Posts Tagged W.B. Yeats

(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

I continue typing up drafts of poems old and new on my Smith-Corona Super-Speed.

I have noticed over the years that there are seasons to the writing life: times of want and times of plenty. You suffer through the droughts so you can enjoy the rains.

My little volume of typed up poems grows and I have re-mapped a strategy for MontanaWriter… or more properly, a new strategy has been mapping out me.

Redwing blackbirds have returned to the edges of thawing ponds and small lakes. Juncos are gathering again under feeders. It is spring in the North Country.

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A November Stream

The first snow of the year arrived earlier this week in the North County. Light layers of white dust eddied across asphalt streets and driveways and caught in the crotch of trees and in the crevices of outdoor things. Snow like that is not real snow, but it is a real reminder of what is to come.

All the trees have been bare for awhile now. Outside at my feeders, juncos seem to have come and gone replaced again by black-capped chickadees. A week ago a piliated woodpecker alighted briefly on an ash tree in my front yard before continuing its rounds… but for the most part, November in my front yard belongs to crows and blue jays.

November in the North Country is the most difficult to define. Some years it is full winter, while others, like this year, it seems merely transitional… October extended. May in the North Country is a month that makes us feel young and full of hope. November is the one that makes us feel nostalgic for the many  things we have lost.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

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?

 

Yeats is the poet I have read most closely and explored most deeply: volumes of essays, all his plays a couple of times, and his poetry, of course. If I made a list of poetic lines that most often return unbidden to me over the years, most of those lines would be his. If I made another list of poets I wish I could memorize in toto, Yeats would head that list as well

If you could know Whitman and Yeats and Shelley and Keats and Wordsworth and Shakespeare and Blake and Milton by heart….now that would be a wonderful thing. The next best thing, of course, is to have them on the Kindle app of your iPhone. And I do. Along with Sandburg and Frost and Arnold and Browning and Tennyson and….

Winter comes but I am ready… armed with poetry and Thoreau. I am fearful, but not without hope.

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Mt. Baldy, Big Belt Mountains, Montana

Words, and the ideas and moods that words represent, are the tools of the writer… especially for the poet. Poetry, after all, is the art of using compressed language to express the inexpressible.

A poet then needs to be mindful of the full gamut of meanings and connotations of each word he or she chooses –of each and every word that chooses the poem– because to varying degrees all of the many denotations and connotations of a word will be carried  eventually by some reader to a poem.

Today at MontanaWriter we begin another new feature: Thesaurus Thursday. Each Thursday we will highlight a word or concept:

• word origin
• dictionary definition
• connotations
• and literary/poetical usage

This week on Thesaurus Thursday we will be examining the most Montanan of words: mountain.

Comments
A few words about the word mountain. Mt. Baldy in the Big Belt Mountains viewed from the Missouri River valley remains always my archetypal mountain. Many places in the west have views of peaks, but of places I have visited only a few places have that one predominant “mountain” that stands over all and gives definition to everything: Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood, the Grand Tetons and Mt. Baldy. The “Tetons” like “Baldy” are actually more than one named peak but collectively are referred to as one.

Baldy remains for the most part unknown to any who have not spent time in Broadwater County. But if you have lived in the valley there, and have known the experience of one mountain always being there, always looking over you, always being a point of reference from any place you are, you begin to know the power of mountains as nature, as definer, and as symbol. Of course, gods live on mountains. Where else could gods and humans meet.

Word Origin

According to Dictionary.com the origin of the English word mountain (and the State of Montana) is:

1175–1225; Middle English mountaine  < Old French montaigne  <Vulgar Latin *montānea,
noun use of feminine of *montāneus, equivalent to Latin montān ( us ) mountainous
( mont-,  stem ofmōns  mountain + -ānus -an) + -eus  adj. suffix

Definition

The definitions for “mountain” are:

noun  1. a natural elevation of the earth’s surface rising more or less abruptly to a summit,
and attaining an altitude greater thanthat of a hill, usually greater than 2000 feet (610 meters).
2. a large mass of something resembling this, as in shape or size.
3. a huge amount: “a mountain of incoming mail.”

adjective 4. of or pertaining to mountains: mountain air. 5. living, growing, or located
in the mountains: mountain people. 6. resembling or suggesting a mountain, as in size.

Associations & Connotations

Religious and Holy Connotations

• Mount Sinai
• Mount Zion
  
• Mount of Olives
• Mount Olympus
• Mount Fuji
• Kilimanjaro
• Mount Ararat

Literary Connotations

• “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway
• Greek Myths and Mount Olympus
• Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
• Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
• The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner
• Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
• Mountain Interval by Robert Frost

Some bible verses with “mountain”

“It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it.” (Isaiah 2:2)

“They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:9)

“Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, fear not; say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!” (Isaiah 40:9)

Some Poetical Lines with “mountain”

Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
~ ( cf. The Land of Heart’s Desire, by W.B. Yeats)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
~ (cf. “No Worse, There is None,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be
But for such faith with nature reconciled;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.
~ (cf. “Mont Blanc”, by P.B. Shelley)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Five years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur.—Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

  ~(cf. “Tintern Abbey,” by William Wordsworth)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

And before hell mouth; dry plain

              and two mountains;

On the one mountain, a running form,

              and another

In the turn of the hill; in hard steel

The road like a slow screw’s thread,

The angle almost imperceptible,

               so that the circuit seemed hardly to rise;

And the running form, naked, Blake…
~ (cf. “Canto XVI,” by Ezra Pound)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 The mountain held the town as in a shadow
I saw so much before I slept there once:
I noticed that I missed stars in the west,
Where its black body cut into the sky.
Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall
Behind which I was sheltered from a wind.
~ (cf. “The Mountain” by Robert Frost)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.

The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,

Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts

Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.
~(cf. “Oh Lovely Rock,” by Robinson Jeffers)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, 
And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim: 
And straight was a path of gold for him, 
And the need of a world of men for me. 
~ (cf. “Parting in the Morning” by Robert Browning)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

You have built a mountain of something,

Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,   

Whose wind is desire starching a petal,

Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.
~ (cf. “These Lacustrine Cities,” by John Ashberry) 

_____

Summer in the humid North Country quickly loses its power to surprise and delight. Somehow having to turn on central-air conditioning changes everything. In mid-January we run from heated car to heated home. We stand at windows and watch the world through panes of glass. On humid summer days we do same. Summer, just barely started, has already become a burden.

A brief hiatus at MontanaWriter has me thinking about change and beginnings.  The very first posting here, more than two years ago, began with one of my favorite Yeats’ poems. Since the audience for MontanaWriter at that point was at the most one, I am going to re-post part of that first post here with a few additions and changes.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The Book of Genesis contains two creation stories. Some biblical literalist would no doubt have preferred that there be just the one. But those ancient redactors who put the bible together knew that beginnings are always messy affairs.

I have seen sketch drafts of poems that W.B. Yeats wrote. The finished product often-times bears little resemblance to the sketched idea. In one of his final poems, “Cuchalain Comforted,” written just a few weeks before his death, for example, the note “A shade recently arrived went through a valley in the country of the dead,” became:

Cuchalain Comforted
A man that had six mortal wounds, a man
Violent and famous, strode among the dead;
Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.

Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head
Came and were gone.  He leant upon a tree
As though to meditate on wounds and blood.

A Shroud that seemed to have authority
Among those bird-like things came, and let fall
A bundle of linen.  Shrouds by two and three

Came creeping up because the man was still.
And thereupon that linen-carrier said:
“Your life can grow much sweeter if you will

“Obey our ancient rule and make a shroud;
Mainly because of what we only know
The rattle of those arms makes us afraid.

“We thread the needles’ eyes, and all we do
All must together do.’ That done, the man
Took up the nearest and began to sew.

“Now must we sing and sing the best we can,
But first you must be told our character:
Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain

“Or driven from home and left to die in fear.’
They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before;

They had changed their throats and had the throats of
birds.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before;

They had changed their throats and had the throats of
birds.

The simple dictated sketch, like the “bird-like” things, needed to be fully fleshed out. And so Yeats did… with 70 years of poetic skill, language, and symbolism.

It is difficult to “pull-out” just a few lines from this poem because I love the whole so much. It is the perfect summation of Yeats and Yeatsian themes. It is the perfect last poem of a great poet… it is the perfect poem.

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As an avid collector of quotes and lines of poetry, I often find myself with unattributed lines and mis-attributed quotes. The internet, though efficient in locating and aggregating information, is not, of course, of much help in clearing up issues of accurate attribution.

But to be honest with you, if the quote is good, I really do not care. What matters to me is that the line is good. And so on hump-day of the first full week of May, here are some quotes I have collected from various sources over the years.

Let me know if there are any you especially like… or that you know are indeed misattributed. Thanks.

In the meantime, enjoy!

“Know what you are talking about.”  ~John Paul II

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” ~Abraham Lincoln

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”  ~Ezra Pound

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”  ~W.H. Auden

“The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance” ~P.B. Shelley

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same” ~Thomas Merton

“The desire to write grows with writing.” ~Erasmus

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”  ~Henry James

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.” ~Ernest Hemingway

“Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.”  ~John Paul II

“The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”  ~Samuel Johnson

“A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard — by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off.” ~Archibald MacLeish

“Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.”  ~Amy Lowell

“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”  ~Ezra Pound

“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“Your library is your paradise.”  ~Erasmus

“I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.” ~Seamus Heaney

“We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” ~Henry James

“There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.” ~Archibald MacLeish

“The first draft of anything is shit.” ~Ernest Hemingway

“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”  ~W.H. Auden

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”  ~Marcel Proust

“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope…. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.” ~Seamus Heaney

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.” ~Henry James

“The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.”  ~W.H. Auden

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.” ~Marcel Proust

“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”  ~T.S. Eliot

“Stupidity is also a gift of God, but one mustn’t misuse it.”  ~John Paul II

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For the last couple of “Music Mondays“, MontanaWriter has been featuring the poetry of W.B. Yeats set to music. For other Yeats poems set to music, click here.

Van Morrison has long been one of my favorite singers. Born in Northern Ireland, he brings an authentic sound and voice to Yeats’ words.

“Before the World Was Made” is classic Yeats in sound and tone and diction. Van Morrison’s version of the poem diminishes nothing of Yeats’ power while at the same time bringing an accessibility to a poet who can admittedly be quite intimidating.

Enjoy!

Before the World Was Made
If I make the lashes dark 
And the eyes more bright 
And the lips more scarlet, 
Or ask if all be right 
From mirror after mirror, 
No vanity’s displayed: 
I’m looking for the face I had 
Before the world was made. 

What if I look upon a man 
As though on my beloved, 
And my blood be cold the while 
And my heart unmoved? 
Why should he think me cruel 
Or that he is betrayed? 
I’d have him love the thing that was 
Before the world was made. 

____

(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

After a dry winter here in the North Country, April brought the kind of moisture we have been needing. Whether it was wet enough to off-set the dry autumn and winter, I do not know. But I do know that lawns are green again, and in the shady areas of the little woods behind our neighborhood the ground is rich brown and muddy again.

The old saying came to mind often during National Poetry Month, “April showers bring May flower.” And so for the month of May, MontanaWriter will be featuring poems about flowers… and a few photos I have taken over the years of flowers and plants.

Emily Dickinson wrote a number of poems about flowers, of course. There are many I could have picked to feature here. Yet since “How Many Flowers  is the one that came first to mind, I will post it here.

I must have first read this poem sometime in my late teens in an Introduction to English Literature class or an American Literature survey class as an undergrad. I suppose I may even have read it earlier in an English text book in high school. It is that familiar to me.

But maybe it is merely her poetry that is familiar to me, her voice. It is as familiar a poetic voice as exists in the English language. The best description of Dickinson’s voice I have read comes from John Barr, President of the Poetry Foundation:

Every great poet writes in a voice that is unmistakably his or hers. When we hear the high, tragic diction of Homer or Yeats, or the urgent but colloquial voice of Dante, who speaks to us in The Inferno as if we saw him on the street just yesterday, or the boisterous, almost overly familiar diction of Walt Whitman, we don’t need to know the poet’s name to know who it is speaking. Emily Dickson’s voice is equally unmistakable. We hear it as if it is coming from the next room. It is a contemporary voice—quiet, contemplative, but also passionate. In fact, the voice is slyly provocative. It never plays into our expectations; rather, it uses the unexpected as a principal conversational tactic. The rhymes are there so we know it’s a poem, but they are there sparingly. The rhythms are there, as well, but they are not mechanical, like a metronome. Her poems wear form, but they wear it lightly. They suffer form, but are not beholden to it. ~ John Barr

Barr is right. In English, only Yeats and Whitman (and Frost, perhaps) are as instantly identifiable to our ears as Dickinson… and but neither Yeats nor Whitman is truly  beloved. They are admired, revered, respected, worshipped, studied… but not beloved. Only Frost, I think, is in the same category of Dickinson as being both instantly familiar and beloved.

Dickinson does the small poem better than anyone in English. It is a kind of American haiku. It is language and image and meaning and rhythm as compressed as they can be compressed.

On the first day of May, Dickinson seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

How Many Flowers Fail in Wood
How many Flowers fail in Wood —
Or perish from the Hill —
Without the privilege to know
That they are Beautiful —

How many cast a nameless Pod
Upon the nearest Breeze —
Unconscious of the Scarlet Freight —
It bear to Other Eyes —

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

How many Flowers fail in Wood —
Or perish from the Hill —
Without the privilege to know
That they are Beautiful —

As is always the case with a small poem, it is difficult to pick just a few lines to highlight. Yet I choose this first stanza for its familiarity, its tonal-definition, and its beauty. They are quintessential Dickinson lines: the alliteration of “flowers” and “fail”, and “that” and “they”; the vowel pairings of “how” and “flower”, and  ”fail” and “hill”; the complimentarianism of “perish” and “privilege”. All of that culminating in what seems to me to be the most Dickinsonian of all words, “Beautiful.”

(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

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Last Monday we featured Christy Moore singing Yeats’ poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” This week we are going in a completely different musical direction: punk legend Shane MacGowan reciting Yeats’ familiar “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.”

For those unfamiliar with MacGowan, he was the front man for Irish punk band The Pogues – one of my all-time favorite groups. He brings a punk energy and most of all a punk anger to his recitation that I love… that I think Yeats would have like as well.

On a rainy Monday morning. The marriage of MacGowan and Yeats seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

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;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

____

In honor of National Poetry Month, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about poets, poetry, and writing poetry. For more poems about poetry, click here.

For April we have featured poems by Wendell Berry, Carl Sandburg, Billy Collins, James Wright, Archibald MacLeish, and a poem by W.H. Auden about W.B. Yeats. It is only fitting for National Poetry Month that we include at least one  poem by Yeats himself… the greatest poet of the 20th Century and one of the a handful of poets that can be considered truly essential.

“Under Ben Bulben” is, of course, one of Yeats’ most famous poems.  It is also the perfect poem for National Poetry Month because its subject is ultimately poetry and poets, a subject Yeats knew more about than any man since… Shelley?

As I have said often here at MontanaWriter, poetry should be read aloud. This is particularly true of Yeats. It is only when you read him aloud that you can fully appreciate his genius.

This poem was one of the last poems Yeats wrote. In his 20s, he was already one of the best poets in the world… yet he only got better. Of what other artist can that be said? More than 50 years of continual artistic growth stopped only by his death. Remarkable!

Enjoy!

Under Ben Bulben
I
Swear by what the sages spoke
Round the Mareotic Lake
That the Witch of Atlas knew,
Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.

Swear by those horsemen, by those women
Complexion and form prove superhuman,
That pale, long-visaged company
That air in immortality
Completeness of their passions won;
Now they ride the wintry dawn
Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.

Here’s the gist of what they mean.

II
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-digger’s toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

III
You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard,
“Send war in our time, O Lord!”
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.

IV
Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did,
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right.

Measurement began our might:
Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
Forms that gentler Phidias wrought,
Michael Angelo left a proof
On the Sistine Chapel roof,
Where but half-awakened Adam
Can disturb globe-trotting Madam
Till her bowels are in heat,
Proof that there’s a purpose set
Before the secret working mind:
Profane perfection of mankind.

Quattrocento put in paint
On backgrounds for a God or Saint
Gardens where a soul’s at ease;
Where everything that meets the eye,
Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,
Resemble forms that are or seem
When sleepers wake and yet still dream,
And when it’s vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That heavens had opened.

Gyres run on;
When that greater dream had gone
Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,
Prepared a rest for the people of God,
Palmer’s phrase, but after that
Confusion fell upon our thought.

V
Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.

VI
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did,
Bring the soul of man to God…

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds…

In this poem there are so many fine lines that catch your ear and eye… such as the famous final stanza, of course. But for National Poetry Month, these lines about the responsibilities of the poet stand out. Read out loud you notice what Yeats does with alliterative word-pairing and echoing, “toe to top,” “heart and heads,” and finally “base-born products of base beds.”

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There is something ironic about setting Yeats’ poetry to music. A number of times he wrote that he had a problem with music because he never liked it when a word was drawn out for musical reasons. The example he always gave was of the word love, which in a song could suddenly become “looooo-ve.”

Nonetheless, a number of people have set Yeats’ poetry to music. For the next few Music Mondays, we will be featuring some of these.

Enjoy!

The Song of Wandering Aengus
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lads and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

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