In the winter you'll be spared the most odious traveler outside the wine snob -- the literary cannibal. This is the individual so pumped with condescension that telling tour guides they're misinformed is his greatest joy, and he will happily knock you down on pathological quests to find the last pencil shavings of the master.
Find your way to Gort in County Galway and follow the signs to Yeats' Tower and Coole Park. The tower, at Thoor Ballylee, is a perfectly preserved square Norman fortress rising next to a river above the unspoiled landscape. The interior is closed until May, but it's worth a drive and a ramble around to see it. Sometimes the only observers will be you and a wise-faced donkey hanging his head over a rock fence, with 20 sheep grazing, woolly heads all coming up at once as you approach.
The grave of Irish son W.B. Yeats in Drumcliff, County Sligo, bears the poet's own words.
() Peter Matthews)
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Here, the poet began the final and most productive stage of his career with his much younger wife, Georgie. (His friend Ezra Pound, who lived for verse and sarcasm, called the tower "Ballyphallus.") There is a plaque near the door:
I, the poet William Yeats,
With old mill boards and sea green slates,
And smithy work from the Gort forge,
Restored this tower for my wife George;
And may their characters remain
When all is ruin once again.
Here, Yeats noted where all of us are, have been or are moving toward:
What shall I do with this absurdity --
