Dolores O'Riordan's Beautifully Poetic Tribute to W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin on the 13th of June 1865 and died on the 28th of January 1939. The Irish poet grew up holidaying in County Sligo where a stunning statue dedicated to him stands. Yeats began writing when he was seventeen and was influenced by Percy Shelley, Edmund Spenser, William Blake, and Irish mythology and folklore.

Yeats used symbolism in his poetry, choosing and assembling words to give them meaning while suggesting significant abstract thought. His highly passionate poetry has inspired many fellow poets, writers, and creatives, including the lead singer of 20th century band The Cranberries, Dolores O’Riordan, who sadly passed away in January 2018. O’Riordan, a life-long Yeats fan, wrote Yeats’ Grave after she visited the place where he was buried.

O’Riordan was born and grew up in County Limerick, Ireland, and studied W.B. Yeats when she was at school. Speaking to Hot Press Magazine in 1994, Dolores expressed how her love for Yeats’ poetry felt at odds with the exam process, and vigorous analysis of the poetry.

“I just always loved Yeats, him as a human. He was so passionate and just wrote what he felt. I always found it difficult in school because I loved Yeats’ poetry but I wasn’t into analysing it. I just had my own understanding of it, me as a poet myself – a young girl who writes. I write my own lyrics and as far as I’m concerned I’m writing my own poems and verse and it might not be over-intellectual and it mightn’t be fifty pages and have big words and y’know, clauses and all that stuff in it but I’m just writing what I feel and as far as I’m concerned Yeats just wrote what he felt. But then you sit down at your exam and it’s like ‘where does he use similes in this poem’ and ‘where is he being ironic’. I’m sure when Yeats wrote his poetry he didn’t want kids to look for the irony in it, I’m sure he wanted young people to sit down and go ‘wow that’s cool, I really understand that’.”

Image: Dolores Mary Eileen O’Riordan, 2013 Kip Carroll/eyevine/Redux

“I was really into Yeats’ poetry, so much so that I wrote a song called Yeats’ Grave the first time I went to Sligo and saw where he is buried. I loved his passion, the dreamer he was. And the fact that he looked beyond the material world to matters spiritual, which is really representative of the Irish people as a race. As with the native Americans and Jamaicans, I’ve found.”