Page:Yeats The tower.pdf/117



read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang.

The persons mentioned are associated by legend, story and tradition with the neighbourhood of Thoor Ballylee or Ballylee Castle, where the poem was written. Mrs. French lived at Peterswell in the eighteenth century and was related to Sir Jonah Barrington, who described the incident of the ear and the trouble that came of it. The peasant beauty and the blind poet are Mary Hynes and Raftery, and the incident of the man drowned in Cloone Bog is recorded in my Celtic Twilight. Hanrahan's