“Portrayed before his Eyes”: an abandoned late poem

Abstract

The eighteen lines transcribed above (see also Plate 15) stand on a single sheet of “Loose-leaf” paper, currently catalogued as MS 30,189 in the National Library of Ireland’s recently acquired set of manuscripts formerly in the possession of Michael Butler Yeats. ¹ They will certainly be familiar from Richard Ellmann’s The Identity of Yeats ² where they form the last section of a forty-five line “Theme for a Poem”, which Ellmann dates 27 December, from a notebook used in 1934.³