Sinéad O’Connor's Love of W. B. Yeats Shaped Her Life and This Fan-Favorite Song

The late singer's debut single was as a literary as it was lovesick.

In her 2021 biography, Rememberings, Sinead O’Connor wrote:

I love Yeats’s poems… they’re like music but they open up a different sky, the one that’s inside me... There isn’t a scary spinning universe outside me; there’s a misted olden-days sitting room inside me, with a huge gray marble fireplace. Yeats is out of his mind there, writing ‘Easter, 1916,’ about the tragic uprising by Irish Republicans against the British. Nobody is ... laughing now is what I wrote on my test in answer to the question ‘What was the poet saying?’

O’Connor’s marvelous account of her interactions with one of Yeats’ most famous poems is heartening stuff: this is what poets hope their work can do. It’s moving to know that O’Connor felt poetry was helping to “open up a different sky” inside her. That’s what good art does more broadly, but the speaking voice, interiority, and intimate rhetorical distance of poetry and song are supercharged in this realm.

The late singer’s debut single, “Troy,” from her 1987 album The Lion and the Cobra, takes its inspiration from a different Yeats poem and is characteristic of O’Connor’s literary mind.