A Certain Slant of Light

Yes, that’s from Emily Dickinson, and it’s about winter, but tonight I’m wondering if summer twilight ever makes you melancholy? It does me.

“The light of evening, Lissadell,

Great windows open to the south,

Two girls in silk kimonos, both

Beautiful, one a gazellle:.”

Yeats is remembering Eva and Constance Gore-Booth, and evenings he spent at dinner in their home in Sligo, Ireland. I have visited Lissadell, been in that very room with the great windows open to the south. It’s far north— the “light of evening” lingers in Ireland until about 11 PM in high summer.

Well somehow, even though the beautiful sisters were younger than Yeats, they predeceased him, in 1926 and 1927, respectively. He wrote this poem in their memory in 1927.

Both were activists for Ireland’s freedom, although, like Yeats,they were Anglo-Irish. Constance married a Polish gent who claimed to be a Count, it’s not clear now that he really was, but she was always known as the Countess Markeviecz.

Here’s the last verse. I hope maybe it will move you as it does me:

“Dear shadows, now you know it all,

All the folly of a fight

With a common wrong or right.

The innocent and the beautiful

Have no enemy but time;

Arise and bid me strike a match

And strike another till time catch;

Should the conflagration climb,

Run till all the sages know.

We the great gazebo built,

They convicted us of guilt;

Bid me strike a match and blow.”