Sir - How predictable that a unionist like Mr David Trimble should interpret Yeats's Lake Isle of Inisfree "against the grain", whereas Mr John Hume's reading of the poem was "idealistic, aspirational and visionary", according to Prof Geraldine Higgins of Atlanta, Georgia at the Yeats Summer School (The Irish Times, July 31st).
The only problem with this neat dichotomy is that it was not Mr Trimble who first used the line "peace comes dropping slow" for political purposes, but the nationalist Mr Albert Reynolds. My recollection is that this line was used, not once but repeatedly, by Mr Reynolds at the time of the first IRA ceasefire in 1994.
In the worst case of gratuitous abuse inflicted on a harmless line of poetry in many a year, he used it as the clinching argument to silence all qualms as to whether a "complete" ceasefire meant the same as a "permanent" one and whether there would be an insistence on decommissioning before negotiations could begin. Looking for too much peace too soon might upset delicate republican sensitivities and set back the process.
Evidently nationalist stereotypes still flourish in the bee-loud glade where "international" summer school devotees gather to contemplate their Irishness. - Yours etc.,
Dermot Meleady, Dublin 3.