Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Tóibín Page A

never knew about the error. She was alone in Coole when the news came and had to make her way by train to Galway to tell Margaret, Robert’s wife. “I stood there and Margaret came in. She cried at once ‘Is he dead?’ … Then I sat down on the floor and cried.”
    Yeats wrote four poems on the death of Robert Gregory ; two of them are among his greatest. The circumstances of the composition of all four poems, and Lady Gregory’s close monitoring of them, remain the most astonishing and telling episode in their long relationship. She wrote to him on 2 February 1918: “If you feel like it some time – write something down that we may keep – you understood him better than many.” A few days latershe wrote to Yeats about Margaret’s wishes for him to do something: “If you would send even a paragraph – just something of what I know you are feeling – to the Observer – or failing that the Nation – she would feel it a comfort.” She enclosed notes for him about Robert. Yeats wrote to John Quinn: “I think he had genius. Certainly no contemporary landscape moved me as much as two or three of his, except perhaps a certain landscape by Innes, from whom he had learned a good deal. His paintings had majesty and austerity, and at the same time sweetness. He was the most accomplished man I have ever known; he could do more things than any other.” Yeats also wrote to Iseult Gonne that Robert Gregory had “a strange pure genius … I have always felt that he had a luckless star and have expected the end.” He wrote a piece for the Observer saying that Robert Gregory’s “very accomplishment hid from many his genius. He had so many sides that some among his friends were not sure what his work would be.”
    Yeats wrote to John Quinn, saying that his real grief was for Lady Gregory. In his first poem about Robert Gregory , “Shepherd and Goatherd”, Yeats’s invocation of Lady Gregory at Coole is among his most pedestrian work:
    She goes about her house erect and calm
    Between the pantry and the linen chest,
    Or else at meadow or at grazing overlooks
    Her labouring men, as though her darling lived,
    But for her grandson now […]
    The poem goes on to deal with Robert, how he had built no house in his lifetime and left merely a few paintings. It cannot have offered Lady Gregory much consolation when Yeats showed it to her on his arrival in Coole in April 1918. The dead artist, he wrote:
    [ …] left the house as in his father’s time
    As though he knew himself, as it were, a cuckoo,
    No settled man. And now that he is gone
    There’s nothing of him left but half a score
    Of sorrowful, austere, sweet, lofty pipe tunes.
    In a letter to his wife, which John Kelly quotes in Lady Gregory: Fifty Years After, Yeats, who had begun to write “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” at Coole, wrote: “I have done nothing but … discuss with Lady Gregory the new stanza that is to commend Robert’s courage in the hunting field. It has been a little thorny but we have settled a compromise. I have got from her a list of musical place-names where he hunted … I have firmly resisted all suggested eloquence about aero planes ‘& the blue Italian sky’. It is pathetic for Lady Gregory constantly says that it [the poem] is his monument – ‘all that remains’.”
    The pathos of the poem “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” comes not from the qualities claimed for Robert Gregory, which are exaggerated, but from the withholding of his name until the sixth line of the sixth stanza. In many journal entries between now and her death, Lady Gregory also withheld her dead son’s name, referring to “the grave in Italy” or “the grave in Padua” or “my darling ”. Now, in Yeats’s poem, other names can be mentioned – the poet Lionel Johnson, the