Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

82 experience had been the happiest period of his life, and a friend who met him at that time commented that Gregory evidently meant this: ‘To a man with his power of standing up to danger – which must mean enjoying it – war must have intensified his life as nothing else could; he got a grip of it that he could not through art or love.’ 139 Gregory and Yeats W.B.Yeats was a great friend and close colleague of Lady Gregory, Robert’s mother, and was a regular and often long-term house-guest at Coole Park. For Robert, sometimes too long-term; and by the First World War he had had more than enough of Yeats’ presence at his home. Nevertheless, after Robert’s death and at Lady Gregory’s prompting, 140 Yeats memorialised him in the writing of four poems: ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’, ‘In memory of Major Robert Gregory’, ‘An Irish airman foresees his death’, and ‘Reprisals’. The last of these was withheld, at Lady Gregory’s request, until after Yeats’ death. So at least, this is one of the bullet-points at the start of this chapter that is incontrovertibly accurate. It is the third of these poems, a single verse of 16 lines, that is best remembered today. It contains no express mention of Robert Gregory, and for that reason it is ‘An Irish airman’ rather than ‘Robert Gregory’ who is known through the poem today. Or, in the happy words of his Cricket Europe entry it is through this poem that Gregory ‘is known, if not by name, to generations of poetry enthusiasts and school students – not always the same thing.’ 141 All four poems can be readily found in anthologies or on the internet. I have neither the space nor the expertise to discuss them here, nor to assess whether what they imply about Robert Gregory’s life and attitudes was accurate, or were just the musings of a poet seeking to present wider truths than merely the attitudes of one man. However, for all that Yeats was well acquainted with Gregory before the War, and for all the intrinsic merits of the poems as poetry, my suspicion is that they should not necessarily be taken at face value as giving us an unqualified insight into the character of Robert Gregory himself. 142 But has any other first-class cricketer ever inspired such a number of poems from such a distinguished poet? Summing up If ever a man’s life contained enough material for a full-length biography, it was surely Robert Gregory’s. Into a mere 36 years and 8 months he crammed a wide range of highly diverse activities, and moreover achieved a considerable degree of success at pretty much all of them; and his memory is further enshrined through four poems written in his honour 139 Henry Lamb RA, quoted in Robert Gregory 1881-1918: A Centenary Tribute . 140 There is much more on the background to the writing and reception of these poems in the essay by James Pethica cited earlier. 141 I gather that in practice this poem is not now, and has not been in the past, part of the regular syllabus for all Irish students, but that those who have studied Yeats in any depth will certainly be familiar with it. 142 James Pethica’s essay addresses this point further. In the Wickets