| Title | : | Selected Poems |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0753816652 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780753816653 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 144 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1939 |
"One time it was a woman's face, or worse-"
"The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;"
"Now nothing but comes readier to the hand"
"Than this accustomed toil."
"--"From" All Things Can Tempt Me"
Nobel Prize winner W.B. Yeats laid the foundations for an Irish literary revival, drawing inspiration from his country's folklore, the occult, and Celtic philosophy. A writer of both poems and plays, he helped found Dublin's famed Abbey Theatre. The poems here provide an example of his life's work and artistry, beginning with verses such as "The Stolen Child" from his debut collection "Crossways "(written when he was 24) through "Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?" from "On the Boiler," published a year prior to his death.
Selected Poems Reviews
-
عين باردة تحدّق في الحياة
وفي الموت
وفارس يعبر بينهما
ــــــــــ
ذلك الفارس المغموس بكليته في بحور الشعر
هو ويليام بتلر ييتس
الشاعر الأيرلندي الممسوس بجنون من نوع خاص
والمشدود إلى عالم الغرائبيات الساحر بكل ما أوتي من عبقرية
ومنطق يتخطى حدود البشر
ييتس صنع من الشعر جناحين عملاقين
وطار بهما محلقا
حاملا قراءة من كل العصور معه
أنت تقرأ ييتس
أنت لم تعد على الأرض
-----------------------
If you have revisited the town, thin Shade,
Whether to look upon your monument
(I wonder if the builder has been paid)
Or happier-thoughted when the day is spent
To drink of that salt breath out of the sea
When grey gulls flit about instead of men,
And the gaunt houses put on majesty:
Let these content you and be gone again;
For they are at their old tricks yet.
A man
Of your own passionate serving kind who had brought
In his full hands what, had they only known,
Had given their children's children loftier thought,
Sweeter emotion, working in their veins
Like gentle blood, has been driven from the place,
And insult heaped upon him for his pains,
And for his open-handedness, disgrace;
Your enemy, an old foul mouth, had set
The pack upon him.
Go, unquiet wanderer,
And gather the Glasnevin coverlet
About your head till the dust stops your ear,
The time for you to taste of that salt breath
And listen at the corners has not come;
You had enough of sorrow before death--
Away, away! You are safer in the tomb.
*-*-*-*-*-*
All the heavy days are over;
Leave the body's coloured pride
Underneath the grass and clover,
With the feet laid side by side.
One with her are mirth and duty;
Bear the gold-embroidered dress,
For she needs not her sad beauty,
To the scented oaken press.
Hers the kiss of Mother Mary,
The long hair is on her face;
Still she goes with footsteps wary
Full of earth's old timid grace.
With white feet of angels seven
Her white feet go glimmering;
And above the deep of heaven,
Flame on flame, and wing on wing.
*-*-*-*-*-*
When my arms wrap you round I press
My heart upon the loveliness
That has long faded from the world;
The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled
In shadowy pools, when armies fled;
The love-tales wrought with silken thread
By dreaming ladies upon cloth
That has made fat the murderous moth;
The roses that of old time were
Woven by ladies in their hair,
The dew-cold lilies ladies bore
Through many a sacred corridor
Where such grey clouds of incense rose
That only God's eyes did not close:
For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,
A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew,
But flame on flame, and deep on deep,
Throne over throne where in half sleep,
Their swords upon their iron knees,
Brood her high lonely mysteries.
*-*-*-*-*-*
Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
*-*-*-*-*-*
Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna's children died.
We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men's souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet. -
When You Are Old
When you are old and gray 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. -
The last stroke of midnight dies.
All day in the one chair
From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have
ranged
In rambling talk with an image of air:
Vague memories, nothing but memories.
— W.B. Yeats, “Broken Dreams”, The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
From the depths of anything mysterious and unfathomable, here come bursts of poetry moving across the years, making impressions with an assortment of intensities and kaleidoscopic visualizations: W.B. Yeats and his unique art. This collection includes verses clear as an Irish summer day; impenetrable as another human soul. And that is the crux of the matter: the complexity to be found in Yeats' poetry may be perceived as utterly beautiful or absolutely inscrutable; a colorful enigma sometimes tiptoeing to the brink of tedium. The most readable thing here is the formidable introduction that tries to shed some light on this poet's work.
A poet in love, a poet in misery. His mind, burdened with the familiar weight of unrequited love – embodied by the fierce Maud Gonne, a woman who enchanted him with her beauty and frankness and became his long-time muse – and heavily influenced by the political scenario of his country, brought different styles to life, which are clearly seen in this selection. Poems replete with love, ideals and disillusion, longing and unhappiness, a fervent nationalism, the loud and the implicit, life and the ruins that time, unapologetically, leaves behind; copious amounts of symbolism, mystique, folklore, question marks... and diverse techniques that never cease to amaze, as the richness of his language. So, when you make some sense out of all those elements, ah, a real treat. I wish that would have happened more often. Perhaps, if I had been steeped in Irish history and mythology, it would have been easier for me to understand, his earlier work in particular. Unfortunately, most of this iconic poet's work didn't resonate with me that much. I did find some memorable poems I read many times, notably some of his later years, whose reflections on human existence, age and death are hauntingly evocative. For that is also what this book encapsulates: an entire life. It perfectly depicts the evolution of a man and his mind; his first steps and the pinnacle of his art.
I think I will revisit this book someday. Ever since I've read one of his plays, I became very fond of his exquisitely lyrical language. It was only fair to assume I was going to love his poetry. (?) But I didn't; I loved a couple of poems but overall, I liked it, and I struggled; therefore, I can't give this a 4/5-star rating just to, you know, look good in front of my fellow poetry lovers.
This is one of the few times I feel morally obligated to carry out some sort of brief analysis based on ratings of a poetry collection that wasn't exactly what I expected. It must be the echo of my own guilt.
From Crossways (1889)
✩✩
▪▫▪
From The Rose (1893)
✩✩✩✩
When You Are Old
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.
The Two Trees
…
Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
...
▪▫▪
From The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
✩✩✩
The Secret Rose
...I, too, await
The hour of thy great wind of love and hate.
▪▫▪
From In the Seven Woods (1903)
✩✩✩
▪▫▪
From The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
✩✩✩✩
No Second Troy
…
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
Reconciliation
…
But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone,
My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.
▪▫▪
From Responsibilities (1914)
✩✩✩
September 1913
…
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
...
Beggar to Beggar Cried
'Time to put off the world and go somewhere
And find my health again in the sea air,'
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,
'And make my soul before my pate is bare.-
'And get a comfortable wife and house
To rid me of the devil in my shoes,'
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,
'And the worse devil that is between my thighs.'
…
(Very classy.)
▪▫▪
From The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
✩✩✩✩
The Wild Swans at Coole
…
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?
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
I know that I shall meet my fate,
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love...
Ego Dominus Tuus
...
Ille. His art is happy, but who knows his mind?
▪▫▪
From Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)
✩✩✩
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...
▪▫▪
From The Tower (1928)
✩✩✩✩
Sailing to Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon‐falls, the mackerel‐crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies...
(One of the best.)
The Tower
…
Did all old men and women, rich and poor,
Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,
Whether in public or in secret rage
As I do now against old age?
But I have found an answer in those eyes
That are impatient to be gone;
Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan,
For I need all his mighty memories.
...
Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or woman lost?
If on the lost, admit you turned aside
From a great labyrinth out of pride,
Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought
Or anything called conscience once;
And that if memory recur, the sun's
Under eclipse and the day blotted out.
...
Two Songs From a Play
…
Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love's pleasure drives his love away,
The painter's brush consumes his dreams...
A Man Young and Old
…
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have
looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
▪▫▪
From The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
✩✩✩✩
In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz
…
Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time...
Death
…
He knows death to the bone –
Man has created death.
A Dialogue of Self and Soul
My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?
…
(Sublime.)
Blood And The Moon
…
For wisdom is the property of the dead,
A something incompatible with life; and power,
Like everything that has the stain of blood,
A property of the living; but no stain
Can come upon the visage of the moon
When it has looked in glory from a cloud.
Vacillation
…
What's the meaning of all song?
'Let all things pass away.'
▪▫▪
From Words for Music Perhaps
✩✩✩
▪▫▪
From A Woman Young and Old
✩✩✩
II
Before the world was made
…
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.
▪▫▪
From A Full Moon in March (1935)
✩✩✩
▪▫▪
From Last Poems (1936-1939)
✩✩✩✩
The Wild Old Wicked Man
…
I have what no young man can have
Because he loves too much.
Words I have that can pierce the heart,
But what can he do but touch?'
...
Man and the Echo
Man
In a cleft that's christened Alt
Under broken stone I halt
At the bottom of a pit
That broad noon has never lit,
And shout a secret to the stone.
All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right...
July 11, 16
* Also on
my blog. -
In contemporary poetry, another author of English expression appears, in the case of Irish origin, which always translated when he began writing in the late nineteenth century. Nothing is taboo; all pros and cons to the taste of pen philosophy in poetry may be the memory of the Druids, the Celts' ancestors of all Western Europeans.
The herring fishing that continues to be made in Northern Europe as it always was, maybe the prior John of socks and collar broke, the memory of classical antiquity, the middle ages, the love of freedom, roaming without an individual course. Again, the countryside, the forest, the passion, the birds, the woman with the Platonic ideal, the friendship, the memory of the middle east cradle of universal history, which I also learned in the school of my sweet land, of Western civilization. -
Sound file of this review here:
http://soundcloud.com/tremcc/review-o...
I’ve always been particularly fond of Yeats. Recently I’ve been told twice in quick succession he was more than just a little rightwing politically and that this ought to put me off him. The problem is that getting turned off poets just because they are rightwing wouldn’t really leave me all that many poets to read.
I tend to buy my oldest daughter books of selected poems for Christmas – I’m not quite sure why or how it even got started. But by now it would seem a bit tragic to stop, to be honest. Last Christmas I bought her this selection. I was a little annoyed to find it didn’t contain A Prayer for My Daughter – for all the obvious reasons, but also because it was the first of his poems I studied at high school and so I have a special fondness for it and for Yeats too – not least because one night my Literature teacher brought me some photocopies of drawings of Yeats and said, well, proved really, that he looked a bit like me. Look, I don’t even try to pretend to not being chuffed by that kind of thing.
Yeats writes two kinds of poems – those that seem to be almost too easy to understand and those that seem to be too difficult to make any sense of at all. I’m going to give you an example of both kinds. I’ll start with the insanely difficult, but perhaps my favourite of his poems, 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?
I really don’t know enough about Yeats’ life to know if my reading of this poem is the official reading – I’m sure there is an official reading, by the way. Anyway, my reading of this is of a poet looking at the horrors of the First World War – the utter futility and barbarity of that war – and thinking that if there ever was a time for a second coming of Christ, of redemption and of holy and righteous outrage at humanity, then surely the end of the First World War was such a time. But this isn’t Christ coming as he had come previously. I mean, the last time he came to earth it was to tell us how we should live and to redeem us, or at least offer us the possibility of being redeemed for our sins. This time is following our twenty centuries of stony sleep in essentially not following the intent of his message of love. Following the horrors of the First World War we can hardly think we deserve more than a god dressed as a rough beast intent not so much on our redemption (you know, been there, done that) but on our punishment. It should hardly be surprising that the image the poet sees forming in his mind’s eye is one that troubles him.
And the image is of the Sphinx. That ancient poser of riddles that seems to be on the move again – to me the image and that of the indignant desert birds surrounding the sphinx is one that reflects our less than godly, and even less than human, natures, we are less than human and this is shown in the half human half animal incarnation. Because isn’t this precisely the natures we should fear being punished for after we have allowed the hunting bird of war to have spiralled away out of our control?
It is the first stanza that I think I like the most. The last couple of lines of which have been so endlessly quoted by people of all shades of politics in reference to their political opponents and in despair over their less than committed political colleagues – I was, have been, am and will remain just such a perplexed and despairing observer of politics.
For example, I watched Rick Perry drop out of the Presidential race yesterday and listened as he said in endorsing Newt Gingrich that despite his differences with him in the past, “The fact is, there is forgiveness for those who seek God and I believe in the power of redemption, for it is a central tenet of my own Christian faith.” It makes my head spin that someone could say something like that at such a time, particularly in reference to the all too grubby world that is American politics – especially by a person belonging to a party whose sole aim seems to be taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich in what surely should be blindingly obvious to everyone, a direct contradiction of Christ’s teachings. It is hard for me, then, not to join in chorus with Yeats that the worst do seem to have all the conviction, and all the passion, while the best are left with Obama, a man whose election campaign is paid for by Wall Street bankers. I don’t know if politics has me slouching towards Bethlehem, but it certainly leaves me slouching.
And of course, the poem contains one of Yeats’ constant references to gyres – to spirals. I’m particularly fond of spirals as a metaphor of life too – I think we spend too much time believing we live in an arrow-like existence, a movement away or towards. Our lives, however, are more like the seasons with us repeatedly cycling back to nearly, if never quite the same place over and over again at the various stages of our aging.
The other poem I want to mention is a deceptively simple love song, Down By the Salley Gardens:
Down by the Salley Gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the Salley Gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her did not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she placed her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears
This is quite literally a song with a truly beautiful tune and one I’ve sung many times.
Here you have one of the eternal themes of poetry – the young man rushing love and confounding love with lust and the young woman’s refusal and her seeking delay – although here it all ends in tears, whereas in say Shakespeare you might have, “In delay, there lies no plenty, then come kiss me sweet and twenty, youths the stuff will not endure” or Marvel’s “Rather at once our time devour, than languish in this slow-chapp’d power”.
I really love how the gardens are named twice in the first stanza, but we have moved from them in the second stanza and away from love too, or at least, having destroyed the possibility of her continued love due to his over-enthusiasm we have moved from gardens to field. The near repetitions are lovely too – she bids him take love easy first and then it’s to take life easy – but this is a life now to be lived without her, hence his leaning shoulder of regret. And in the first stanza the water is snow, that is, solid and fixed – but the water in the second is a river and his tears – both moving and changing. This is ironic enough though, because it is only now he has learnt the fixed nature of his own love for her, now that he has forced her to change her of opinion of him due to his sexual impatience.
All the same, and this is why I say the poem is deceptively simple, to me the reading I’ve just given struggles with the advice she gives in both stanzas (take love easy as leaves and take life easy as grass) – but this is at least partly because I’m unsure how grass grows on weirs. I would take the grass to be more permanent than leaves that grow on trees only to fall in Autumn, so there seems to be a strange mix here, with her choosing the less constant metaphor for love than for life. I don’t really understand this advice of hers, to be honest and that’s my excuse for often not remembering while singing the song which metaphor comes first – the grass or the leaves.
Yeats always has complications for you to think about even in his most simple poems. From the little I know of his life that is probably true there also. His falling in love with an unobtainable and opinionated woman and his marriage to a woman who did automatic writing and his fascination with what I take to be Jungian archetypal images make him endlessly fascinating. One day I must get around to reading a biography.
Nonetheless, he is my rightwing poet of choice, but then, his hair does strand down his forehead much like mine does, so he can’t be all bad, can he? -
4.5
To appreciate Yeats’ poetry, it’s good to know the context for his poems as they embed through symbolism and imagery a great many historical, political, mythological, mystical, and, above all, autobiographical allusions. Some of these can be found in the notes that Yeats wrote to his collections and poems, a fascinating read in its own right, which are reproduced in the collection of his complete poems edited by Finneran,
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, which Heaney used as the source for his selections. But it’s also enormously helpful to have good annotations and I didn’t find Finneran’s explanatory notes to be even across poems nor detailed enough.
Much finer notes can be found in the comprehensive volume by Jeffares,
A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. “Commentary” in the title is somewhat misplaced as there is no criticism or analysis but rather standard annotations with detailed references to Yeats’ imagery, esoteric beliefs, Irish folklore, Gaelic legends and myths, figures and events from Irish political history, as well as places and names of muses (especially Maud Gonne, the greatest love of his life) and friends from his life that are profusely alluded to in his poems. Besides helpful annotations, the poetry is further contextualized with Yeats’ own notes (and excerpts from his letters) that accompany individual poems rather than having them reproduced separately as in Finneran’s edition.
Once placed in their context, the poems reveal a full splendor in their meaning and beauty which can easily escape a reader on their first read.
W.B. Yeats: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney does not have any explanatory notes and, for this reason, it is not sufficient as a standalone collection except for someone already familiar with the symbolism, imagery, and allusions in Yeats poetry. It is essential though for the exquisite selections of poems besides, of course, its attraction that they were chosen by
Seamus Heaney, probably the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. Having read most of Yeats’ poems in Finneran's edited volume of his complete poetic oeuvre, with the exception of a few poems that did not find their way into Heaney's selection (‘The Sorrow of Love’, ‘The Secret Rose’, ‘The Two Trees’, ‘The Mask’, 'The Three Hermits', 'Never give all the Heart', ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’, ‘Imitated from the Japanese’...), almost all of them would be my choices as well.
I already quoted several shorter poems on my reading updates and would add a few more selections of my favorites either in their entirety or, for longer ones, in their excerpts or links to the music they inspired and a couple of extraordinary recitations.
Yeats’ early poetry up until ca.1900 was infused with the stunning beauty of his two loves: the Irish folklore and landscape, and Maud Gonne, an Irish actress and political revolutionary, to whom he unsuccessfully proposed numerous times.From ‘The Stolen Child’
‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, written when he was 25 and still in his heart more than 40 years later as Yeats reads it for a BBC broadcast:
A refrain repeated at the end of each stanza
(Yeats believed in faeries 🖤):
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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-northe...
‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ - Yeats was inspired by an Irish traditional song in writing this poem, here sung by a wonderful English alto, Kathleen Ferrier, to the music set by Hughes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdDIM...
‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ - Donovan turned it into one of his many beautiful songs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIaTp...
A few more of my favorites from this period are ‘When You Are Old’, ‘’To Ireland in the Coming Times’, The Secret Rose’, ‘He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ (an excerpt is on my reading updates), ‘The Two Trees’, ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’, ‘Who goes with Fergus?’ (James Joyce’s favorite).
I must say that I was less enchanted with the poems he wrote at the beginning of the 20th century up until World War I, sometimes considered his ‘middle period’. Still, several are remarkable, above all for me ‘Adam’s Curse’, the often anthologized ’September 1913’, ‘’The Coming of Wisdom with Time’ (can be found on my updates), ‘The Mask’, ‘The Three Hermits’, and ‘The Cold Heaven’.From ‘Adam’s Curse’
In 1914 Yeats enters his ‘mature’ period of writing and his poems written in the late 1910s and 1920s had a special appeal to me. Sampling a few highlights among many: ’The Second Coming’, Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death’, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Among School Children’, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, ‘To a Squirrel at Kyle-na-no’, ‘Her Praise’, 'A Dialogue of Self and Soul'.
From the first stanza:
We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Last two stanzas:
We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.
‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death’, Adrian Dunbar (a great actor!) recites it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbFPa...From The Second Coming:
While his poetry in the 1930s is usually described as reaching the peak (36 of 89 poems in Heaney's selection are from this period), I personally responded to only a few, including ‘Byzantium’,’Meru’, ‘Lapis Lazuli’, ‘Imitated from the Japanese’, ‘An acre of Grass’, his penultimate death poem ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, and three lesser known ones, two of which are quoted on my updates (‘The Four Ages of Man’ and ‘The Great Day’) and…
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.
[…]
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?
… this one with Yeats reflecting back on different stages of his life and pondering about the meaning of it all:What then?
His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
‘What then?’ sang Plato's ghost. ‘What then?’
Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
‘What then?’ sang Plato's ghost. ‘What then?’
All his happier dreams came true—
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
poets and Wits about him drew;
‘What then?’ sang Plato's ghost. ‘What then?’
‘The work is done,’ grown old he thought,
‘According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought;’
But louder sang that ghost, ‘What then?’ -
The poems I liked, I really liked. However, there were quite a few that I didn't much care for and found difficult to understand. I do appreciate that Yeat's poems must have spoke more to Irish people at the time of writing, especially the poems which referenced Parnell, Irish nationalism etc. I also think I would have enjoyed the poems more with more knowledge of mythology as a lot of the poems do reference mythical characters, some that I've never heard of.
Two of my favourite poems from this book:
A Coat - W.B. Yeats
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it,
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven - W.B. Yeats
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. -
112th book of 2020 – officially beaten my last year total.
This is a tough one to review; there is no doubt that Yeats is a great writer (there are plenty of good lines in these poems), but after ‘living’ with Yeats for over a month, reading this on and off, a little at a time, I can say that mostly I was left unimpressed by his work. This is a large collection, with over two-hundred of his poems from his writing years, 1888-1939.
The feel of Yeats’ work is interesting, and, as I have said in previous reviews where writers are less ‘understood’ (T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, etc.), I believe that is sometimes most important. Though, Yeats didn’t bring about any sense of loss, or awe, only interest. His poems are mythical, dreamlike. Mostly, they are filled with Irish history and myth, names that have no meaning to me without further research, which sadly, I didn’t enjoy the poems enough to go and do. So, Yeats is not among my favourite poets, sadly. I did enjoy some poems more than others, of course, with a collection this large, and I found great pleasure in spotting titles of other novels in Yeats’ work. There are two, I believe, in ‘The Second Coming’: Things fall apart (being the title of Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel of the same name) and the final line of the poem: Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? - I can only presume that is Joan Didion’s famous book,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I guess Cormac’s McCarthy’s 2005 novel comes from the opening line of ‘Sailing to Byzantium: That is no country for old men. And finally, though not taken from here, I am sure, the final lines of ‘Vacillation’ reminded me of a song from my hero, idol, role-model, George Harrison: What’s the meaning of all song?/‘Let all things pass away.’
My favourite poems then, were:
- The Indian to His Love
- Ephemera
- The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner
- He wishes his Beloved were Dead
- [I walked among the seven woods of Coole]
- [The friends that have it I do wrong]
- Reconciliation
- Running to Paradise (particularly: II The Peacock)
- The Second Coming
- The Tower
- Meditations in Time of Civil War
- Coole Park, 1929
- Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931
- The Curse of Cromwell
Finally, some good lines from throughout the collection to finish.
The island dreams under the dawn
And great boughs drop tranquillity;
*
Athena takes Achilles by the hair,
Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born,
Because the hero’s crescent is the twelfth.
And yet, twice born, twice buried, grow he must,
Before the full moon, helpless as a worm.
*
Yet little peace he had
For those that love are sad.
Let's take this opportunity to listen to 'All Things Must Pass' - It's not always going to be this grey... -
When you are old and gray 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. -
Man And The Echo
‘Man. In a cleft that's christened Alt
Under broken stone I halt
At the bottom of a pit
That broad noon has never lit,
And shout a secret to the stone.
All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
Did words of mine put too great strain
On that woman's reeling brain?
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?
And all seems evil until I
Sleepless would lie down and die.
Echo. Lie down and die.
Man. That were to shirk
The spiritual intellect's great work,
And shirk it in vain. There is no release
In a bodkin or disease,
Nor can there be work so great
As that which cleans man's dirty slate.
While man can still his body keep
Wine or love drug him to sleep,
Waking he thanks the Lord that he
Has body and its stupidity,
But body gone he sleeps no more,
And till his intellect grows sure
That all's arranged in one clear view,
pursues the thoughts that I pursue,
Then stands in judgment on his soul,
And, all work done, dismisses all
Out of intellect and sight
And sinks at last into the night.
Echo. Into the night.
Man. O Rocky Voice,
Shall we in that great night rejoice?
What do we know but that we face
One another in this place?
But hush, for I have lost the theme,
Its joy or night-seem but a dream;
Up there some hawk or owl has struck,
Dropping out of sky or rock,
A stricken rabbit is crying out,
And its cry distracts my thought.’ -
Our long ships loose thought-woven sails and wait,
For God has bid them share an equal fate;
And when at last defeated in His wars,
They have gone down under the same white stars,
We shall no longer hear the little cry
Of our sad hearts, that may not live nor die.
I was struck yesterday, September 1, by the dates of Yeats' birth and death. 1865 and 1939. My pause was but a series of moments, my thoughts dragging themselves across the rocks of history, reading and a world too full of weeping. Should we champion the Orange, Velvet, Spring and make allowance for continued stone-breaking? I refute you thusly!Technology continues apace whereas our elan vital becomes a function.
An application.
A talking cure for the shipwrecked.
The edge of these sojourns leave me scratched and sore but seldom broken. Perhaps I lack the vitality to be crushed. I lack the self-awareness for such.
Temerity leads elsewhere.
I feel almost Canadian in that regard. Yeats worked for me. -
Final review and rating to come!!!
3rd book for my RoryGilmoreReadathon -
I’m always surprised when I don’t love a well-known poet, and equally surprised when I discover an unknown poet whose work is miraculous. That’s just crazy-stupid, and I should know better.
Well now I feel I’ve given Yeats a good try. I read a little about him--learned that he was proudly Irish, believed in the Irish Nationalist cause, and that he considered himself an artist who valued craftsmanship and symbolism. I took my time with his poems, and amidst so much in a style I didn’t appreciate, or about things I didn’t understand, did find some to love.
From “Anashuya and Vijaya”
May we two stand,
When we are dead, beyond the setting suns,
A little from the other shades apart,
With mingling hair, and play upon one lute.
From “The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner”
I spit into the face of Time
That has transfigured me
“Into the Twilight” was lovely, and starts:
Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
I found two poems absolutely wonderful, and they’re in public domain, so I’ll post them both below.
“To a Child Dancing in the Wind”
Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?
“A Faery Song”
We who are old, old and gay,
O so old!
Thousands of years, thousands of years,
If all were told:
Give to these children, new from the world,
Silence and love;
And the long dew-dropping hours of the night,
And the stars above:
Give to these children, new from the world,
Rest far from men,
Is anything better, anything better
Tell us it then:
Us who are old, old and gay,
O so old!
Thousands of years, thousands of years,
If all were told.” -
Having only ever read Yeats "easier" and often anthologised poems I hadn't realised how difficult much of his work could be. Well, at least I learnt some Irish history and mythology.
And here is one of his that even I could understand, although given his Celtic roots shouldn't this be about redheads rather than blondes?
For Anne Gregory
"Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair."
"But I shall get a hair dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair"
"I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair" -
“This night has been so strange that it seemed
As if the hair stood up on my head.
From going-down of the sun I have dreamed
That women laughing, or timid or wild,
In rustle of lace or silken stuff,
Climbed up my creaking stair. They had read
All I had rhymed of that monstrous thing
Returned and yet unrequited love.
They stood in the door and stood between
My great wood lectern and the fire
Till I could hear their hearts beating:
One is a harlot, and one a child
That never looked upon man with desire.
And one, it may be, a queen.” -
"For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon."
I am perhaps a very selective reader of Yeats' poetry. I do not like all of his poems, but some of them I love and cherish with all of my heart. Perhaps this is due to the fact that in order to understand the majority of his poems an extensive knowledge of Irish culture and mythology is required - which I sadly lack.
And also, these poems are meant to be heard, and ideally to be read aloud in a soft Irish voice. The poems are so lyrically and melodically composed they in some ways can resemble the traditional Irish folksongs.
I have settled upon a rating of 4 stars, as I do love Yeats and his fairytale-like poetry, which will draw you in and transport you to a long lost time of fairies, mermaids, unicorns and true magic. To read his poems is to feel a wave of blissful harmony wash over your mind and bury your troubles in a deep blue sea of ignorance.
"But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." -
I have a problem with poetry. I’ll rephrase that. I have a problem with the reading of poetry, not the hearing of it. When someone else reads and speaks, it all seems to make perfect sense. The music appears in the images dance their questions. But when I read, it all seems flat, shapeless and often meaningless.
Perhaps I am not investing enough time. Perhaps reading it once is not enough. Perhaps I ought to read it again and perhaps again, and then another time aloud. Would I then experience what I get from others renditions?
And then there’s the problem of opacity. Things so personal, so individually expressed but rarely explicitly admitted, often speak in tongues whose language seems foreign, at least not my own. I felt all of this strongly throughout Yates - Selected Poetry.
William Butler Yeats won a Nobel Prize for Literature for his work. It was the recognition of a committee of cognoscenti that his contribution was beyond the mundane, even the special, and thus had entered a select space reserved for the enduring. But the space seems to lack clarity or certainty. The ideas expressed seem at the surface so personal they could never approach the universal, the very place that the prize recognizes the author already inhabits.
But perhaps that is the point. The personal has become universal via its expression. And perhaps my own yearning for an objective reality blocks its recognition.
But that’s what poetry does, doesn’t it? Makes you think, causes you to reflect, to evaluate, to reconsider… Yates - Selected Poetry was very much worth reading, after all. -
sublime
-
Breathless, familiar whisperings....I could feel them warm on my cheek.
-
I found this beautiful book at Topping & Company in St. Andrews, Scotland! I really enjoyed the Introduction by Seamus Heaney. He did a brilliant job of compiling the book. My two favorites from the volume are He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven and The Song of Wandering Aengus.
-
"Yet always when I look death in the face, / When I clamber to the heights of sleep, / Or when I grow excited with wine, / Suddenly I meet your face." ('A Deep-Sworn Vow' p.53)
-
I'm reading a book right now that has lines from Yeats at the beginning of each chapter so I thought I would give some of his actual poetry a try.
Truth: I both loved it and was confused by it. These poems are lyrical and beautiful, sometimes so much so that it would literally stop my brain in its tracks as I read and I would go over a line three, four, five times. I also needed help when reading because there were a lot of references to places and people that are just unfamiliar to me - having that context really helped Yeats' poetry come alive for me. I liked that there were political ideas, ideas about growing old and maturing, I loved his magical views of the wildlife and world around him.
I'm glad I made the effort - so many lines were familiar to me, some of them lyrics of songs that I know that I had no idea were just poems by Yeats set to music.
Two of my favorite parts:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild - The Stolen Child
and
Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet - The Rose of the World
okay, one more
When such as I cast our 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. - A Dialogue of Self and Soul -
I feel so guilty because I want to like Yeats but while there are one or two amazing poems, like 'Leda and the Swan' and 'An Irish Airman Forsees His Death', or one or two that are very interesting and strikingly expressed, like 'The Second Coming' or 'The Circus Animal's Desertion', overall, I find Yeats boring a lot of the time and a bit repugnant for his conservative nature, such as his nationalism.
I found it hard to concentrate and understand a lot of his poems and I didn't really come away feeling like he'd deeply touched me and got to my heart (like Paul Verlaine) or said something amazing (like Baudelaire). Maybe I just expected more of this poet that is so routinely hailed as one of the greatest, in this English-language country, and I need to go back and spend more time with his poetry. Well, I see it; I just don't feel or think it. -
This is an absolutely stunning collection of poems from one of the best poets of the 20th Century, compiled by Seamus Heaney.
Although I'm fairly new to Yeats, I believe this collection contains many of his major works. I was a little surprised that The Tower, generally considered his greatest work of poetry, featured relatively few poems here, compared with some of the other books such as The Winding Stair, but Yeats went through so many different periods and styles so it must have been hard for Heaney to decide on a 'final cut'.
Poems such as 'Sailing to Byzantium' stood out as favorites as well as the very last poems at the end of the book. Yeats certainly had an excellent ear for poetry and despite being considered a modernist, his rhyme schemes were quite traditional and conventional I thought, which I was comfortable with, because this is the poetry of my youth; poems we read as wee lads back in school.
Highly, highly recommended. This will be going in my travel bag to revisit whenever I get the urge to re-read Yeats and dream of the Ireland of the past, the land of my ancestors. -
And what if excess of love bewildered them till they died?
-
«Leave unchanged
The hands that I have kissed,
For old sake’s sake»💔💔💔 -
Here are some samples from the book:
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
By William Butler Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
When You Are Old
By William Butler Yeats
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.
Adam's Curse
By William Butler Yeats
We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’
And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There’s many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.’
I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
Precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’
We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.
(Note: the book misprinted the third line in the final stanza as the following:
To love you in the old highway of love;)
Huge mistake! And one of my favorite lines. Says a lot about the editors. -
Not much experience with poetry, so this was a bit of a tough read for me. Many poems in this collection tell me about the the process of aging, looking back, decay and thinking abouth the dreams and idleness of youth, where everything seemed possible.
The concetration needed to fully grasp a poem proved an interesting excercise for me. I noticed that I sometimes read "lazy" and allow my thoughts to wander. It was a confronting experience. -
I bought this about five years ago for a project and have just now gotten around to reading it. I started it feeling very excited - Yeats is so lyrical and imaginative and so obviously enamored with nature and myths. His poetry is so beautiful. But I think as I continued through the book, I found it harder to understand a lot of his poems. Many of them seemed to go all over the place or refer to myths and gods I am unfamiliar with. It made reading the poetry more like a chore. All in all, the poems I loved, I REALLY loved. The poems I didn't so much care for were more because I failed to understand them, and I never like putting a whole lot of effort into understanding poetry.
-Favourite Poems-
"The Cloak, The Boat, and The Shoes"
"The Indian Upon God"
"Ephemera"
"The Rose of Peace"
"The Host of the Air"
"The Song of Wandering Aengus"
"To a Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine"
"A Lyric from An Unpublished Play"
"To a Child Dancing in the Wind"
"Fallen Majesty"
