{"id":6241,"date":"2007-04-14T11:16:06","date_gmt":"2007-04-14T15:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6241"},"modified":"2022-10-12T16:37:05","modified_gmt":"2022-10-12T20:37:05","slug":"national-poetry-month-william-butler-yeats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6241","title":{"rendered":"National Poetry Month: William Butler Yeats"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wrote about my affection for this poem here<\/a> – it was just a part of my childhood because of that Clancy Brothers album … I didn’t even know it was Yeats at the time! Of course his later poems are among the greatest poems ever written – reading his stuff in chronological order last fall was one of the coolest reading experiences of my life. There is so much crap (forgive me) to get thru … but wait for it … watch him emerge … Unbelievable.<\/p>\n

This is a poem I can recite by heart. Adore it. Gives me a lump in the ol’ throat.<\/p>\n


\nThe Host of the Air<\/b><\/p>\n

O’Driscoll drove with a song
\nThe wild duck and the drake
\nFrom the tall and the tufted reeds
\nOf the drear Heart Lake.<\/p>\n

And he saw how the reeds grew dark
\nAt the coming of night-tide,
\nAnd dreamed of the long dim hair
\nOf Bridget his bride.<\/p>\n

He heard while he sang and dreamed
\nA piper piping away,
\nAnd never was piping so sad,
\nAnd never was piping so gay.<\/p>\n

And he saw young men and young girls
\nWho danced on a level place,
\nAnd Bridget his bride among them,
\nWith a sad and a gay face.<\/p>\n

The dancers crowded about him
\nAnd many a sweet thing said,
\nAnd a young man brought him red wine
\nAnd a young girl white bread.<\/p>\n

But Bridget drew him by the sleeve
\nAway from the merry bands,
\nTo old men playing at cards
\nWith a twinkling of ancient hands.<\/p>\n

The bread and the wine had a doom,
\nFor these were the host of the air;
\nHe sat and played in a dream
\nOf her long dim hair.<\/p>\n

He played with the merry old men
\nAnd thought not of evil chance,
\nUntil one bore Bridget his bride
\nAway from the merry dance.<\/p>\n

He bore her away in his arms,
\nThe handsomest young man there,
\nAnd his neck and his breast and his arms
\nWere drowned in her long dim hair.<\/p>\n

O’Driscoll scattered the cards
\nAnd out of his dream awoke:
\nOld men and young men and young girls
\nWere gone like a drifting smoke;<\/p>\n

But he heard high up in the air
\nA piper piping away,
\nAnd never was piping so sad,
\nAnd never was piping so gay.<\/p>\n

\n

“My poetry is generally written out of despair. Like Balzac, I see increasing commonness everywhere, and like Balzac I know no one who shares the premises from which I work.” — Yeats<\/i><\/p>\n

“On the third night Yeats addressed the audience before the curtain rose. If anyone had anything to say against the piece they would be welcomed at a debate which he would be glad to arrange in the theatre at some other time. He was interrupted several times. He asked the interrupters to at least listen to the play so that they would know what it was they were objecting to.” — Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh’s description of Yeats trying to handle the riots that were happening in response to Synge’s “Playboy of the Western World” – a play being put on at the Abbey Theatre<\/i><\/p>\n

“In 1875 Yeats entered the Godolphin School in Hammersmith and visited Ireland during the longer school vacations, when he stayed with the Pollexfens in County Sligo. An early poetic impulse was to change the name of his toy yacht from Sunbeam<\/i> to Moonbeam<\/i>. It was a decisive act.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets<\/i><\/p>\n

“I thought we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed of provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose.” — Yeats<\/i><\/p>\n

“This is not the huge competence of Auden, at play in the toy shop of poetic form, but mastery<\/i>, the possession of a unique rhetoric for use on a real but limited range of themes. It is a mastery so complete that it can occlude the genuinely problematic, ride over the potholes of nonsense without even sensing them. Late in life he recognizes the evasiveness of his symbols, the tendency of his verse to turn away or inward, and in the concentrated intensity of the late poems he tries to remedy this. But he has an imperfect sense of generality; he is willing to plump out a truism as truth. As his mastery increases, his art becomes less truthful. But his main concern is not – until the later poems, and even there in an attenuated spirit – truth, but the house of myth and legend, where he can become a principal tenant, where it is his voice we hear casting the spell, and where real men are reduced – or, in his mind, enlarged – to masks, figures and types useful to myth, regardless of the human reality they had.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets”<\/i><\/p>\n

“All literature created out of a conscious political aim in the long run crates weakness by creating a habit of unthinking obedience. Literature created for its own sake, for some eternal spiritual need, can be used for politics. Dante is said to have unified Italy. The more unconscious the creation, the more powerful.” — Yeats<\/i><\/p>\n

“Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind.” — Yeats<\/i><\/p>\n

“His mastery seems almost excessive.” — Richard Ellmann<\/i><\/p>\n

“… a strained and unworkable allegory about a young man and a sphinx on a rock in the sea (how did they get there? what did they eat? and so on; people think such criticisms very prosaic, but common-sense is never out of place anywhere …) but still containing fine lines and vivid imagery.” – Gerard Manley Hopkins, after reading some of Yeats’ first published verses<\/i><\/p>\n

“Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.” — Yeats<\/i><\/p>\n

“Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ has gained in prophetic power with each decade of the twentieth and now twenty-first century, from the rise of fascism and nuclear warfare to the proliferation of international terrorism. It expresses the melancholy realizatino that man, yearningly drawn to the divine, will never fully escape his bestial ancestry. The poem is modernistically unrhymed, though the first stanza plays with shadowy off-rhymes: ‘gyre’ \/ ‘falconer’ \/ ‘everywhere’; ‘hold’ \/ ‘world’ \/ ‘drowned’. It is structured instead by dramatic visuals and emblematic choreography. There are two main movements: a huge, expanding circle (the ascending falcon) and an arrowlike, linear track (the beast bound for Bethlehem). Then two smaller ones: a pendulum arc (the rocking cradle) and an exploding pinwheel (the reeling desert birds). Ideas have become design, starkly juxtaposed with the murky turbulence of elemental forces – storm, flood, drought. Hence the poem, with its horror movie finale, is as hybrid as the sphinx, who represents our buried impulses, vestiges of a past that keeps turning into the future.” — Camille Paglia, “Break, Blow, Burn”<\/i><\/p>\n

“The heavy voluptuous splendour of much of his work has yet a ghostliness as of the palace made magically of leaves. Even his heroes and beautiful women are aware of this … He never leaves us, any more than Crashaw, content with the glory alone. It calls our attention to a spirit behind and beyond, heaping high lovely, invisible things that it may show the greater beauty that can survive their crumbling into dust.” — Edward Thomas, 1909<\/i><\/p>\n

“The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.” — Yeats<\/i><\/p>\n

“In London he was active in literature and politics. One particular event in 1889 proved crucial: he met and fell in love with the fiery Republican who haunted him for the rest of his days, Maud Gonne. His biography, from 1889 until Maud Gonne’s marriage, is punctuated by the statement, ‘Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne.'” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets”<\/i><\/p>\n

“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.” — Yeats<\/i><\/p>\n

” ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst \/ Are full of passionate intensity’: these famous lines are Yeats’s anguished formulation of what seems to be an eternal principle of politics (7-8). When ‘the center cannot hold,’ neither consensus nor compromise is possible. Public debate shifts to the extremes or is overtaken by violence, which blocks incremental movement toward reciprocity and conciliation. Moderate views are ‘drowned’ out (as by the bloody tide) in strident partisanship or fanaticism. The phrase ‘passionate intensity’ suggests that, for the late Romantic Yeats, eros diverted from the personal to the political turns into a distorted lust for power. The second stanza opens in doubt and confusion: ‘Surely some revelation is at hand; \/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand. \/ The Second Coming!” (9-11). We are hearing either one voice echoing its own shocked phrases or many voices in public tumult. The book of Revelation lists the dreadful omens heralding doomsday, when Jesus will return and unlock the secrets of history. But in Yeats’s poem, Christ’s promised glory is overshadowed by a monstrous apparition from antiquity. The poet is seized by an electrifying vision: ‘a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi<\/i> \/ Troubles my sight’. It’s a collective memory, crystallizing from the repository of world myths (12-13). (“Spiritus Mundi<\/i>” is Yeats’s mystical term for “soul of the universe”.) We witness the resurrection of the pagan era, whose barbarism mirrors that of the war-torn twentieth century. Yeats sees no evidence of moral evolution over two millennia of Christianity.” — Camille Paglia, “Break, Blow, Burn”<\/i><\/p>\n

“I once got Yeats down to bed-rock on these subjects and we talked for hours. He had been talking rather wildly about the after life. Finally I asked him: ‘What do you believe happens to us immediately after death?’ He replied, ‘After a person dies, he does not realize that he is dead.’ I: ‘In what state is he?’ W.B.Y.: ‘In some half-conscious state.’ I said: ‘Like the period between waking and sleeping?’ W.B.Y.: ‘Yes.’ I: ‘How long does this state last?’ W.B.Y.: ‘Perhaps some twenty years.’ ‘And after that,’ I asked, ‘what happens next?’ He replied, ‘Again a period which is Purgaotry. The length of that period depends upon the sins of the man when he was upon this earth.’ And then again I asked: ‘And after that?’ I do not remember his actual words, but he spoke of the return of the soul to God. I said, ‘Well, it seems to me that you are hurrying us back into the great arms of the Roman Catholic Church.’ He was of course an Irish Protestant. I was bold to ask him, but his only retort was his splendid laugh.” — Lady Dorothy Wellesley<\/i><\/p>\n

“It is an entirely new thing — neither what they eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time.” — Yeats on James Joyce’s “Ulysses”<\/i><\/p>\n

“For Yeats, there was something both enviable and exemplary about the enlargement of vision and the consequent histrionic equanimity which Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines attain at the moment of their death, ‘carried beyond feeling into the aboriginal ice.’ He wanted people in real life to emulate or at least to internalize the fortitude and defiance thus manifested in tragic art.” — Seamus Heaney, 1990<\/i><\/p>\n

“Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Arran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.” — Yeats’s advice to John Synge<\/i><\/p>\n

In Memory of W.B. Yeats<\/b>
\nby Auden<\/i><\/p>\n

I
\nHe disappeared in the dead of winter:
\nThe brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
\nAnd snow disfigured the public statues;
\nThe mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
\nWhat instruments we have agree
\nThe day of his death was a dark cold day.<\/p>\n

Far from his illness
\nThe wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
\nThe peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
\nBy mourning tongues
\nThe death of the poet was kept from his poems.<\/p>\n

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
\nAn afternoon of nurses and rumours;
\nThe provinces of his body revolted,
\nThe squares of his mind were empty,
\nSilence invaded the suburbs,
\nThe current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.<\/p>\n

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
\nAnd wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
\nTo find his happiness in another kind of wood
\nAnd be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
\nThe words of a dead man
\nAre modified in the guts of the living.<\/p>\n

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
\nWhen the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
\nAnd the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
\nAnd each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
\nA few thousand will think of this day
\nAs one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.<\/p>\n

What instruments we have agree
\nThe day of his death was a dark cold day.<\/p>\n

II<\/p>\n

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
\nThe parish of rich women, physical decay,
\nYourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
\nNow Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
\nFor poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
\nIn the valley of its making where executives
\nWould never want to tamper, flows on south
\nFrom ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
\nRaw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
\nA way of happening, a mouth.<\/p>\n

III<\/p>\n

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
\nWilliam Yeats is laid to rest.
\nLet the Irish vessel lie
\nEmptied of its poetry.<\/p>\n

In the nightmare of the dark
\nAll the dogs of Europe bark,
\nAnd the living nations wait,
\nEach sequestered in its hate;<\/p>\n

Intellectual disgrace
\nStares from every human face,
\nAnd the seas of pity lie
\nLocked and frozen in each eye.<\/p>\n

Follow, poet, follow right
\nTo the bottom of the night,
\nWith your unconstraining voice
\nStill persuade us to rejoice;<\/p>\n

With the farming of a verse
\nMake a vineyard of the curse,
\nSing of human unsuccess
\nIn a rapture of distress;<\/p>\n

In the deserts of the heart
\nLet the healing fountain start,
\nIn the prison of his days
\nTeach the free man how to praise.<\/p>\n

\n“Conquest, difficulty, labour: these terms indicate the nature of Yeats’s creative disposition. From the start, he was enamoured of Blake’s conviction that energy is eternal delight, yet the development of his own thought brought him more and more to the conclusion that conflict was the inescapable condition of being human. So, as his art matured and the articulation of his beliefs became more clarified and forceful, Yeats’s poems typically conveyed a sensation of certitude achieved by great effort and of contradictions quelled. Poems in which the defiant self is pitted against hostile or disabling conditions – ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’, ‘September 1913’, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’- are complemented by poems that read like discharges of pure, self-possessed energy, poems from which the accidental circumstances have been excluded so that all that remains is the melody and stamina of resurgent spirit – The Cold Heaven’, ‘Byzantium’, ‘Long-legged Fly’.” — Seamus Heaney, 2006<\/i><\/p>\n

Anne’s post on Maud Gonne<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“The first spectre of the new generation has appeared. His name is Joyce. I have suffered from him and I would like you to suffer.” — George Russell in a letter to Yeats, 1902<\/i><\/p>\n

Cast a cold eye
\nOn life on death
\nHorseman pass by
\n— Yeats’s epitaph<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote about my affection for this poem here – it was just a part of my childhood because of that Clancy Brothers album … I didn’t even know it was Yeats at the time! Of course his later poems … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[35,2629,224],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6241"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6241"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180448,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6241\/revisions\/180448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}