“I think putting Yeats to rock’n’roll and doing it for 20 songs is radical.”

Wonderful piece about setting poems from famous poets to music, in particular Yeats. The focus of the piece is on The Waterboys (especially Mike Scott) who has been determined to put Yeats’s stuff to music, and has been doing so for years.

I own Fisherman’s Blues (an album by the Waterboys) which has the haunting version of Yeats’s “The Stolen Child” on it – a poem I will always have great affection for because we went to that spot in Ireland, as kids, with the little waterfall in the woods, and “The Stolen Child” on a plaque right there – and there was something about it: the setting, plus the poem – that just made it come alive to me. Not to mention the haunting refrain:

For the world’s more feel of weeping than you can understand.

There I was, in Ireland, as a 14 year old pudgy teenager, and I feverishly copied down the entire poem, standing there in the woods, as my family wandered around, because I knew I wanted to have it with me. I NEEDED to have it with me. There was no Google. Naturally, with a father like mine, there were multiple copies of said poem back home – and while it is certainly not considered Yeats’s greatest, it had a real impact on me back then, and I respect it for that. I entered into the poem. And to this day, I can never read that poem without picturing that spot in Ireland, the green woods, the small path, and the tall thin eerie waterfall. They are inextricably linked.

The Waterboys put “The Stolen Child” to music (audio clip below the jump). And it was years after my expereince in the woods in Ireland when I heard their version of the Yeats poem, but to me: it captures what it feels like there, and what the poem feels like, its tremendous sadness, loss, grief, and also an eerie quality – like the Pied Piper leading the children away forever from their homeland. I love the recording.

Back to The Waterboys. Read the article above. Mike Scott, frontman for The Waterboys is I guess what you would call a “Yeats geek” (he calls himself an “archivist”)- and he is now working on a larger project, more extended, and they’re doing a concert at the Abbey Theatre (that Yeats helped form back in the day), and it’s all very exciting. There will be a new album of all of these live concerts – called Appointment with Mr. Yeats. Very exciting.

Funny: his last comment in the article sort of dovetails with my thoughts on “intimidation” that I’ve been bandying about lately. Writers who intimidate. The ones you love above all else. The ones who make you feel it’s useless to even write at all. Here is Mike Scott wrestling with that influence, as a way to honor him, but also as a way to re-contextualize the work of a poet who died in 1939. It’s beautiful. Scott states, “I can’t be intimidated.”

I really look forward to An Appointment with Mr. Yeats.

THE STOLEN CHILD (by WB Yeats – and covered by The Waterboys on Fisherman’s Blues)

WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
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.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray 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 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 more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
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.

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.