and above all “Those images that yet / Fresh images beget” of “Byzantium” elsewhere in this one.