TS Heavy Hitters Poll #1: Yeats vs. Shakespeare

I think I've read Yeats more often for pleasure, and as a high school senior and college freshman I was utterly intoxicated by "Among School Children," "Lapiz Lazuli," "The Statues," "No Second Troy," "Long-Legged Fly," and at least a dozen others.

Shakespeare will probably walk this poll easy but consider among others this:

The Magi

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.

Also: his late period flowering, while awesome, has too long eclipsed his terrific earlier work.

that last line is one of the most incredible feats of language I know of - continually, permanently humbling

here is where I shamefully admit I have never read any Yeats except perhaps one or two poems in passing (and never of my own volition)

also, his line about "the fascination of what's difficult" nicely summarizes my attraction to the difficult later work; their difficulty was itself attractive to the young Soto.

A Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth,
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on the street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.

That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

oh MAN.

man oh man.

:)

Dammmmmmmmmmmmmmm tough. Shakespeare is GOAT, the inescapable, most ridic show of wtf genius to turn up in English – I mean look around 1600, what the hell else is like the sonnets, Hamlet etc?

But then I've spent way longer just fixated on Yeats – emo youth hung up on the early verse, his middle-late period always there, studied and picked at, in my 20s; and still the c20th man I come back to as embodiment of the mystery of poetry - he was silly, strange and dislikeable; a list of his beliefs would look absurd; and yet untouchable verse.

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams -
Some vague Utopia - and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

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;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.

Was just thinking about spending some serious time on Yeats last weekend. Going back through the poetry and plays, reading the Roy Foster biog.

Autobiographies is one of the strangest, most magical books I've ever read.

oblig; never gets any worse either

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?

this is one of those threads where I point at myself and go "lol CS guy"

this is one of those threads where I go 'lol I wasn't cast in 3 Yeats poems' and get SB'd by about 15 ardent Yeats fanboys

I plead fire, water, air and dirt / fukkin magnets / how do they work?

I will stan for W.B. Yeats any day of the week. He was at or near the pinnacle of the 20th century, which was a hell of a century for poetry in English.

But, the other Willie gets my vote. Shakespeare could write emo, write tragedy, write comedy, write allegory. You name it, he wrote it and it still stands up after 400 years. Try that yourself and see how far you get. I mean, you need a commentary by a specialist to dig the mummified jokes out of Aristophanes, but you can send just about anyone to see A Midsummer Night's Dream and they'll laugh like a hyena.

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.

ronnie james dio r.i.p.

you need a commentary by a specialist to dig the mummified jokes out of Aristophanes,

this is not true of my beloved Plautus btw

Rome ftw

virgil vs shakespeare would be more apt, yeats I'd line up vs willim garlos cilliams maybe? hmm.

My hard drive is named Apemantus.

naw lj I disagree. Yeats's only proper company is with the biggest hitters there are. Shakespeare, Chaucer, Propertius, maybe Vergil, really hard to think of Vergil in anybody's company except Homer imo

virgil smokes homer ten ways to byzantium

The only poets writing in English that rival Yeats in the first half of the century: Frost and Stevens.

I'd consider WCW a huge hitter, personally, although I'm probably very biased.

If we're drawing up a canon of stone-cold greats I think there should be at least one American in there. I'd also really REALLY want to put GMH in too, but again that's completely subjective.

Not read any Propertius; would definitely dust off my Latin if he's as good as you say.

Favourite Greek writer = well, this is Favourite Tragedian really. Did we poll them? Euripides vs Sophocles, although we've probably got an Aeschylus contrarian somewhere up in this thang

Don't actually know any Frost. Am very glad nobody has mentioned TS Eliot yet. Dude's a little overrated IMO.

ffs even I know Frost

"The Most of It" rivals late Yeats in the chills department:

He thought he kept the universe alone;
for all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
in the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the great water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush--and that was all.

One of my favorite Stevens poems, "The Plain Sense of Things":

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

shakespeare

virgil smokes homer ten ways to byzantium

― acoleuthic, Tuesday, May 25, 2010 3:23 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

bullshit!

gonna start that poll after the greek tragedians one is over i think

are there translations of homer, virgil etc to look out for? I've never read either, to my shame

I think I'm probably biased in favour of Virgil because I've studied and fully understood the original Latin to a minute degree, whereas the Homer, although I have studied it in Greek, didn't connect quite so well in the original language.

More Yeats: "Adam's Curse". Note the cadence, its mastery of the demotic. Surprisingly my students love it.

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.

This is totally impossible btw - c1600 (Henry IV pt I - Anthony and Cleopatra) Shakespeare feels as close to some sort of godlike as it's possible to get, but at the opposite end of the spectrum, tho on the same level, Yeats sits close to the heart.

I'd probably choose The Circus Animals' Desertion as a favourite, partly because it makes no sense without all his poetry, his magical poetry, but also because... (several insertions and deletions later) ach, I can't say why:

Maybe at last, being but a broken man
I must be satisfied with my heart ..

It could in fact be a lost Shakespeare speech - Prospero looking at his broken staff in a state of denuded humanity.

Keep up your bright swords or the dew will rust them, for this one I think. (voted Shakey fwiw)

ws

If we're drawing up a canon of stone-cold greats I think there should be at least one American in there.

Yeah, it's Frost, head and shoulders above all the other Americans imo - not iconoclastic or school-of-poetry-leading. Just the best at writing poetry from this country, imo.

If we're drawing up a canon of stone-cold greats I think there should be at least one American in there.

ha i don't see why necessarily.

(i don't really know anything about poetry tbh)

I'm just wondering what's going to happen when I eventually bring up Maya Angelou

She's going to fart in your face.

Frost is taken for granted because he's so popular (one of my most prized possessions is a kids anthology of Frost poems my mom bought me in eighth grade). But the man's work is swathed in darkness.

Frost probably just doesn't reach Britain. It's odd. His stuff is pretty good as I can see

And his reputation was first made in England!

this is really weird, like a decade-long blind-spot

Frost is close after Whitman and Stevens.

Frost probably just doesn't reach Britain.

Not a lot I guess. But Glyn Maxwell decided to follow him.

Impossible to make a case against either, but Yeats, for me, mastered language and cadence to an extent I find it difficult to believe even with the words printed in front of me.

Frost probably just doesn't reach Britain.

It's a bit complicated because of the Frost/Edward Thomas thing maybe? Mates and style buddies, so our (Britishes) last A1 pre-modernist shares a lot of inflections with Frost – they're like a pair of poets who write incredible plainish formal verse about absences, dead ends, strange pauses, empty spaces. And Frost gets a bit dull to me after those first three unbelievable volumes - flat, folksy, rather than the what-was-that of eg The Mountain. But the cultural heft really doesn't carry across - don't think he's ever been a popular/ist poet here.

I would take Stevens as my top US poet of the century - probably said elsewhere I'm not a Make-It-New Pound/WCW man, and Wallace S is precise, sonically astonishing and able to take you out into depths. Sings and thinks. M. Moore's my other, but that's an odd choice I know.

Auden for England.

Still not sure how I want to vote here. Leaning Shaks.

and Frost gets a bit dull to me after those first three unbelievable volumes

It's true, but check out the volume A Further Range.

This thread has made me really happy -- and persuaded me to reach for the top of my bookshelf for Yeats and Stevens.

We should start a thread in which we name our favorite 20th century poets.

I agree, for a start that would be a better option than using the thread where we explain why Yeats > (just) Shakespeare

are there translations of homer, virgil etc to look out for? I've never read either, to my shame

― cozen, Wednesday, May 26, 2010 4:45 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

for homer, fagles is the most recently celebrated one. but I've read robert fitzgerald's translation of the odyssey and prefer it to the fagles - fagles is a little too modern & poetic.

for virgil, I'm a fan of the allen mandelbaum. track down the copy w/ illustrations by barry moser.

"Auden for England."

i second that emotion. i should say that i have read a lot more auden than yeats. but this thread does make me want to read more yeats.

"M. Moore's my other, but that's an odd choice I know."

i dig her but sometimes i feel like i'm too slow for her. or i should take a class on her. elizabeth bishop is more my speed.

i need more larkin in my life. he's my kinda guy.

ooh read a bio before you say that

or better, don't

larkin is very, very, very much not my kinda guy, for what that's worth

larkin's my kinda poet. know nothing about him besides.

frost? really?

yeah i meant poetry-wise.

that was more to everyone

what is "two girls in silk kimonos" from? paul muldoon does something with it in 'meeting the british'

the only two poets of the twentieth century who can keep company with frost are yeats and hardy in my opinion, thom, for whatever that's worth. his will specified that his complete poetry always be available at low price; I can't recommend his collected poems strongly enough.

OTHERS taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
My myself in the summer heaven, godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

^^^ the spirituality of America in the 20th century summed up in fifteen lines imo

that's pretty spooky, in a great way

best fifteen-line metaphysical ghost story ever

what is "two girls in silk kimonos" from? paul muldoon does something with it in 'meeting the british'

Muldoon mangles that Yeats poem ("In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz") - "Two girls in silk kimonos, one a gazebo" iirc

I almost mentioned Hardy since when I was in school Hardy, thanks to Larkin and Auden, was hauled into the twentieth century (and he died in 1928); but I always saw him as a 19th century gent whose pessimism suddenly became fashionable post-Waste Land.

i dig her but sometimes i feel like i'm too slow for her. or i should take a class on her. elizabeth bishop is more my speed.

It took years for Moore to get under my skin - she's a really odd mix of clarity and obscurity, really dense observation with intense visual sense, but then will slip off into abstraction or the moral. It feels like she's this very serious, precise artist, and a really commanding poet of syntax, who just doesn't think or see like anyone else in the century. I used to find her wobbling between trivial and impossible tho.

But yeah Bishop is not far behind Moore and Stevens for me - destroys the rest of the (genuinely formidable) mid-century crowd

Larkin is an A1 shit, but v much my kind of poet.

I can't read Frost's "Desert Places" without literally getting a chill:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less -
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
WIth no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

But yeah Bishop is not far behind Moore and Stevens for me - destroys the rest of the (genuinely formidable) mid-century crowd

My mid to late twentieth century homies:

Merrill
Bishop
Ashbery
Hecht
Clampitt

muldoon-related xpost: it's in '7, Middagh Street'

'two girls, I thought: two girls in silk kimonos. / Both beautiful, one a gazebo.'

but with a change of speaker between the first line and the second. i did not realise the quote. which is pretty relevant, the quote, there being some role-of-poetry-and-specifically-Irish-poetry-in-world-affairs stuff going on, in the poem.

My mid to late twentieth century homies:

Berryman
Plath
Jarrell
Justice
Dubie

are mine - Dubie may or may not count for jack in the future, and frankly, anybody who shuns meter isn't likely to get read repeatedly by me however much I enjoy his/her stuff on first pass, but his images have been killin me dead for years.

I love Justice too. Jarrell's influence as a critic on me is immense (his one novel is a masterful compendium of one-liners) but his poetry leaves me cold. Where should I restart?

Here is Helen Vendler on Jarrell's poetry.

Jarrell ... can be said to have put his genius into his criticism and his talent into his poetry...

His first steady original poems date from his experience in the Air Force, when the pity that was his tutelary emotion ... found a universal scope...

The secret of his war poems is that in the soldiers he found children; what is the ball turret gunner but a baby who has lost his mother? The luckier baby who has a mother, as Jarrell tells us in "Bats," "clings to her long fur / by his thumbs and toes and teeth... / Her baby hangs on underneath... / All the bright day, as the mother sleeps, / She folds her wings around her sleeping child." So much for Jarrell's dream of maternity...

Jarrell often has been taken to task for his sentimentality, but the fiction, recurrent in his work, of a wholly nonsexual tenderness, though it can be unnerving in some of the marriage poems, is indispensable in his long, tearfully elated recollections of childhood. The child who was never mothered enough, the mother who wants to keep her children forever, these are the inhabitants of the lost world, where the perfect filial symbiosis continues forever...

For all his wish to be a writer of dramatic monologues, Jarrell could only speak in his own alternately frightened and consolatory voice, as he alternately played child and mother...

That pretty much nails it for all the poems of his that I've read or listened to. So maybe the answer is you don't, because he's just like that.

Vendler's terrific. My favorite collection:

http://www.amazon.com/Music-What-Happens-Poems-Critics/dp/0674591534/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275187962&sr=1-1

Jarrell poem whose conclusion gives me the shivers every time, still:

90 North

At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe,
I clambered to bed; up the globe's impossible sides
I sailed all night—till at last, with my black beard,
My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole.

There in the childish night my companions lay frozen,
The stiff furs knocked at my starveling throat,
And I gave my great sigh: the flakes came huddling,
Were they really my end? In the darkness I turned to my rest.

—Here, the flag snaps in the glare and silence
Of the unbroken ice. I stand here,
The dogs bark, my beard is black, and I stare
At the North Pole . . .
And now what? Why, go back.

Turn as I please, my step is to the south.
The world—my world spins on this final point
Of cold and wretchedness: all lines, all winds
End in this whirlpool I at last discover.

And it is meaningless. In the child's bed
After the night's voyage, in that warm world
Where people work and suffer for the end
That crowns the pain—in that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land

I reached my North and it had meaning.
Here at the actual pole of my existence,
Where all that I have done is meaningless,
Where I die or live by accident alone—

Where, living or dying, I am still alone;
Here where North, the night, the berg of death
Crowd me out of the ignorant darkness,
I see at last that all the knowledge

I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Unfortunately I haven't read enough twentieth century poetry to form my own opinions. I've rad a good amount of Yeats, Eliot, Edward Thomas, Larkin, and though I admired Yeats for his obvious power, I was never sure if the poetry was equal to the rhetoric.

My English teacher, whom I trusted, once told me that the two greatest poets of the 20c were Jack Spicer and Basil Bunting.

Was your English teacher named Hieronymous J. Pisstake, by any chance?

Oh why, you not a fan of their work?

no I'm just being funny 'cause they're good but there are some pretty heavy hitters in contention for the Greatest of 20th C. spot and while I guess I'm open to the idea that either of them, studied closely, are in the company of for example Yeats & Frost....well, no, I'm kind of not. So it seems like poetic challops along the lines of "sure, Shakespeare was good, but he wasn't half the poet Thomas Wyatt was" -- I mean I love Wyatt, a lot, but c'mon

Being ignorant of Frost (as most Brits are) I just read a couple of his poems, 'After Apple-Picking' and 'Birches', and while they had a great conversational quality I can't imagine the author of these being the greatest poet of any century, especially not such a dramatic, revolutionary, scary and exciting one as the 20c. yeats certainly engages with a good deal of that in his later work, the earlier stuff is, for me, very hard to enjoy Celtic Twilight guff.
I did my dissertation on Yeats, but I find even his best poetry some what remote now.

Looking at that 'For Once, then, Something', is this mean to be so gauche? 'And lo'? 'Truth'?
I know Lo is meant to make us think of 'low' but its pretty laughable. The repetition of words
is effective, i grant.

please do continue to provide us with the illuminating first looks into Frost

seriously dude, "I just looked at this and I have to say, nope, no sale" - save that for, like, TV shows or something & maybe read a critical appreciation of the poetry?

Seriously, Frogman: read ten or a dozen poems before judging.

and though I admired Yeats for his obvious power, I was never sure if the poetry was equal to the rhetoric

Not sure I agree with this. It does also allow me to correct something I said upthread about Yeats' 'magical poetry' which sounded like a gushing schoolgirl - I meant it actually as poetry about magic, rather than in the sense that poetry can be magical, although I think that's true in all sorts of cases.

Point being, I think that Yeats consistently finds something ineffable and beautiful from the mystical bric-a-brac, his prosaic, silly side. Do you find the arcane symbolism of The Tower gets in the way of 'O heart, O troubled heart'? Or all that crap about gyres? While not quite seperable, they are strangely unimportant, despite clearly being part of Yeats' poetic imagination.

In other words, the poetry (for me) usually wins over any rhetoric.

randall jarrell's criticism is a+++ phenomenal

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightlest bondage made aware.

- R. Frost, The Silken Tent

my mid-to-late century homies:

bishop
larkin
ponge
kees
macniece

"The Subverted Flower":

She drew back; he was calm:
"It is this that had the power."
And he lashed his open palm
With the tender-headed flower.
He smiled for her to smile,
But she was either blind
Or willfully unkind.
He eyed her for a while
For a woman and a puzzle.
He flicked and flung the flower,
And another sort of smile
Caught up like fingertips
The corners of his lips
And cracked his ragged muzzle.
She was standing to the waist
In golden rod and brake,
Her shining hair displaced.
He stretched her either arm
As if she made it ache
To clasp her - not to harm;
As if he could not spare
To touch her neck and hair.
"If this has come to us
And not to me alone -"
So she thought she heard him say;
Though with every word he spoke
His lips were sucked and blown
And the effort made him choke
Like a tiger at a bone.
She had to lean away.
She dared not stir a foot,
Lest movement should provoke
The demon of pursuit
That slumbers in a brute.
It was then her mother’s call
From inside the garden wall
Made her steal a look of fear
To see if he could hear
And would pounce to end it all
Before her mother came.
She looked and saw the shame:
A hand hung like a paw,
An arm worked like a saw
As if to be persuasive,
An ingratiating laugh
That cut the snout in half,
And eye become evasive.
A girl could only see
That a flower had marred a man,
But what she could not see
Was that the flower might be
Other than base and fetid:
That the flower had done but part,
And what the flower began
Her own too meager heart
Had terribly completed.
She looked and saw the worst.
And the dog or what it was,
Obeying bestial laws,
A coward save at night,
Turned from the place and ran.
She heard him stumble first
And use his hands in flight.
She heard him bark outright.
And oh, for one so young
The bitter words she spit
Like some tenacious bit
That will not leave the tongue.
She plucked her lips for it,
And still the horror clung.
Her mother wiped the foam
From her chin, picked up her comb,
And drew her backward home.

that frost stuff is nice, did he continue writing after adolescence?

srsly u yanks are cute.

y u i orta

:D

nah i've not read much frost, it doesn't help that he's thought only in junior poetry/english cycles this side of the ocean tbh

write-in voting for robert burns

there are more heavy hitters polls to come

I know the tradition on ILM would be "let's do twenty polls at once" but I figured let's get this big q out of the way and then continue

Next poll:

English schools
American schools

private or public?

from what I'm told of Ireland I don't think the worst Manchester ghoul will be able to do aught but bow before the masters :(

Finally voted. It was Shakespeare coz yknow he's Shakespeare (OR WAS HE???).

The Frost quoted here not doing much for me tbh - still where I was upthread and mostly hit by the earlier stuff (just reread 'Out, out' and hell yes). This feels woolier, less concrete, and the poet's sticking his head in a bit more; sounds ok, but I feel like I'm in the Graves league (which yes is a place I like to be), not the Yeats true vision league.

It was Shakespeare coz yknow he's Shakespeare

Or rather, he persuaded me right now because of that opaque inwardness that he's got - minds talking to themselves, jumping from image to image, losing you sometimes, picking at and around something and stretching language far to do it. When a Shakespeare contemporary gets difficult, it's often because you're missing an allusion; with Yeats, it's sometimes because he's wandered into private-symbol world (and sometimes it's because he's talking bollocks); with Shakespeare it's like he's thinking and discriminating and turning inwards - like he (in the sonnets) or a character are in an difficult argument with themselves (mid-late drama especially - Corialanus, Timon), stepping s'ways, skipping ahead, cutting back, reacing for images to articulate it.

There are bits of that around him in Fulke Greville and Donne maybe (the latter a gen down, so picking it up from the playhouses?), but it's never really allied elsewhere to such a straight-up prettypretty lyrical gift.

Anyway that is why I voted Shakespeare today.

I also admit that everything I'm praising could just be textual corruption.

It was very difficult for me to vote for Shakespeare given how much some of Yeats means to me. "But I, being poor, have only my dreams/I have spread my dreams under your feet/tread softly for you tread on my dreams"? All love poetry after that might as well go hang, that's as good as it's going to get. But then, you know, Will S.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!
Fool. O nuncle, court holy-water in a dry house is better than this rain-water out o’ door. Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughters’ blessing; here’s a night pities neither wise man nor fool.
Lear. Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,
You owe me no subscription: then, let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man.

I mean

you know

lol at ppl shitting on robert frost

shakespeare is so ridiculous

ly amazing

xxp do you file that thought under comedy, poetry or scat porn, though?

passive-aggressive finickiness disguised as wit

nah i cut all the pass-agg out of my diet tbph, but this is the shakespeare/yeats poll and frost will have his due consideration soon, i look fwd to more exposure.

that frost stuff is nice, did he continue writing after adolescence?

srsly u yanks are cute.

― May be half naked, but knows a good headline when he sees it (darraghmac), Sunday, 30 May 2010 14:51 (8 hours ago) Bookmark

haha

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i'm literally perning in a gyre with excitement

Mid-late-20th-Century:

Sceptr'd Isle

MacNeice
Larkin
Hill

God's Country

Stevens
Merrill
Berryman
Ammons

My favorite Merrill poem. The last stanza kills me.

I mean

you know

For Lear WS needed almost superhuman self-control. For all his gyres I don't think Yeats could go there.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

this is no country... for yeats!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

^^^^ mods, plz change thread title

nu-Shakespeare could be posting to Tumblr rite now -- would we know it? O_O

They knew it then, we'd know it now.

Didn't vote but I followed the arguments and while I sensed a lot more affection for Yeats I knew (and so did everybody) that it wasn't going to be enough.

thread took moral high ground of recognising greatness of both rather than turning it into a flamewar contest.

that was aerosmith's intention though

Nah -- we used it as an excuse to post great poems.

well it transpired as Robert Frost Is Awesome but yeah, great thread

I spent a fair amount of drive time today thinking about what to make heavy hitters poll #2 - what's anybody wanna do?

dare we approach Virgil's rostrum

*I* would be down for something involving GMH but I'm aware I'm pretty much alone on that. Go with your gut, dude

Thomas Hardy vs D.H. Lawrence

virgil vs dante

or homer vs milton

Flaubert vs Nabokov

Albarn vs Gillespie

oh wait I got it now

dickinson vs whitman

oh you already started it

lets get some women up in these polls tho, and by women, i mean, emily dickinson

max OTM iirc

(that poll's impossible to answer, tho)

I was looking at elizabeth bishop & marianne moore this morning, but yeah dickinson is the business

was lucky to have had a prof who was a Dickinson scholar tbh

or, if he didn't publish on Dickinson -- i don't know -- she was definitely one of his favorite poets, if not his favorite, and we did a lot of work on her stuff

I was looking at elizabeth bishop & marianne moore this morning

there's painful choosing. ow.

*I* would be down for something involving GMH

Dickinson v GMH! US/UK shut-ins of the 19th century. (another tough un).

I would guess that Dickinson would be hard to beat by almost anyone - actually Dickinson vs. Donne might be a fair fight

or Dickinson vs Herbert

dickinson vs..... herself

Dickinson v GMH! US/UK shut-ins of the 19th century. (another tough un).

this poll would be amazing and would probably lead to me reading some Dickinson, who like Frost is a massive black hole in British poetic education

god you guys are missing out

i dont know if youd like dickinson tho louis? dont you like big epic type bros? maybe whitman would be more your style?

Um...more or less my favourite poetry (that 1930's modernist biz) is decidedly UN-epic! Or at least, doesn't really go on for more than 20 pages at a pop, and usually keeps to one or two pages. The epic form is delightful when done well, however, so I'm open-minded about who I read.

great modern female poets: Susan Howe anyone? Elizabeth Bishop did that poem about a fish didn't she - the one that got polled up against some other poems - it's GREAT and I voted for it

*WHOM if we're being PERNICKETY

actually GMH is pretty much my favourite poetry fuck tha h8rs

I want to love Hopkins, but the rhymes and rhythms jangle in an awkward way. Behind the rhetorical legerdemain is content that Donne and Herbert have approached more...delicately, let's say.

maybe GMH is a unique synthesis of anguished melodrama and infernal systemic-scattergun complexity, two things which have always defined my youthful thoughts

or he's just got an ear for cadence that I haven't heard the like of, ever else

it only deepens my affection, that he makes up compound-adjectives and expressions like 'inscape' and 'instress' to suit his wild purposes - he seems genuinely to be inventing and discovering a new poetic, one that in this pure moment of creation only he can compose - and this new poetic enables him to look within mystical processes in a manner that reveals the very structure of his sensual imagination - his entire comprehension of life is splattered manically onto the page as if attempting to chronicle the totality of God - observe how elongated I have become in response - it is silly but no poet has evinced such throes - such exquisite tortures

'rollrock highroad roaring down' are seven of my favorite syllables of all time. the rest is hit or miss.

LJ OTM imo -- good post

'Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves' is the most perfect document of English language, IMO, but enough of this - I need sleep

xpost

although, tbh, the only GMH i've encountered was a little bit here and there in college -- all scattershot

go on then, I've posted this to ILX like 3 times before but why not again

accents are for stress

Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves

EARNEST, earthless, equal, attuneable, ' vaulty, voluminous, … stupendous
Evening strains to be tíme’s vást, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ' her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ' stárs principal, overbend us,
Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ' her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as-
tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ' self ín self steedèd and páshed — qúite
Disremembering, dísmémbering ' áll now. Heart, you round me right
With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ' whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.
Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ' damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,
Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ' Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind
Off hér once skéined stained véined variety ' upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck
Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds — black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ' thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

i don't know who did the seeding but there's just no way Yeats runs into the Shakespeare buzzsaw in round one. Shoulda tossed him a sacrificial Romantic or something.

aw i missed this! i had such an embarrassing yeats obsession as a teenager that i couldn't read him for a while after that. also think he suffers because i know more about him as a dude than shakespeare and yeats was kind of silly.

i mean, shakespeare is the "i want you back" by the jackson 5 of polls, so i would have voted for him, but <3 yeats so ponderous.

For me there is something about Shakespeare, Keats, and Yeats that places them above everyone else in the English language. Don't know if I'll feel this way in five years or not...

i like your picks. shelley maybe squeezes in there too imo, but that's based on nothing more than ozymandias really.

Yep, love Shelley.

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.

i've been drunkenly reading this several times per day for the last week. fuck

The last two stanzas of "Adam's Curse"!

i've been drunkenly reading this several times per day for the last week. fuck

aww K3v hope you are ok. those lines make me sob even when everything is right in my life, they are the most perfect thing

Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,
You owe me no subscription: then, let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man.

^^^ I think the pyrotechnics of the earlier parts of the soliloquy get all the attention but this right here is the business

collapses on itself v nicely

thanks to alfred for posting frost's 'desert places.' never read that before; utterly gorgeous.

is there a consensus on the best frost collection to own?

The collected Frost is really one of the rare COMPLETE collections you need own. He only wrote two volumes of fluff (his last two).

we should do more of these

my sophomore HS english teacher had to drive frost to and from the airport when he was in college. he described him as 'the crabbiest old bastard i've ever met.'

SEPTEMBER 1913
by William Butler Yeats
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the ha’pence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save?,
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You’d cry ‘Some woman’s yellow hair
Has maddened every mother’s son’:
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they’re dead and gone,
They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

100th anniversary of publication, and all is changed, changed utterly (not likely)

in the pub, with a friend, he's just gone to drain the weasel, read that while he was away. and well, it moved the hell out of me. time to get a pint.

this is the best thread on ilx

Old ILE's dead and gone
It's with Passantino in the UK

just sent the second coming to a client wanting to know why things don't work as well as they used to. v much looking fwd to response.

should've sent him Lear's last monologue

some guy studying political science barf was introduced to me at a party the other night and the person introducing us said of him "he's very passionate" and i said "but about what" and he said "taking over the world" barf and i said "see, the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity" and he looked perplexed

no response :(

tbh its maybe a tack worth taking more often

I would like us to do this all over again, picking different lines and verses and offerings, I wouldn't even pick on frost this time. we should do it every year, without repeats.

ts big dogs 2014 edition #1: dostoyevsky vs austen

oh yeah def but i meant like for these two itt

today, a cat
THE CAT AND THE MOON

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

HE cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

imagine being so good you can write that for a bloody cat tho

I remember at school, and English was my subject, mind, that sailing to Byzantium was only nonsense, whispers caught in the wind and the odd image of echoing history, a scatty lament, nothing more. read it again tonight and welp

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.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come

maybe its been mentioned earlier but reading yeats in school i found his delusional sad-sack obsession with maud gonne pitiful and led to some gratuitous bitterness in his poems.

true, yet even unworthy sentiments weren't wasted on him, looking at the outputs he generated from them. even if twere relevant tbh

whenever he writes an empty booming phrase like "the artifice of eternity" he belts me with "Of hammered gold and gold enamelling/To keep a drowsy Emperor awake."

a belt of hammered gold would be alright imo

otm

Yeats really really getting to me lately, like I open and read and am completely drowning within a few lines

this is no country... for yeats!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

― max, Monday, May 31, 2010 7:04 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

thread making me think i should give frost another chance

i don't know why i posted upthread about being embarrassed by yeats because i had been obsessed with him as a teenager. teenagers otm.

i would have voted shakespeare but this is really hard.

all otm

got a good compendium of Yeats and yeah maybe I just need my Shakespeare performed for me, cf my hopkins , but nobody reads like Yeats imo

btw, regarding the discussion upthread, dickinson is our american genius, surely? i'm willing to believe frost is better than i know but there's no way he's that good.

She's more "original" in the formal sense.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal

;_;

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show

;_; ;_; ;_;

late Yeats is so raw

I was youtubing poetry to ease the idleness of food preparation yday and I remembered this thread and looked up frost and had a go and the person reading it was an *american* person and I know the fault is in me and the stuff reads well up thread but I had to drop a potful of good roosters just to get to Richard Burton growling something about farms and youth I have some work yet to do with frost I admit

xp raw is a v good word its brutal at times

faw:

First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go

raw too

the first poem i ever memorized was "Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty" and i didn't even have to try because the lines

When my arms wrap you round I press
my heart upon the loveliness
that has long faded from the world

just stuck in my head indelibly upon first reading. how does he do that?

Shakespeare was a creep:

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
But if thou live, remember'd not to be,
Die single and thine image dies with thee.

all those sonnets that are like, you're super-hot, you should go plow some lady so that your hotness lives on creep me out the worst.

but then there's Lear, so

"Adam's Curse" is the bomb. When I used to teach poetry explaining the narrative to students provoked excellent responses. It has the quiet revelations of a short story but the compression of a great lyric.

when you are old and grey has a slap in it too, tbf

the procreation sonnets are kind of 3rd-tier but I like them as an opening to the semi-narrative of the sequence - like Shakespeare has taken on this weird family politics patronage job where he's trying to persuade a good-looking young aristo to turn out a kid to keep the line up, but then bang sonnet 18 forget about having babies, shakespeare is in love.

the beat drops

all those sonnets that are like, you're super-hot, you should go plow some lady so that your hotness lives on creep me out the worst.

In Shakespere's day infant/child mortality was extremely high (I'm thinking around 30%) and life expectancy for those who successfully reached adulthood was still only about 50. Death was very, very real to those people and when they wrote about how fleeting life and love and beauty were, they weren't kidding.

i take seriously that those early sonnets are about mortality. it's the triangulation that's creepy. and interesting, later in the sonnets.

Lines Written on a Seat
on the Grand Canal, Dublin

'Erected to the memory of Mrs. Dermot O'Brien'

O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water, preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
A swan goes by head low with many apologies,
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges -
And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb - just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.

I'm just gonna, having let that mature, offer aero or whoever their pick against kavanagh, as a way of getting the ball rolling here

Dylan Thomas might make a good match-up.

but then we're heading towards a poetry 6 nations.

nothing wrong with that itd keep the yanks out (not that they'd respect it but no harm setting a stall out maybe)

all those sonnets that are like, you're super-hot, you should go plow some lady so that your hotness lives on creep me out the worst.

― horseshoe, Monday, 1 September 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I look out for this paperbk ed of the sonnets, intro by Germaine Greer.

feel like Kavanagh/D Thomas/Ted Hughes might be an interesting stand-off (great but not dominant-great, like Yeats or someone), but I'd be uncertain of a Scottish poet to throw in the mix (I think MacDiarmid is too heavy a hitter for them, or his major achievements are more long-form maybe, and then I'm no good on the next step down, like MacCaig and Morgan) & then I wouldn't know at all to pick a French or Italian poet - it'd be names from a hat for me tbh.

Berryman/Plath might be an interesting head-to-head.

I dont think there are any bad ideas there tbh I just like reading ilx poetry hedz thrash it out also I think maybe Kavanagh needs some spotlight

is there a good selection of Yeats' best lyrics? I'm reading through the Collected in full, & there's a lot in the early volumes that seems... unnecessary

then again, it could just be the actual formatting that's throwing me: giant font + poems starting in midpage = the shorter, pithy stuff tends to get lost in the shuffle; combine that with the frustrating similarity of the titles & I end up rereading a whole volume of poems because I can't spot the ones I liked when I'm paging through :/

the recent separate issue of 'the tower' is nice

yeah I've got that & 'The Winding Stair' in separate volumes (nice cuz they're both good books & the covers are pretty). would love to see this get the same reissued-facsimile treatment:
http://www.themargins.net/images2/bib/B/BL/BL17_228.jpg

ooh, i didn't know there was another one of those

Depends. How are you defining "early"? No Yeats is complete without "The Sorrow of Fergus" and "Adam's Curse."

you referring to "Fergus and the Druid" or another poem? definitely "early", but perhaps a "dramatic fragment" rather than a "lyric"...

"Adam's Curse" = early-middle Yeats?

I've been reading Harold Bloom's Yeats study in tandem with the Collected, & he draws the line right at the turn of the century, which is convenient; but unlike Bloom, I find much to admire in the 'middle poems' of Responsibilities (1914) & The Green Helmet (1910). I'm somewhat less charmed by 1904's In the Seven Woods, so it's simple enough to shunt that one off to the early track.

rosenthal's 'selected poems and four plays' is the standard, right, or used to be? i feel like i may have been recommended it on this board. this thread, possibly.

i just cant with yeats tho in general

Responsibilitie would be my cutoff point, and I'd include several of its poems.

That Bloom book is excellent on among other things Yeats' indebtedness to Shelley.

xp yeah I was just looking at the Rosenthal... it's still like 300 pages tho! & I already have all the plays

I feel like my appreciation of a poet depends heavily on my ability to carry a book around with me for several weeks, reading & rereading during my little snatches of downtime. pocket-sized facsimile editions of The Tower & The Winding Stair have made some inroads towards the later Yeats, but if I want to dip into The Wind Among the Reeds I'm stuck lugging around a 600-page brick :/

are you reading this thread on a printout?

who says he wants to appreciate us

... well now that you mention it, I do appreciate that counter-zing on my behalf :)

it wasn't a zing I'm trying to shock u into happiness get a kindle

no thanks, I'm a sentimental traditionalist & a champion of conservative values (I'm reading Yeats ffs)

this is the same Yeats with the tombshagging and the whatnot now

Better still, hand the Yeats-loaded Kindle to a gifted reader-aloud of poetry and have them insinuate the words into your brain through your ears. That way you needn't encumber your hands and may even close your eyes restfully.

think of how many monkey testicles you'd be able to afford thanks the savings a kindle brings

The benefits are endless.

interesting that nobody talks abt shakespeare ITT anymore, interesting and telling imo Yeats in the long run at a canto imo

shakespeare in a first round KO thx

Yeats after the fall

ive had the first four lines of wild swans at Cooke in my head all day idk why.

how do the rhythms even work. idk.

anyway, 150th bday this week rte running a course of events across TV and radio to look fwd to

how do the rhythms even work. idk.

Yeats employed a superb bassist

How do I shot Yeats through guitar amp?

giving yis both a dry downturning mouth rn

On R3 also: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05xq6b0

Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

God almighty

√

interesting that nobody talks abt shakespeare ITT anymore, interesting and telling imo Yeats in the long run at a canto imo

― post you had fecund thoughts about (darraghmac), Thursday, April 9, 2015 11:39 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

*folds arms, raises eyebrows at shakespeare*

no way of comparing...

i was gonna read Deidre, one of the plays, this week.

I'm easily riled but It's been a while since I've seen something that's riled me this much. This is an object lesson on hot to not read a great poem. And how to dress badly to boot. What on earth is she doing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0VuBD-yxVI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPB_17rbNXk

I've already had that misfortune^. Not the whole thing, obviously.

"Watch this video on youtube. Playback on other sites has been disabled by this owner"

Think I've seen Shaw read Shakespeare on TV. That's when you know your voice is the best voice.

I know not what the younger dreams --
Some vague Utopia -- and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.

I read a page of a yeats short story aloud yesterday and jeez there was a guy who needed the breaks forced onto him. Rhythm and cadence was there but sentences were running sevenclause deep.

yet his Autobiographies is beautiful, and so is a meditational reverie called "Per Amica Silentia Lunae."

I dont doubt it, the 'aloud' part was what caused me the problems.

anyone read yeats' plays? the collection i've got has "calvary" and "purgatory"

Yes. Read The Words Upon the Windowpane for realistic drama, Purgatory in his spare Noh phase.

oh these are super short too

A Deep-sworn Vow

OTHERS because you did not keep
That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;
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.

ughhhh

stop soul-reading me, WBY

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.

Always enjoyed the hints of malice/goes in that one

/glee

The entire social concept of friendzoning justified in the most beautiful whines imaginable

The leaden echo and the golden echo is the best poem

the boss just made a reference to "the second coming", you know the "slouching towards bethlehem" bit. "we've all been slouching towards bethlehem a little bit". it wasn't an allusion that was cleaving closely to the original - she was emphasizing the slouching towards something, there was no hint of apocalypse. a co-worker piped in "that was christmas"

haha

Dreamt recently I made an illustrated small book of Wandering Aengus which ended with the Flammarion engraving for the final 2 lines.

“I have no rest, nor joy, nor peace,
For people die and die
And after cried he, “God forgive!
My body spake, not I!”

This one is a bit cheesy but it does remain one of the few poems I still know by heart (and can rattle off primary school style too).