William Butler Yeats.
The O’Malley children were made to memorize Yeats’ epitaph as part of our weekly allowance ritual. Say Yeat’s epitaph, get a dime!! Such were the rules in our house. Nothing, and I say NOTHING, could obliterate that epitaph from my memory:
Cast a cold eye
On life on Death
Horseman pass by
Uhm … where’s my dime, Dad?
Here’s a biography of Yeats, Nobel prize winner in 1923.
So much to say, so little time. Yeats, as a poet, has always been one of my favorites, but what truly inspires me is his work in Irish theatre, and the creation of the Abbey. An amazing story. His Nobel lecture was on the Irish Dramatic Movement. I wrote a big long post about his nurturing of John Synge, author of The Playboy of the Western World
Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” has always frightened and enthralled me. It’s like a nightmare. A quiet stealthy nightmare. Or a dark ominous crystal ball that shows awful things approaching and yet you still can’t look away.
“The Second Coming”
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 the 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?
And here … now … a plethora of Yeats quotes. I end with one of my favorites.
“I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.”
“Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.”
“The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.”
“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.”
“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.”
“And say my glory was I had such friends.”
Yes. That last one really moves me. I feel the same way about my life, and my friends.
Never give all the heart
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy. Kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
I also love love LOVE his poem to Jonathan Swift where he writes: “Imitate him if you dare.” Totally. A warning to those who think it might be easy.
Swift’s Epitaph
SWIFT has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.
And lastly, a poem that has great personal meaning for me:
The wild swans at Coole
THE trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
Happy birthday to the incomparable William Butler Yeats. Imitate him if you dare.
Red = At first glance, I thought that was a picture of Burt Lancaster. Have a wonderful day, Terry
hahaha! It does look like him!
Hi Sheila,
Thanks for writing this tribute! Here are a few of my Yeatsean touchstones.
I, too, await
The hour of thy great wind of love and hate.
When shall the stars be blown about the sky,
Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?
Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,
Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?
(from “The Secret Rose”)
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
(from “Sailing to Byzantium”)
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
(from “Among School Children”)
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.
(from “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”)
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
(from “Byzantium”)
Thought is a garment and the soul’s a bride
That cannot in that trash and tinsel hid:
Hatred of God may bring the soul to God.
(from “Ribh considers Christian Love insufficient”)
but man’s life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
(from “Meru”)
You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard
‘Send war in our time, O Lord!’
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace,
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate
Know his work or choose his mate.
(from “Under Ben Bulben”)
You KNOW my favorite is “When You Are Old”. Unrequited love. . .ah.
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.
Have you heard the Chieftains version of “Never Give All the Heart”? Brenda Fricker does the voice over Annua, (sp?) the Irish choir. GORgeous.
Lisa – YES!!! I have heard it and it just is inCREDIBLE. You’re so so right.
I sit next to an ex-journalist at work. Thus, I’m stealing Yeats’ quote about journalists for my whiteboard “Quote of the Week.” There’s nothing quite like the boredom-killing method of stirring up some intra-office antagonism. Thanks!
Nathan – awesome! glad to be of help. :)
Actually, at first glance I thought it was Burgess Meredith..
“And say my glory was I had such friends.”
Hi, Sheila,
What piece is the above quote from? I saw it etched on a pair of wine glasses once, but could never quite find the quote within the WBY writings I was researching.
I like your blog, btw. A lot.
Bob – it is from his poem The Municipal Gallery Re-visited:
I
Around me the images of thirty years:
An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side;
Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars,
Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride;
Kevin O’Higgins’ countenance that wears
A gentle questioning look that cannot hide
A soul incapable of remorse or rest;
A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed;
II
An Abbot or Archbishop with an upraised hand
Blessing the Tricolour. ‘This is not,’ I say,
‘The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland
The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.’
Before a woman’s portrait suddenly I stand,
Beautiful and gentle in her Venetian way.
I met her all but fifty years ago
For twenty minutes in some studio.
III
Heart-smitten with emotion I Sink down,
My heart recovering with covered eyes;
Wherever I had looked I had looked upon
My permanent or impermanent images:
Augusta Gregory’s son; her sister’s son,
Hugh Lane, ‘onlie begetter’ of all these;
Hazel Lavery living and dying, that tale
As though some ballad-singer had sung it all;
IV
Mancini’s portrait of Augusta Gregory,
‘Greatest since Rembrandt,’ according to John Synge;
A great ebullient portrait certainly;
But where is the brush that could show anything
Of all that pride and that humility?
And I am in despair that time may bring
Approved patterns of women or of men
But not that selfsame excellence again.
V
My mediaeval knees lack health until they bend,
But in that woman, in that household where
Honour had lived so long, all lacking found.
Childless I thought, ‘My children may find here
Deep-rooted things,’ but never foresaw its end,
And now that end has come I have not wept;
No fox can foul the lair the badger swept –
VI
(An image out of Spenser and the common tongue).
John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought
All that we did, all that we said or sang
Must come from contact with the soil, from that
Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.
We three alone in modern times had brought
Everything down to that sole test again,
Dream of the noble and the beggar-man.
VII
And here’s John Synge himself, that rooted man,
‘Forgetting human words,’ a grave deep face.
You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.
That’s quoted in a movie, too, but for the life of me, I can’t remember which one.
Grrrr.
Wonderful, thanks so much!