William Butler Yeats, renowned Irish poet, playwright and writer, winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize for literature, is buried in St. Columba’s church graveyard in Drumcliff (sometimes spelled Drumcliffe) in County Sligo, Ireland.
Or is he?
Yeats died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France, on 28 January 1939. He was 73.[1] Yeats was buried at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin following a discreet and private funeral.
But Yeats’s family wanted him buried in Ireland, in the graveyard of the neo-Gothic style St. Columba’s, where his great grandfather had been rector.
Attempts were made in France to dissuade the family from relocating the remains to Ireland due to the uncertainty of their identity.
Yeats’s body was exhumed in 1946 and transferred to the cemetery’s ossuary and mixed with other remains.[2] French Foreign Ministry authorities were worried about the fact that Yeats’ remains were thrown into a communal grave.[7]
Yeats’ wish was that he be buried quickly in France. According to his wife, George, “His actual words were ‘If I die, bury me up there [at Roquebrune] and then in a year’s time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo’.”[3]
Positively identified or not, in September 1948, nine years after his death, Yeats’s remains were moved to the graveyard of St Columba’s.[4]
The remains buried in Drumcliff, Co. Sligo, may – or may not – be those of William Butler Yeats.
The man in charge of repatriating the poet’s remains for the Irish Government was Seán MacBride, Minister of External Affairs, the son of Maud Gonne MacBride, who was one of Yeats’s former lovers. [5][6]
Yeats married 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees, known as George, in 1917. He was 51. Despite their age difference and Yeats’ affairs with other women, the couple remained married. They had two children, Anne and Michael. Georgie once wrote to her husband “When you are dead, people will talk about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, for I will remember how proud you were.”
The epitaph carved into Yeats’s tombstone in Drumcliff is from “one of his final poems Under Ben Bulben”:
Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by!
1. Obituary. “W. B. Yeats Dead Archived 28 September 2013 at the Wayback Machine”. The New York Times, 30 January 1939. 2. Jordan, Anthony J. (2003). W. B. Yeats: Vain, Glorious, Lout – A Maker of Modern Ireland. Westport Books. ISBN 978-0-9524447-2-5.3. Foster, R. F. (2003). 3. W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-818465-2. 4. Foster, 2003
5. Jordon, 20036.
6. Cahill, Christopher (December 2003). “Second Puberty: The Later Years of W. B. Yeats Brought His Best Poetry, along with personal melodrama on an epic scale”. theatlantic.com. Archived from the original on 29 August 2021. 7. “The Documents”. The Irish Times. Archived from the original on 9 November 2017.
