Yeats Waits Christmas 2005

Yeats: 'I will arise and wait now'

W. B. Yeats is up on his feet again but will not be well enough to make it back to his favourite spot in Sligo in time for Christmas.

Having been knocked down by a car outside the Ulster Bank early one Friday morning last August, a broken W. B. had been resting quietly in the workshop of his maker, Dublin-based sculptor Rowan Gillespie.

But it has now emerged that W. B., bronzed and better, is up and about, and on the way to full recovery.

"He is up on his feet," Mr. Gillespie told The Sligo Champion this morning. "His feet and ankles are in wax waiting to be cast through to bronze."

It's expected to be only a few weeks after Christmas when Mr. Gillespie will have Nobel laureate ready for discharge. Then it seems it will be a matter for Sligo Borough Council to make plans for his return to his corner outside the Ulster Bank. "It would be a bad time to put him up now. It would be nice to wait for a bit of brightness in the weather," Mr. Gillespie said.

He added that he had finished work on repairing the top section of the sculpture. "When he fell, he grazed his head, hit his nose and the hand in his pocket got a substantial dent, and a bit had to be cut out and recast," the sculptor explained.

For all that, the poet, Senator and "smiling public man" is still a bit stiff on the feet. But, if truth be told, they were never his strongest point.

"Down to the ankles he is all fixed. Now I am completely redoing the ankle section where the impact occurred," Mr. Gillespie said.

Although W. B. should be ready for return to the Land of Hearts Desire early in the New Year, Mr. Gillespie did not know when all the necessary arrangements would be in place to put him in position again at the junction of Markievicz Road and Stephen Street, the place where he has stood since May 1990, watching a town that's changing, changing utterly, as the years pass by.

By HARRY KEANEY