{"id":6702,"date":"2007-06-13T08:05:56","date_gmt":"2007-06-13T12:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6702"},"modified":"2022-10-12T22:27:11","modified_gmt":"2022-10-13T02:27:11","slug":"happy-birthday-to-william-butler-yeats-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6702","title":{"rendered":"Happy birthday \u2013 to William Butler Yeats"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s the post I wrote about him<\/a> for National Poetry Month – lots of great quotes from and about him.<\/p>\n

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!<\/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

\nTo those of you who know that Clancy Brothers album – you’ll know the special-ness of that recording.<\/p>\n

William Butler Yeats. It is fitting that today, of all days, is WB Yeats’ birthday.<\/p>\n

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

Cast a cold eye
\nOn life on Death
\nHorseman pass by<\/p>\n

Once more for good luck!<\/p>\n

Cast a cold eye
\nOn life on Death
\nHorseman pass by <\/i><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Here’s a biography of Yeats<\/a>, Nobel prize winner in 1923<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yeats, as a poet, has always been one of my favorites (even with the “cloud-pale eyelids” balderdash<\/a>), 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<\/a>. I wrote a big long post about his nurturing of John Synge<\/a>, author of Playboy of the Western World<\/i>. 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.<\/p>\n


\nI 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.<\/p>\n

“The Second Coming<\/b>”<\/p>\n

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
\nThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;
\nThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
\nMere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
\nThe blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
\nThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;
\nThe best lack all conviction, while the worst
\nAre full of passionate intensity.<\/p>\n

Surely some revelation is at hand;
\nSurely the Second Coming is at hand.
\nThe Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
\nWhen a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
\nTroubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
\nA shape with lion body and the head of a man,
\nA gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
\nIs moving its slow thighs, while all about it
\nReel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
\nThe darkness drops again; but now I know
\nThat twenty centuries of stony sleep
\nWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
\nAnd what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
\nSlouches towards Bethlehem to be born?<\/p>\n

\nOf course, there is also the Maud Gonne factor<\/a> that must be considered.<\/p>\n

Some quotes from Mr. Yeats:<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/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.”<\/p>\n

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

“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.”<\/p>\n

“And say my glory was I had such friends.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Words to live by:<\/p>\n

Never give all the heart<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n

Never give all the heart, for love
\nWill hardly seem worth thinking of
\nTo passionate women if it seem
\nCertain, and they never dream
\nThat it fades out from kiss to kiss;
\nFor everything that’s lovely is
\nBut a brief, dreamy. Kind delight.
\nO never give the heart outright,
\nFor they, for all smooth lips can say,
\nHave given their hearts up to the play.
\nAnd who could play it well enough
\nIf deaf and dumb and blind with love?
\nHe that made this knows all the cost,
\nFor he gave all his heart and lost.<\/p>\n

I also love love LOVE his poem to Jonathan Swift where he writes: “Imitate him if you dare.”<\/p>\n

Swift’s Epitaph<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n

Swift has sailed into his rest;
\nSavage indignation there
\nCannot lacerate his breast.
\nImitate him if you dare,
\nWorld-besotted traveller; he
\nServed human liberty.<\/p>\n

Speaking of epitaphs, you can’t get any better or more eloquent than Auden’s stunning poem in memory of Yeats:<\/p>\n

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

And lastly, a poem that has great personal meaning for me – especially today, of all days:<\/p>\n

The wild swans at Coole<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
\nThe woodland paths are dry,
\nUnder the October twilight the water
\nMirrors a still sky;
\nUpon the brimming water among the stones
\nAre nine-and-fifty Swans.<\/p>\n

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
\nSince I first made my count;
\nI saw, before I had well finished,
\nAll suddenly mount
\nAnd scatter wheeling in great broken rings
\nUpon their clamorous wings.<\/p>\n

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
\nAnd now my heart is sore.
\nAll’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
\nThe first time on this shore,
\nThe bell-beat of their wings above my head,
\nTrod with a lighter tread.<\/p>\n

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
\nThey paddle in the cold
\nCompanionable streams or climb the air;
\nTheir hearts have not grown old;
\nPassion or conquest, wander where they will,
\nAttend upon them still.<\/p>\n

But now they drift on the still water,
\nMysterious, beautiful;
\nAmong what rushes will they build,
\nBy what lake’s edge or pool
\nDelight men’s eyes when I awake some day
\nTo find they have flown away?<\/p>\n

Happy birthday to William Butler Yeats.<\/p>\n

Imitate him if you dare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6702"}],"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=6702"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180884,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6702\/revisions\/180884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}