“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” is Hamilton Gallery’s Invited Artists Exhibition for 2019. The exhibition features work by 129 artists and is themed around the eponymous W B Yeats poem, in the context of Ireland’s Decade of Commemoration .

This is the fifth of 10 Blog posts cataloging the work of the exhibition alongside notes from the participating artists.

These posts are made in September 2019 to coincide with the showing of the exhibition at Ireland’s US Consulate Offices, Park Avenue New York.

III

Some moralist or mythological poet

Compares the solitary soul to a swan;

I am satisfied with that,

Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,

Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,

An image of its state;

The wings half spread for flight,

The breast thrust out in pride

Whether to play, or to ride

Those winds that clamour of approaching night.

A man in his own secret meditation

Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made

In art or politics;

Some Platonist affirms that in the station

Where we should cast off body and trade

The ancient habit sticks,

And that if our works could

But vanish with our breath

That were a lucky death,

For triumph can but mar our solitude.

…. from Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen by W B Yeats