If Auden was right that ?mad Ireland? hurt Yeats into poetry, then Yeats lucked out. It hurt Roseanne Clear into the asylum, for decades.
Roseanne is the central character in Sebastian Barry?s latest novel, ?The Secret Scripture,? which charts her path through the violent upheavals of Ireland?s past century. Still institutionalized at age 100 and scribbling her life story on scavenged paper, she uses Auden?s very word ? hurt ? at the outset of her tale. It?s not the only sign that Barry has Yeats on his mind. Roseanne was a great beauty in her time, as was her mother; both lives are pitted by despair and quite possibly incarnate the ?terrible beauty? Yeats saw born in the Easter uprising of 1916