['I Walked Among the Seven Woods of Coole']

The poem ‘Under the Moon’ was completed on 8 Sep., and for the rest of that month WBY was at Coole with AG, working intermittently with GM on plans for their collaborative play Diarmuid and Grania. It was probably during these weeks that this poem was composed. There is, also, an aspect of the poem which celebrates the seven woods as a place where the supernatural – like the folklore that is its living record – has not quite vanished from the earth. The poet's privacy, then, is a state where deeper levels of privacy can be intimated in the Coole Park demesne: what is hidden in Eden is partially glimpsed there, in the voice of a poet who is himself conscious of being hidden from the world's gaze in a protected, private environment. There are many respects in which the poem, though dedicatory and specific in nature, is also a work of WBY's own artistic self-examination and dedication.