User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats #1), W.B. Yeats, Richard J. Finneran (Editor)
To a child dancing in the wind
Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of the wind?تاریخ نخستین خوانش: بیست و نهم آگوست سال2013میلادی
عنوان: دریانوردی به سمت بیزانس؛ نویسنده و شاعر: ویلیام باتلر ییتس؛ مترجم: رزا جمالی؛ در112ص؛ موضوع: شعر شاعران ایرلند - سده19م
نقل یک شعر (میدانم
که تقدیرم را خواهم دید
جایی میان ابرها آن بالا
میجنگم با آنها اما کینه ای در دل ندارم
حفظ میکنم آنها را اما دوست ندارمشان
سرزمین من گذر روستایی کلتارتان است
هموطنان من، مردمانِ بیچاره ی کلتارتان
و شاید که در انتها نبازند
و رهاشان میکنم شادمانتر از پیش
نه قانونیست
و نه وظیفه ای
چیزی مرا به جنگ حکم نداده
نه مردانی عادی و نه گروهی به شادی
این میلیست تنها به شادمانی
که ما را به آشوب ابرها برد
همه را نگه داشته ام من
همه را به خاطر میآورم
سالهایی که میآیند
سالهایی که در آن نفسهامان حرام شده
این مرگ را با زندگی میسنجم و نگه داشته ام)؛ پایان
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 21/04/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Rating: really liked it
"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately."
This quote from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own comes to my mind when I sit down to have a closer look at one of my favourite poets. For it wasn’t Yeats I was searching for when I went through my shelves today. It was Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe’s classic novel. Seeing Yeats in the shelf, however, I remembered that the title is from his famous poem “The Second Coming”, and I opened the earmarked poetry collection, full of post-its and comments. And sure enough, there was a pink post-it showing the way to the lines I wanted:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;...”
Knowing the story of Things Fall Apart, it makes my heart break to think of the proud falcon in his natural habitat, suddenly threatened by the falconer with his sly methods and superior weapons, killing out of pleasure - a careless sportsmanship. This story in my mind takes a leap to present times, seeing it is still just as relevant, in many places, and I am mourning the contemporary falcon’s lost spirit in a world of falconers, destroying things because they can. The centre cannot hold.
Reading on, I get curious to see where all my sticky notes indicate that my attention was sharpened, and of course, I find my handwriting next to a poem on a young man going to war. How could I not, reading this the last time in conjunction with The Poems Of Wilfred Owen?
“An Irish Airman Foresees his Death
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
[...]”
The sad truth of World War I, best expressed maybe in poetry or novels like All Quiet on the Western Front. And as a counterpoint, with a sticky note in a different colour:
“On Being Asked For A War Poem
I think it better that in times like these
A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.”
I remember pondering on the conundrum of accepting these lines as perfect truth while also being grateful that Yeats had not remained silent after all, that he had expressed his thoughts over and over again, in dramatic, long, narrative poems and short, lyrical ones, in stories of common people and kings and queens, in real-life poems and fairy tales. He had not been silent at all, but he resisted the command to produce poetry for politicians, to shout out the ancient heroic ideal “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” before sending soldiers to living hell.
He wrote his own truth, and that of the island he loved and the culture he cherished. To review all his poems, and make them justice, would be a life time’s work. My favourite love poem is to be found in his collection as well:
“When You are Old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”
I can’t read that often enough. “The pilgrim soul in you” sends a shiver down my spine every single time. Before I close the collection, my eye catches a poem that is not earmarked yet, that I must have read without thinking much about it last time. But now, it yells out its truth to me in a disturbing way:
“Why should not Old Men be Mad?”
Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream
Climb on a wagonette and scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell,
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.”
It may be a sign of me getting older that I identify more and more with the disillusion of experience, but at the same time, reading poetry like this makes me feel passionately involved in life still!
Yeats is a timeless treat!
Rating: really liked it
I don’t typically go for poetry, but I’m working on a project where a cursory understanding of Irish literature is helpful. I enjoyed this collection, although I must admit that much of it was beyond me at some level. This collection includes a variety of Yeats’ styles – lyrical, narrative, and dramatic. It also spans from 1889 to 1939.
Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild.
With a faery, hand in hand, more full of weeping than you can understand. At first, I simply read the poems and let the words wash over me. I understood a few poems and parts of others, but many are so abstract (or using older language and references) that the meaning went right past me. I was surprised to find that, on some level, I was still enjoying the prose without fully understanding the intention. But Yeats prose is so creative and artistic that I find it pleasing. I enjoyed his short early lyrical poems much more than his later dramatic epics.
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance After reading much of the book, I went back and tried to pick apart some of the poems. It required some intense thought and some deep internet searches. While this process wasn’t exactly fun, it did help me, on a novice level, to begin to appreciate his mastery. He mixes nature, Irish myths and occultism, romanticism, and politics. He spins these concepts into webs of dense allusions and compact imagery. There is such a level of abstraction, and I can’t help but wonder about his process when he wrote these. Did he start out simply and then revise the lines into deeper and deeper levels of abstraction? Did his mind (and education/background/experience) allow such creative and intricate ideas to just flow onto the paper?
All things hang, like a drop of dew Upon a blade of grass I know there are criticisms of Yeats, and yes, the poems are full of dew drops and streams and sea foam, but who cares? When you’re struggling to find beauty in the world/humanity, sometimes nature is all you can turn to. His work is also flawed in the ways that society was flawed in the late 17th century, such as chauvinism.
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams. I also understand he was a force behind the Irish Literary Revival. In the end, I’m not sure his criticism of society and politics was as effective as his pure eloquence and mastery of lyrics. A genius that created passionate, varied, and immortal poetry.
Rating: really liked it
Not everything in here works for me, but Yeats is never less than a pleasure to read. As others have remarked upon, he's what one might describe as a
proper poet: his rhythmic structure and rhymes flow off of the reading tongue—and at his best, he cannot be touched for the ariose beauty of his lyrical genius.
Before the World Was Made
If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.
What if I look upon a man
As though on my beloved,
And my blood be cold the while
And my heart unmoved?
Why should he think me cruel
Or that he is betrayed?
I'd have him love the thing that was
Before the world was made.
One of my favourites below, a lengthy verse that captures the very essence of disillusion amidst the wreckage of an apparent bounty of promise and progression. Yeats rises to the heights yet wielding the language of ash and benightment; no paens to the fey primordiality of Eire here, but rather poesy shaped with withering power:
Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen
I.
Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about. There stood
Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
An ancient image made of olive wood --
And gone are Phidias' famous ivories
And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned
Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant
From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,
Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent
On master-work of intellect or hand,
No honour leave its mighty monument,
Has but one comfort left: all triumph would
But break upon his ghostly solitude.
But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say? That country round
None dared admit, if Such a thought were his,
Incendiary or bigot could be found
To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
Or break in bits the famous ivories
Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees.
II.
When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
So the platonic Year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.
III
Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,
An image of its state;
The wings half spread for flight,
The breast thrust out in pride
Whether to play, or to ride
Those winds that clamour of approaching night.
A man in his own secret meditation
Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made
In art or politics;
Some Platonist affirms that in the station
Where we should cast off body and trade
The ancient habit sticks,
And that if our works could
But vanish with our breath
That were a lucky death,
For triumph can but mar our solitude.
The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things, to end
What my laborious life imagined, even
The half-imagined, the half-written page;
O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.
IV.
We, who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.
V.
Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked -- and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.
VI.
Violence upon the roads: violence of horses;
Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,
But wearied running round and round in their courses
All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:
Herodias' daughters have returned again,
A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;
And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
According to the wind, for all are blind.
But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.
Rating: really liked it
I have given hourlong recitations of Yeats's poems, among the easiest to recall in English; for example, his tetrameters in the late "Under Ben Bulben" which contains his epitaph. I defy you to say this aloud three times without knowing most of it by heart: "Whether man dies in his bed,/ Or the rifle knocks him dead,/ A brief parting from those dear/ Is the worst man has to fear." And his own epitaph is memorable, "Cast a cold eye/ On life, on death/ Horseman, pass by!" It is anti-conventional, since most epitaphs were written by clergy to scare the readers back to church, like this one in Pittsfield, MA: "Corruption, earth and worms/ Shall but refine this flesh..." etc. I seriously doubt the interred was consulted about that one. Yeats counters, look at this grave, and fogggetaboutit, Pass by!
By memory I still have "When you are old," his adaptation of Ronsard, "Lake Isle of Innisfree," so imitative of the water lapping the shores, in its medial caesuras, "I hear lake water lapping...Though I stand on the roadway..I shall arise and go now..." And so interesting that WBY first had a truism, "There noon is all a glimmer, and midnight a purple glow," which he reversed to the memorable, "There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon has a purple glow..." Ahh... a useful trick for writers. (My Ph.D. advisor Leonard Unger noted the influence of Meredith on Innisfree.) "The Second Coming," whose opening I said in my flight fears of landing. The problem in reciting that poem is "The worst are full of passionate intensity." I had to reduce the intensity of my aloudreading. "Sailing to Byzantium," and others.
I have also set to music seven of Yeats' poems, including "Brown Penny," "Her Anxiety," "Lullaby," and even "Crazy Jane talks to the Bishop." "Brown Penny" and "Her Anxiety" can be heard on clyp.it under FB pseudonym Alan Bruno. (Glen McKillop on Fleugel Horn.) Scroll down past my other music compositions (like Dylan Thomas's "Death Shall Have No Dominion" for SATB, cello teombone and again, Fleugel Horn) and a few nature recordings, like Yeats's "lake water lapping" at a local reservoir.
Yeats's son Michael, fathered in his late fifties, toured the US in the 70s. A friend in the Berkshires heard him recall his father mainly shooing him from the room to write or recite. Sounds accurate. (Maybe that's why Shakespeare lived in London, his kids in Stratford!)
I mentioned learning Yeats at Leonard Unger's knee, but also from Chester Anderson, Joycean and Irish specialist.
Rating: really liked it
Just looking at my bookcase and brushing off some old books covered in dust. Man how did I miss Yeats? Literary genius. 👍🐯
Rating: really liked it
Still my favourite poet of all time! Read this one cover to cover, spent heaps of time leisurely sifting through these evocative, elliptic lines of eternity. Gyres, skies, stars & wisdom ensues. The meaning, like a carefully crafted lake of silent water, tilted ever so slightly that the form is just out of your mind's reach. If these mysterious words draw you in & make you curious, perhaps this poetry collection is for you. If they repel you, perhaps Wordsworth is your kind of poet. It takes at least a Wordsworth, Blake, Ovid & perhaps Ferdowsi to all combine, creating the mastery that is Yeats. With of course the occasional rebellious spirit that's a musically gifted Morrison of mystery.
***
W.B. Yeats bought a signed 1st edition of Ulysses!
Yeat's poetry is deeply philosophical and moving. A Dialogue of Self and Soul is still a top favorite poem of all time for me.
Reference for 1st edition info:
https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/blog/...
Rating: really liked it
Okay. Cards on the table.
I'm not actually that into Yeats. I mean, he's fine, don't get me wrong. Kind of an interesting dude with his Cabalism and his Jacob Black-esque mother-to-daughter romantic transference thing.
And some of his poetry I can't deny is pretty impressive stuff: the one about wishing for the cloths of the heaven, and the second coming, and the lake isle of innisfree. All that silver apples of the moon stuff. Very nice.
But, honestly, I used to keep this on my bedside table in order to look sensitive so arty types would sleep with me.
It, uh, did the job. FIVE STARS!
Rating: really liked it
Yeats, Yeats, what can you say?
Ireland. Mysticism. Longing. Despair. PO-etry!
This is a surprisingly consistent, formidable, subtle and wide ranging
oeuvre and I'm not the only person to have overheard the suggestion that Yeats was the greatest poet of the 20th Century.
Lets not forget the influence. Not only in Ireland but in elsewhere, as part of some variation on the human cultural inheritance. As far as I can tell, there were at least three major (to my mind, anyway) poets who admitted that when they were coming up they didn't just want to be LIKE Yeats, they wanted to BE Yeats, as one of them put it.*
I mean, granted, he's insufferably emo (
He Mourns the Change That Has Come Upon Him and His Beloved, and He Wishes For The World To End). He's tripping through the daisies, twisting his ankle, breaking his glasses, while he sings to the sun. He can't get over the fact that Maude Gonne won't let him even think about taking her shirt off, but she's a unique, mercurial, assured young woman with a pilgrim soul in her, which her darling poet loves. I mean,
He Who Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,
When You Are Old,
No Second Troy,
Down By the Salley Gardens, and on and on...
And then there's this:
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun. You're right there, in a dream, in HIS dream, it's the
Song of Wandering Aengus. A whole enchanted world is created, in perfect meter and with metronomyic lullaby. You believe him, somehow, or at least you believe the story.
Do you mean to tell me that you
doubt Wandering Aengus?
Nu-uh. No way. It's in the repetition of the imagery and the phrases in the last few lines. It's the way the whole details of the story are told, unveiled, bit by bit. Just a touch, a glance, a little Keatsian faery girl, a
belle dame sans merci with a perfect alibi.
The mysticism is there, and it's hazy and, er, full of mist and glowing eyes and faery wings and stolen children and dolphins and mechanical birds in Byzantium and Helen of Troy and eternal roses and astrology and gods incarnating in the form of a swans while they fuck humans and darkness and eternity and "the murderous innocence of the sea"...ruins and secret fountains and rolling hills and caves (WBY slept in one for awhile, you country boys know how it gets when the evenings wind on endlessly under a deep summer sky) and witches and little clay-wattle huts, far from the pavement's gray, by a lazy river deep in Innisfree.
And he can get political. I mean, this was a guy whose poetry and drama were front-row-seat essential to the literary lives and times of a centuries-subjugated, colonized, demoralized, quasi-Modern nation that underwent the convulsion of the failure of the Easter Rising in his day, to mention but one event amid the caterwaul of Ireland dragging itself kicking and screaming into the 20th Century.
Yeats was a lover not a fighter, no dewy doubt about that, but he grappled with the living nightmare of history with sober eyes and a wide view of the horizon. By the way, that living nightmare bit was deliberate, ifyouknowwhatI'msayin', and rumor has it a cocky, mouthy young lad once approached the smiling public man in the streets and told him that he was too old to talk some sense into him and subsequently absconded to the continent and proceeded to write
Dubliners,
Portrait and so on and so forth...
It's not so much that WBY was afraid or unwilling to enter into the burgeoning roil and confusion of the modern world (Lightbulbs! Radios! Trench Warefare! Relativity! Quantum theory! Dada! Jazz! Ezra Pound! Girls who smoke and gleefully shag sailors and stockbrokers and poets, too, but not poor Willy Yeats, by the looks of things, much to his eternal chagrin...) and his glassy-eyed, bookish haunting of wild Ireland starts to sound more like wish fulfillment or the pleasure principle, I can't remember which. It's more that I think he played a small(ish) but significant part in a larger, more complex, historically embedded and quite bloody awful historical moment.
I mean, he had to live with praising the soldier who was married to his beloved (and screwing around on her, btw, for the record) in a stoic and bitter and ruminating poem about a failed rebellion which he definitively supported and he was big enough to bite down hard and publish the thing anyway...
No, I think it's ok to give WBY the benefit of the doubt on this one. Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry. He knew damn well that words can have consequences, just like actions, and it's all well and good to huddle up by a candle in the library and proclaim your love for a woman or for the motherland or for Freedom and Justice or whatever but it's quite something else indeed to publicly submit one's statements for the record, when everybody's listening...
All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
Did words of mine put too great strain
On that woman’s reeling brain?
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked? It takes a lot of sand to ask yourself that question.
Then there's this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXe6Ja...
How many times has this been quoted, from all over the body of the poem, particularly in places where its ominousness and austere power of facing, the apocalyptic mood that slowly spreads from word to word, from image to image...the speaker
knows all this, somehow, and he is just as overwhelmed by it as anyone else.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
'Twas it not ever thus?
Where else? You can go for days. I had a teacher for Irish lit who once remarked, quite off the cuff, that nobody gets more out of a line that WBY.
By way of demonstration:
That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tehter the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand upon his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.
That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding resides
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence. You know that feeling you get when poetry happens? That quiet, satisfied hum that you do after the poem has finished, and begins to dissipate into the air. After the visitation. That quiet, hushed, ruminating feeling. Something is happening here and you don't know what it is...
My best friend is a big fan of the show Lost. I've never seen it, myself, but it comes highly recommended and all that. The point being, he is fond of quoting the character Dexter, who is (I think) a Scottish guy given to charisma and/or eloquence or something. He's find of quoting Dexter's exultant, exuberant phrase "that's just POETRY, bruther"!
I've never heard him *actually* say it, but I think I know what he means. What it is. What he's getting at. What it's all about.
And if this stuff isn't it, then count me out of the human race.
* Now, granted, the three poets I'm thinking of (Philip Larkin, John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz, if you're keeping score at home- and you should be) were, in their ways, degenerate pathetic alcoholics and therefore their somewhat maudlin affections for WBY might have been some kind of unconscious identification or projection onto the starry-eyed, gnomic singer of ballads and player of harps and whatnot, but still. Influence is a big indicator of admiration, y'see, like imitation and flattery, especially in the notoriously competitive vineyards of literature...
Rating: really liked it
The poetry was very good but rather depressing. I believe he could have used some happy pills. I would recommend it to all however.
Enjoy and Be Blessed.
Rating: really liked it
My favourite piece of Yeats, which I've known since I was a teenager. I've never really figured out what it means, but I think it's wonderful all the same:
Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!
You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled
Upon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring
The bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing.
Beauty grown sad with its eternity
Made you of us, and of the dim grey sea.
Our long ships loose thought-woven sails and wait,
For God has bid them share an equal fate;
And when at last defeated in His wars,
They have gone down under the same white stars,
We shall no longer hear the little cry
Of our sad hearts, that may not live nor die.
Rating: really liked it
In the fall of my last year in high school, I read extensively from this book in order to prepare my fall term paper. I chose Yeats because the Clancy Brothers occasionally included readings of poems by Yeats on their records and in their concerts. Given that the Clancy Brothers were very close Bob Dylan they constituted for me an important authority.
Looking back I realized now what an anomaly Yeats was. He was a master of cadence, sound and rhyme skills that are no longer valued by English poets. No one since Yeats has written poems to be recited in taverns.
I applaud the Nobel Academy for having awarded the 2016 Literature Prize to Bob Dylan. I cannot think of any poet who loved the English language as much as he did. Yeats in some measure however small would have been one of Dylan's sources of inspiration. At a minimum Dylan would have known the Host of the Air and the other Yeats poems in the repertory of the Clancy Brothers.
To hear a masterful version of Yeats Host of the air, go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyPc6...
Rating: really liked it
This great Irish poet won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1923, and he certainly deserved it! I really enjoyed this book of his poems. My favorites are He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, The Song of Wandering Aengus, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, and The Wanderings of Oisin. I will be taking this book with me to Dublin, Ireland soon! I have missed Ireland!
Rating: really liked it
The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head:Everything he writes is beauty personified, from his love poems to his Irish mythology.
We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
Rating: really liked it
If not for The Wanderings of Oisin, this was a 2.5/5.
I think half of Yeats's poems include the word "dew." It's used so many times it actually increasingly pissed me off with each successive occurrence and almost culminated in my throwing the book across the room.
Joyce was entirely right in his criticism of Yeats.
Save for a few good poems, the rest are entirely forgettable.
