WB Yeats

[sandandfoam]

There's nothing that Yeats wrote that I don't like.
My favourite poem is a very short one,

Gratitude to Unknown Instructors
What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.

My favourite lines come from The Stolen Child -

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

I love being outside and sometimes lines by Yeats just appear in my mind. He speaks to me like no other poet.

 

[doppelganger]

Great ones, Stephen.

My favorite is also a short one,

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By his dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
How can anybody, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins, engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

 

[Guitar's Cry]

Stolen Child, all the way!

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's morefully of weeping than you can understand.

I highly recommend the Loreena Mckennit song: YouTube - Stolen Child

Did you know Yeats was a member of the Golden Dawn, and was none too friendly with Aleister Crowley?

 

[Melancholy]

I first heard A Yeates poem in a film some years back and that is how I looked into more of his poetry.
Heres the poem that started me liking Yeates.

The Second Coming [SIZE=-1]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;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?[/SIZE]

 

[sandandfoam]

Did you know Yeats was a member of the Golden Dawn, and was none too friendly with Aleister Crowley?

No I didn't, but I'd like to. Tell us more please.

 

[Guitar's Cry]

No I didn't, but I'd like to. Tell us more please.

From Wikipedia:

During 1885, Yeats was involved in the formation of the Dublin Hermetic Order. The society held its first meeting on 16 June, with Yeats acting as its chairman. The same year, the Dublin Theosophical lodge was opened in conjunction with Brahmin Mohini Chatterjee, who traveled from the Theosophical Society in London to lecture. Yeats attended his first séance the following year. He later became heavily involved with the Theosophical Society and with hermeticism, particularly with the eclectic Rosicrucianism of the Golden Dawn. During séances held from 1912, a spirit calling itself "Leo Africanus" apparently claimed to be Yeats's Daemon or anti-self, inspiring some of the speculations in Per Amica Silentia Lunae.[25] He was admitted into the Golden Dawn in March 1890 and took the magical motto Daemon est Deus inversus—translated as Devil is God inverted or A demon is a god reflected.[26] He was an active recruiter for the sect's Isis-Urania temple, and brought in his uncle George Pollexfen, Maud Gonne, and Florence Farr. Although he reserved a distaste for abstract and dogmatic religions founded around personality cults, he was attracted to the type of people he met at the Golden Dawn.[27] He was involved in the Order's power struggles, both with Farr and Macgregor Mathers, but was most notably involved when Mathers sent Aleister Crowley to repossess Golden Dawn paraphernalia during the "Battle of Blythe Road." After the Golden Dawn ceased and splintered into various offshoots, Yeats remained with the Stella Matutina until 1921.[28]

I honestly don't know why, but I have read in various sources that Yeats and Crowley were not on the best of terms. But then, Crowley often held grudges.

Yeats and one of his wives also practiced automatic writing, which is letting a "spirit" control your hand as you write.

 

[sandandfoam]

I read this tonight, I think it's great.

Memory
One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

 

[Melissa G]

I recall Yeats questioning his own beliefs, metaphysics and concluding that if the magical world he obviously believed in didn't exist, one was left with ' the foul rag and bone shop of the heart'.

Melissa g

 

[rhys]

Yeats was at once a marvelous poet and a remarkably silly man, I think. So was Pound, and so was Eliot, really. The fact that someone is good with words doesn't make them good at thinking, I reckon. You wouldn't expect opera singers to be good at rugby, which is about equivalent.

 

[sandandfoam]

Yeats was at once a marvelous poet and a remarkably silly man, I think. So was Pound, and so was Eliot, really. The fact that someone is good with words doesn't make them good at thinking, I reckon. You wouldn't expect opera singers to be good at rugby, which is about equivalent.

Whether he was good at thinking or not is aside the point and impossible to determine. What is clear to me is that he captures some remarkable things in his poetry. That's enough, and more.

 

[rhys]

Whether he was good at thinking or not is aside the point and impossible to determine. What is clear to me is that he captures some remarkable things in his poetry. That's enough, and more.

Well yes, sure - otherwise he wouldn't be a great poet. But it is only in the poetry that we look for the remarkable things.

 

[sandandfoam]

Well yes, sure - otherwise he wouldn't be a great poet. But it is only in the poetry that we look for the remarkable things.

Who suggested that anyone look elsewhere ?

 

[rhys]

Who suggested that anyone look elsewhere ?

I was thinking of the references to Crowley and to the Golden Dawn - to which we might add the stuff suggested by his wife's automatic writing. The danger is that people should suppose the great verse validates belief in all that (though if people want to believe it anyway, fine).

 

[RonPrice]

W.B. Yeats writes that: "the more a poet rids his verse of heterogeneous knowledge and irrelevant analysis, and purifies his mind with elaborate art, the more does the little ritual of his verse resemble the great ritual of Nature, and become mysterious and inscrutable. He becomes, as all the great mystics have believed, a vessel of the creative power of God."1


My poetry, in contrast, is filled with heterogeneous knowledge, much analysis and has little of the purification that comes from elaborate art. In contrast, too, my poetry is, as far as is possible for me and as much as I can make it, neither inscrutable nor mysterious, but rather simple and straightforward. As to whether I have become a vessel of the creative power of God, I would certainly like to think this is true. But certitude in such a matter goes hand in hand with doubt.–Ron Price with thanks to 1W.B. Yeats in W.B. Yeats: Essays and Introductions, MacMillan, London, 1971(1961), pp. 201-202.


the white light of noon,
the heaviness of woods,
the golden light of dawn,
the redness of sunset and
the place colours, delicate
silence, the low murmurs
of cloudy country days
when the plough is in the
earth and the grey sky
darkening towards sunset:
I would praise all of these
things as I would praise
God in granting me the
hidden gift that has given
rise to all this poetry and
prose whatever its quality,
whatever its mysterious
origins and utterly
inscrutable ending.


Ron Price 8 August 2008