Bronze man stolen from Yeats’s grave tells its own story

The sculptor who made it, Jackie McKenna, has a bad feeling about the fate of the bronze figure which last weekend was wrenched from its base and stolen from its quiet place in the grounds of the Church of Ireland at Drumcliffe, Co Sligo. She fears it has already been cut up, melted down for scrap metal and sold. If she is right, it will not have made much money for the thieves, but we will have lost something precious and irreplaceable. If she is wrong and the piece is still intact, then anyone who can help to save and return it must urgently do so.

This is a wonderful piece of sculpture, modest, simple, and truly beautiful, something that speaks directly to the soul. “People love it,” McKenna said. Local people especially. They raised funds to commission in back in 2002, with inspired assistance from the National Roads Authority. It was cast in the Leitrim Sculpture Centre, that excellent and valiantly surviving institution which McKenna helped to set up in her native Manorhamilton, a few crow-flying miles across the mountains and glens from Drumcliffe.

McKenna is deflated and upset. She went to Drumcliffe after she heard about it. “The site where it was looks awful,” she told me. “I can’t do it again. You can’t replicate. You wouldn’t get the feeling into it.”

Prayer mat

It was – no, let us be hopeful, is –a soulful piece, a slender young man with a bare torso and bare feet, crouched on what McKenna describes as a kind of prayer mat or magic carpet. He smiles as he reads the carved words of the poem He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven:

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"Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

People flock by the coachload to Drumcliffe churchyard to visit the grave of the poem’s author, William Butler Yeats. Most would see the McKenna sculpture and read the poem first, as it was in a corner of the car park, beside a dry-stone wall, under tall trees that, when the wind from the Atlantic tosses them, cast their leaves down onto the figure and the words, which the sculptor also carved in braille on a plinth. The figure faced towards the old stone church towards the great, stark cliffs of Benbulben. One day, driving past, I stopped to watch the wind make a play of sunlight and cloud shadow across the mountain, and I saw the embroidered cloths spread magically before me on its slopes. The bronze man had become an integral part of this mysterious place.

I can't imagine how anyone could just cut it up. It wasn't doing anyone any harm

McKenna talked about how she imagined the piece, thinking about the poem and its exhortation to “tread softly”. The figure expressed vulnerability, human fragility. “We all have something wonderful we want to give, but our fear is that it will be rejected,” she said. “The man was on tiptoes. He looked like he could easily be knocked over.”

She spoke of the young Buddhist man who modelled for her. Also, sadly, of another young man who helped her to make the piece, and who was, a few years later, killed in a road accident. “He is in the piece, too,” she said. It took six months to make, involving laborious and intricate processes with wood, wax, clay, bronze and stone. “It is like a person,” McKenna said. “I can’t imagine how anyone could just cut it up. It wasn’t doing anyone any harm.”

Destruction

It was not, however, her first experience of destruction. McKenna's best-known sculpture is of women resting from shopping beside the Ha'penny Bridge on Dublin's quays. Its proper name is Meeting Place but it is fondly known as "the hags with the bags". Her own favourite piece, however, is in Sligo's Hazelwood, on the shores of Lough Gill. This is called The Wood Gatherer and was modelled on an old woman the sculptor, as a child, used to watch from the window of her classroom. Someone tried to set it alight, and later someone chopped off its head. A few years ago someone stole the plinth from beside the Drumcliffe figure. It was found tossed into a ditch near Glencar waterfall. McKenna is not the only one whose work has been vandalised and stolen. It is, she said, all too common.

McKenna is a great though undersung sculptor who quietly continues to practise her difficult art despite the difficulty of making any kind of a living from it. She has a keen sense of human solidarity. One of her Leitrim pieces, in stainless steel, was inspired by her thoughts about refugees. It is a big, open book carved with the old phrase “Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine” (in the shelter of each other we live). We need our artists to remind us of this. We need their work to be enabled, protected and respected.