King of Morning, Queen of Day Read Online Free PDF

can I resist? Since our little soiree at the Gaelic Literary League, I have looked for an opportunity to meet him again. My dear Constance, wild horses wouldn’t keep me! I wonder, however, might I bring Emily? She will shortly be returning for the summer, and I know nothing would thrill her more than to hear Mr. Yeats reading his own incomparable verse. I sent her copies of In the Seven Woods and The Green Helmet and Other Poems, and she has devoured them as a starving man would a crust of bread! To actually meet this Olympian figure— I can assure you that she will be on her very best behaviour; no repeat of the histrionics at her birthday party. She conducts herself exceedingly well in adult company; quite the little charmer. It has been said by others that she reminds them of me, but it sometimes seems to me that she is a little too eager to grow up. Please do give it your consideration. Emily would be thrilled if it is acceptable. If the request is within your powers to grant, I will write to Emily to inform her, and I thank you once again for your kindness and hospitality. It will be good to meet Mr. Yeats again.
Yours Sincerely,
    Caroline

Emily’s Diary: June 29, 1913
    O H, TO BE IN Craigdarragh now that summer’s here! It is the little, magical things that make the summer for me: Michael and Paddy-Joe, Mrs. O’Carolan’s sons, scything the front lawn; the sound of their scythes reaping the tall grass; the smell of bruised hay; the sagging tennis net run out for another year; old Dignan the gardener trying to creosote straight tram lines; the smell of sun-warmed wood and old, peeling paint in the summerhouse; the sound of opera from the garden when Mummy takes her big black deckchair with the sunshade, her phonogram and her workbooks out into the sunken garden (how she can work with people screaming at each other in Italian I do not know), the house filled with clicks and creaks and strange little animal sounds, as if it were stretching back into the life and heat of summer after months of hibernation; early morning light streaming through my window onto the counterpane; outside, the quiet rustle of the Irish Times. I always know that summer has truly arrived when Daddy has his alfresco breakfasts at the table by the rhododendrons. And just to make everything perfect, there is the promise of a boating trip on Lough Gill with Mummy’s friend Mrs. Booth-Kennedy, and of actually meeting with Mr. William Butler Yeats, the greatest poet who ever lived! It is as if everything is in some great, benign conspiracy to make this the most perfect summer yet.
    To prepare myself, I have been rereading all my copies of Yeats; sometimes aloud outside in the gardens, because they seem to perfectly match each other—the wonderful words, the magical summer. Poor Paddy-Joe and Michael, what must they think when they see the daughter of the house pirouetting, barefoot, among the rhododendrons, reciting The Lake Isle of Innisfree?
    The weather is exceptional; since the day I came home from Cross and Passion there has not been one cloud in the sky. I love the weather when it is like this, when every day is the same as the one before and it seems that they will go on like this forever—day after day after day of perfect, unchanging blue, when the sun rises at four in the morning and sets so late that it never gets properly dark at all and the whole world seems suspended somewhere beyond time, changeless, like a flower in a glass paperweight. The air feels strangely charged, as if This World and the Otherworld are at the closest points of their orbits and the friction of their passage is being translated into a lazy, sensual magic. It is quite impossible to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes without my imagination flying away like mayflies above the minnow-burn—one minute hovering in one place, the next, somewhere else, so fast you would think they had the gift of instantaneous movement. With everything so pregnant