CofC students in front of the Yeats Tower, Thoor Ballylee

Thoor Ballylee, the fifteenth-century fortified tower house that Yeats renovated and lived in during the Anglo-Irish and Irish Civil Wars, is opened again for visits.  Local folks near Gort, County Galway, have collaborated to recover the site from the flood that closed it in 2009.  Here’s a snippet of Yeats’s “Prayer for My Daughter”:

I have walked and prayed for this child an hour

And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,

And under the arches of the bridge, and scream

In the elms above the flooded stream;

Imagining in excited reverie

That the future years had come

Dancing to a frenzied drum,

Out of the murderous innocence of the seas.

Yeats  was writing in dangerous times, and his soul was gloomy with world affairs.