Happy birthday – to William Butler Yeats

Here’s the post I wrote about him for National Poetry Month – lots of great quotes from and about him.

From memory now! And when I hear this, in my head – I always hear the recitation from the Clancy Brothers Carnegie Hall album … I get goosebumps every time I hear the “He bore her away in his arms” part … so passionate!

O’Driscoll drove with a song
The wild duck and the drake
From the tall and the tufted reeds
Of the drear Heart Lake.

And he saw how the reeds grew dark
At the coming of night-tide,
And dreamed of the long dim hair
Of Bridget his bride.

He heard while he sang and dreamed
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.

And he saw young men and young girls
Who danced on a level place,
And Bridget his bride among them,
With a sad and a gay face.

The dancers crowded about him
And many a sweet thing said,
And a young man brought him red wine
And a young girl white bread.

But Bridget drew him by the sleeve
Away from the merry bands,
To old men playing at cards
With a twinkling of ancient hands.

The bread and the wine had a doom,
For these were the host of the air;
He sat and played in a dream
Of her long dim hair.

He played with the merry old men
And thought not of evil chance,
Until one bore Bridget his bride
Away from the merry dance.

He bore her away in his arms,
The handsomest young man there,
And his neck and his breast and his arms
Were drowned in her long dim hair.

O’Driscoll scattered the cards
And out of his dream awoke:
Old men and young men and young girls
Were gone like a drifting smoke;

But he heard high up in the air
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.

To those of you who know that Clancy Brothers album – you’ll know the special-ness of that recording.

William Butler Yeats. It is fitting that today, of all days, is WB Yeats’ birthday.

The O’Malley children were made to memorize Yeats’ epitaph as part of our weekly allowance ritual. Say Yeats’ epitaph, get a dime!!

Cast a cold eye
On life on Death
Horseman pass by

Once more for good luck!

Cast a cold eye
On life on Death
Horseman pass by

When we visited his grave in Ireland, as kids, we all felt kind of amazed that … it was REAL. That the epitaph we had been rattling off since we were toddlers actually existed out in the world.

Here’s a biography of Yeats, Nobel prize winner in 1923.

Yeats, as a poet, has always been one of my favorites (even with the “cloud-pale eyelids” balderdash), 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 Playboy of the Western World. Synge, as a young man, was a floundering artist bohemian type – until Yeats got a hold of him, and told him to go stay on the Aran Islands for a while, to discover the real Irish people. The result? A revolution in Irish theatre.

I had a conversation once with the doppelganger about “greatest poems of the 20th century” and we discussed Sailing to Byzantium, Among Schoolchildren, and The Second Coming. We said any list of “greatest poems of the 20th century” that DIDN’T include at least one of those poems was not a list to be taken seriously in the slightest. “The Second Coming” is quoted (and mis-appropriated, more often than not) and quoted again … by people who want to use it for their own ends. It’s a dark ominous crystal ball. Written in 1919 – when the world had already become familiar with horror – a horror of a kind never before seen on earth – the poem predicts the chaos of the 20th century.

“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?

Of course, there is also the Maud Gonne factor that must be considered.

Some quotes from Mr. Yeats:

“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 – it’s from one of his poems. I feel the same way about my life, and my friends.

Words to live by:

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.”

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.

Speaking of epitaphs, you can’t get any better or more eloquent than Auden’s stunning poem in memory of Yeats:

In Memory of W.B. Yeats
by Auden

I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

And lastly, a poem that has great personal meaning for me – especially today, of all days:

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 William Butler Yeats.

Imitate him if you dare.