Posts Tagged Yeats

Osip Mandelstam is an artistic martyr, a saint of the imagination. No poet sacrificed as much for his art. No poet paid more dearly for believing in the power of language and beauty and the freedom of imagination.

Exiled and incarcerated often in Soviet Russia for what he wrote, Mandelstam reminds us that words do matter. That one of the first casualties of the demonic is beauty and pleasure.

While Mandelstam is probably read and admired by westerners more than any other Russian poet, I still do not think he is read enough.

On a bleak, wet May morning Mandelstam seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

54 (trans. by W.S. Merwin)

Poison in the bread, the air drunk dry.
Hard to doctor the wounds.
Joseph sold into Egypt
grieved no more bitterly for home.

Bedouins under the stars
close their eyes, sitting their horses,
and improvise songs
out of the troubles of the day.

No lack of subject:
one lost a quiver in the sand,
one bartered away a stallion…
the mist of events drift away.

And if the song is sung truly,
from the whole heart, everything
at last vanishes: nothing is left
but space, the stars, the singer.

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

And if the song is sung truly,
from the whole heart, everything
at last vanishes: nothing is left
but space, the stars, the singer.

In these lines I hear echoes of Yeats’s Cuchulain Comforted, “They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.”

Here we have, in the Mandelstam’s own words (rendered beautifully by Merwin), his artistic credo, his faith in the ultimate power of poetry and imagination. And the best explanation for why evil will always try to destroy art.

_____

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.

_____

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) 

_____

Those of us who regularly (and not so regularly these hectic days) write about ideas know that oftentimes it is only in writing about some “thing” that we come to understand what we truly think about it.  We may start off writing with the idea that we are going to say one thing but quite often we find ourselves saying something altogether different. We undergo a transformation of sorts – even a conversion at times– as we wrestle to put into words what it is we want to say about the thing we are writing about. That, of course, is one of the main reasons we write: to understand.

The last poetry review here on Richard Hugo’s “Making Certain It Goes On” got me thinking about the relationship between poetry and stone. Four poems came quickly to mindd: Richard Hugo’s “Making Certain It Goes On” and Yeats’ “Under Ben Bulben,” of course… but also Robert Frosts’ “The Lesson for Today” and Shelley’s “Ozimandias.”

Frost’s lines from the final stanza of “The Lesson for Today” are as familiar as any that he has written. The long poem that they come from is not so familiar. But long poems tend to be that way: too taxing to be cherished by the masses. As with popular music, our ears tend to gravitate toward and hang onto the catchy choruses of songs. They can more easily carry us way… and hence be more easily carried away by us as songs stuck in our heads.

“I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori.
And were an epitaph to be my story,
I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

In one inspired line, the final one, Frost sums up his entire body of work. It becomes, in the way that only poetry can, a line more permanent than lines carved into stone.

That, of course, is the irony at the center of Shelley’s great “Ozymandias.” Words last longer than stone. The tablets Moses carried down from the mountain are gone… the words live forever.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

In the famous final stanzas of Yeat’s “Under Ben Bulben” we see again a poet calling for a few words to be etched into stone at a final resting place, pointing to the most important reason that poets write: so they can live on forever.

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!

Poetic “fame” is what all poets truly want. Not fame in the sense that popular culture thinks of it, something transitory and bright flaming on the night…. something everyone notices for a few moments but soon forget when the next distraction comes along. That is celebrity. That is not poetic fame, artistic fame.

No poetic fame is what Shakespeare and Shelley and Yeats and Auden have. Their words will remain as long as people can read and write and think. That in the end is what Frost and Yeats are writing about in writing their own epitaphs.

Which bring us again to Richard Hugo, a largely forgotten poet… though one now apparently being “rediscovered” to some extent. His poem seems like something different altogether.

In this dreamy summer air you and I
dreamily plan a statue commemorating
the unknown fisherman. The stone will bear
no inscription and that deliberate anonymity
will start enough rumors to keep
the mill operating, big trout nosing the surface,
the church reforming white frame
into handsome blue stone, and this community
going strong another hundred years.

At first glance we are tempted to say, “Hugo is obviously not talking about a stone and statue for himself like Yeats and Frost so clearly were.”  But I am not convinced that that is true.

God alone can create ex nihilo. The personae a poet creates to speak any poem is always one drawn from out of the pool of their own self. All poetry in the first person amounts to a kind of  dialectic deceit, simultaneously both about the poet and at the same time not about the poet at all but about some “persona” the poet has created.

This is part of what Harold Bloom means when he says all bad poetry is sincere. Sincere poetry– bad poetry– is really only about the writer of the poem. Without the “dialectic deceit,” it is flat poetry… totally without the subtlety and undercurrents that are at the heart of all “true” poetry. It is (again referencing Bloom) Maya Angelou at her sincere best.

The drunk fisherman in “Making Certain It Goes On” then is as much Hugo as it is not Hugo. The fact that he calls for no epitaph on the statue then, catches my eye and ear. It creates a poem with much subtlety and depth, one I like more with each reading.

And so here I am, as I am so often in my writing life, thinking I am going to write about one thing only to find I have written about something else altogether (and coined a new phrase for myself along the way, dialectic deceit!). But that is the nature of writing and poetry and poets as deep and wonderful as Yeats and Shelley and Frost and Hugo.

_____

For the next month or so, postings at MontanaWriter will be sparse by necessity, and I will be re-posting –with new content and edits– some older posts that were written and posted before readership here really began to grow. Soon, “and very soon,” there will be enough time again… for new directions and trajectories. But for now, patience is the order of the day.

The first  book of Seamus Heaney’s I ever purchased wasSweeney Astray at a used bookstore in Dinkytown, Minneapolis. That was in October 1986. Since then I have purchased and read many, many other books of his poetry and prose. I treasure each and every one.

By the time Heaney published Sweeny Astray in 1983, he had already written and published a number of volumes of poetry. On the day I purchased the book, a translation  of a medieval Irish work called Buile Suibhne, I was more familiar with the famous Irish  character of Mad Sweeney than I was of poet/translator Seamus Heaney. By the time I finished the book, I was a committed Heaney fan.

Those who are old enough to remember life before the internet, will remember that there was a time when finding information could be difficult, when was not as simple as just “googling” a name and sifting through hits.

In 1986, when I wanted to know more about this poet I had just “discovered,” and what other books he may have written, I had to go to the library at the University of Minnesota. I spent an entire weekend “researching” Heaney, taking notes in one of old  composition book I always used as a journal… and days combing the shelves of various used bookstores looking for his works. Almost 25 years later, out of habit I suppose, I still find myself looking for his works whenever I am at used bookstores, even though I think I have almost everything he has written.

Heaney was born in Northern Ireland. His best poetry centers around the places and faces of his childhood and youth. He is at his best when writing about those things. “Digging” is such a poem. It is also a wonderful poem about writing poetry.

Enjoy!

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

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

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

* * * * * * * * * *

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

This is one of Heaney’s first poems and in it we see so much that we have come to associate with him: sounds, themes, and that remarkable ear. There are few poets that are as delightful to read out-loud, or at least, few late 20th Century ones.

In Heaney we find the DNA of Yeats and Auden mixed with something earthier (Patrick Kavanaugh at his best). While Yeats and Auden have little of the the working class, the earthy, the common place in their language, perspective, or subject matter (something almost always a part of the best American poetry) , Heaney along with Ted Hughes, “rediscovered” the earth and earthliness and brought it back to British Isles poetry.

_____

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.

____

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)

____

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.

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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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