Book of a lifetime: Selected Poems by WB Yeats

From The Independent archive: Adam O’Riordan finds the Irish poet’s work helps him explore his roots

William Butler Yeats in about 1900 (Getty)

I first heard WB Yeats’s poetry spoken aloud not by the reedy-voiced poet himself intoning on an early recording, or by a teacher at high school or a friend at university, but on an album that belonged to my big brother: Fisherman’s Blues by The Waterboys. The band had set Yeats’s “Stolen Child” to music: “Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild. With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” I was fascinated by language that was musical, yet freighted with grief and melancholy.

I grew up with an Irish surname (O’Riordan derives from “riogh bhard” or “royal bard”) but with no living link to Ireland. My father’s family had moved to Edinburgh from Cork several generations ago, while family lore on my mother’s side told of a great-great grandfather shot dead on the steps of Armagh Cathedral. Yeats’s work allowed me to engage with a side of my identity I was, in name at least, entitled to. It is a book I would carry around in my pocket as a schoolboy until the yellowed pages began to fall out.

“An Irish Airman foresees his Death” was the first poem I had by heart, and those middle lines on the “lonely impulse of delight” that is the airman’s motivation still fill me with that fleeting satisfaction when a feeling or a thought finds its ideal expression in language; or what Yeats might call “something to perfection brought”.