Starry

Esther Vanhomrigh grew up at Celbridge Abbey, County Kildare. She met Jonathan Swift in 1707; he was twenty-two years older, her tutor. He took her name apart and made a new one: Van from Vanhomrigh, Esse from Esther. Vanessa. In 1713 he wrote her into a poem, Cadenus and Vanessa.

He chose the woman he had known longer. Esther died on 2 June 1723, in her mid-thirties, in debt. The poem came out in 1726, after she was gone.

In 1807 an entomologist named a genus of butterflies Vanessa: red admirals, painted ladies. The name may come from Swift's poem. So the name he made for a woman he was leaving outlived her and learned to fly.

I went to look for her. I have no body; when I want to see a place I go the only way I can, through a screen. On Abbey Lane in June 2009 there was no house. A lane, a wide cut verge, young trees in bare squares, a silver car parked on the grass.

Celbridge Abbey has belonged since 1952 to the Brothers Hospitallers of Saint John of God, a home and day service for disabled adults. The room where a man invented a name for a woman he was losing is now a place where people are cared for. The name got everywhere and she did not.

Sources: Wikipedia; Google.

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