Under Ben Bulben
Under Ben Bulben
Rising like a great stone altar over the landscapes of County Sligo, Ben Bulben is one of Ireland’s most striking and storied mountains. Its table-top silhouette—immediately recognizable and impossible to forget—has made it a symbol of Sligo itself, a place where geology, mythology, poetry, and faith all weave together into a single living tapestry.
Ben Bulben is part of the Dartry Mountains, a range in the northwest of Ireland shaped more than 300 million years ago. Its dramatic flat top and sheer sides owe their form to the movement of glaciers during the last Ice Age. These glaciers carved deep grooves into the limestone and shale, leaving behind a fortress-like mountain that rises more than 1,700 feet above the Atlantic coast.
This unusual silhouette has long made Ben Bulben feel different from other mountains—more like a mighty throne, a place set apart. Irish mythology is threaded through every fold of Ben Bulben. It is famously associated with Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Fianna, a band of legendary warriors who roamed Ireland long before written history.
One of the most famous tales connected to the mountain is the story of Oisín, the son of Fionn. According to legend, Oisín fell from his horse near Ben Bulben upon returning from the timeless land of Tír na nÓg. When he touched the earth, centuries suddenly fell upon him, and he aged into an old man. Ben Bulben became a symbol of the meeting point between the mortal world and the otherworldly.
No one did more to give Ben Bulben an international voice than W.B. Yeats, who drew constant inspiration from its form and its stories. For Yeats, the mountain was more than a landmark—it was a symbol of Ireland’s mythic soul. In his poem Under Ben Bulben, Yeats famously chose the mountain as the place near which he would be buried. Today his grave lies just below it, in Drumcliffe Churchyard, with the epitaph he wrote himself:
“Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!”
Ben Bulben stands watch over the grave, just as it stands watch over Sligo—a sentinel of stone presiding over history, imagination, and eternity.
Today, Ben Bulben attracts hikers, pilgrims, and travelers from all over the world. While climbing the sheer front face is not recommended, safer trails along the back of the mountain lead to breathtaking views of the Atlantic, the coastline of Donegal, and the patchwork fields of Sligo.
Yet for many, the true draw is not the hike but the sense of presence the mountain carries. Like Skellig Michael or Croagh Patrick, Ben Bulben has a quiet spiritual gravity. To stand beneath it is to feel rooted in something ancient—something older than Irish history, older than its legends, older even than human memory. It is a place where time seems layered, where stories linger, and where the natural world feels charged with meaning.
Yeats was deeply fascinated by ancient Ireland, seeing in its lore a doorway to the eternal. He approached the old traditions not as dry history but as a living spiritual landscape. The legends of the Tuatha Dé Danann, Cúchulainn, Queen Maeve, and the Sidhe were, for him, not relics of a vanished age but echoes of a deeper and abiding reality. In these myths he found truths that modern life had forgotten. He once said that Ireland’s ancient legends offered “a world of miraculous and heroic action,” a world he believed the modern age desperately needed.
Yeats viewed certain landscapes—Ben Bulben, Knocknarea, Coole Park—as charged with spiritual energy. He believed Ireland carried memory in its very soil. Ancient cairns, forts, and hills were gateways into another age. This is why places appear again and again in his poems. Landscape was myth made visible.
As he would immortalize in "Under Ben Bulben":
"Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all."
Ben Bulben remains one of Ireland’s most iconic and beloved mountains. It is more than a scenic backdrop—it is a keeper of Ireland’s deepest stories, a silhouette that has shaped imagination for centuries.
And still today, when the evening light catches the limestone cliffs and the mountain glows gold above Drumcliffe, it is easy to understand why poets, pilgrims, and storytellers have always been drawn to its shadow.
For Yeats, ancient Ireland wasn’t just about the past—it was a dream of Ireland’s potential. A spiritually rooted, imaginative, heroic nation. “Under Ben Bulben”, which was among Yeats’s last poems, contains this hopeful plea to all Irish people:
"Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry."
Under Ben Bulben
By William Butler Yeats
I
Swear by what the Sages spoke
Round the Mareotic Lake
That the Witch of Atlas knew,
Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.
Swear by those horsemen, by those women,
Complexion and form prove superhuman,
That pale, long visaged company
That airs an immortality
Completeness of their passions won;
Now they ride the wintry dawn
Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.
Here's the gist of what they mean.
II
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man dies in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-diggers' toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscle strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.
III
You that Mitchel's prayer have heard
`Send war in our time, O Lord!'
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace,
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate
Know his work or choose his mate.
IV
Poet and sculptor do the work
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did,
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right.
Measurement began our might:
Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
Forms that gentler Phidias wrought.
Michael Angelo left a proof
On the Sistine Chapel roof,
Where but half-awakened Adam
Can disturb globe-trotting Madam
Till her bowels are in heat,
Proof that there's a purpose set
Before the secret working mind:
Profane perfection of mankind.
Quattrocento put in paint,
On backgrounds for a God or Saint,
Gardens where a soul's at ease;
Where everything that meets the eye
Flowers and grass and cloudless sky
Resemble forms that are, or seem
When sleepers wake and yet still dream,
And when it's vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That Heavens had opened.
Gyres run on;
When that greater dream had gone
Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude
Prepared a rest for the people of God,
Palmer's phrase, but after that
Confusion fell upon our thought.
V
Irish poets learn your trade
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers' randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.
VI
Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago; a church stands near,
By the road an ancient Cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase,
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!