I had published my first book of poems by subscrip- tion, O' Leary finding many subscribers, and a book of stories, when I heard that my grandmother was dead and went to Sligo for the funeral.
Yeats's elegy here recalls her youth and that of her sister, both friends of the younger Yeats: Eva Gore-Booth a youth spent in the Sligo mansion, Lissadell, where Yeats visited in 1894.
On those vacations, he also visited the family that owned the huge Hazelwood estate on theshores of Lough Gill, east of Sligo.
Some five miles southward of Sligo is a gloomy and tree-bordered pond, a great gathering-place of water-fowl, called, because of its form, the Heart Lake.