Discuss here poetry, prose, or plays of William Butler Yeats.

Honorable mention to anyone who uses, in his/her post, the word gyre.

Don't you love Joni Mitchell's setting of Yeats' "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"?

This is a six-minute version, in Bethel NY 1998; it's also on the album "Night Ride Home."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0ggfs2kgfY

If poetry is meant to be read aloud, I can't think of anything better than the first couple of stanzas of Yeats' "A Prayer for My Daughter". I'm a bit rushed for time; otherwise I'd type them out.

Yeats puzzles me in some ways, though. I have no idea of what to make of all that "Order of the Golden Dawn" stuff.

Protest against the iron grip of industrial rationalism? Actual source of poetic meditation? Friendship with courteous people receptive to his wanderings? I think there's a mixed bag of reasons in there somewhere.

Since you suggested it, I've cut-and-pasted "Prayer for My Daughter, " below. It's wildly beautiful:

A Prayer for my Daughter

William Butler Yeats



Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory's wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-leggd smith for man.
It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty's very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there's no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

June 1919

I'd suggest that the poems falls off considerably- into didactic mode, albeit with a few good touches- after the first two stanzas, which are magificent.

As for the rest, it's as though WBY thinks everybody lives in a stately home: Coole Park/Ballylee, eating cucumber sandwiches with Lady Gregory.

It annoys me. The last stanza is the worst offender.

I'm also not entirely comfortable with Yeats injections of extract of monkey-glands to increase his sexual potency.

I see the progression you're noting here, Eddie, and especially the fall-off into aristo-arrogance in the last couple of stanzas. It's as close as he comes to failure at that stage; fortunately, Irish politics was about to save him from irrelevance such as that earned or lived in such a stately mansion. And I still say the man turns a magnificant phrase throughout. It's an unearned gift.

Monkey-glands - who cares. Pathetic, really, but one of the fads of his anti-Freudian age.

Here's a perhaps-less-off-putting poem by the master:



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.

John for being the "Head Whankie" you sure are smart I have misjudged you terrably

Curses.

Draw rein, draw breath
Cast a cold eye
On life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!

Yeats' impressive self-penned epitaph is rather compromised by the fact that the memorial stone on which it appears may not be placed over the poet's bones at all but those of an anonymous Frenchman sporting a truss.

Yeats died in Vichy France during WWII and, in the administrative chaos of the period, was interred in a grave with several other bodies with no identifying markers.

When the war was over, the Irish government represented to the French that it would be fitting if the great man's remains were re-buried in his native soil, a request to which the French authorities readily agreed and an Irish diplomatic mission was despatched to accomplish the delicate task.

The problem, of course, was one of identification. No CIS in those days. The only significant identifying detail provided to the Irish mission was that the great poet had worn a truss in his later years. When the grave was opened, though, TWO male bodies were exhumed of much the same height, both wearing a truss. It became a case of pure guesswork....

I'm thinking of A Vision and of Yeats' belief that his wife, George, was being informed by spirits and putting down insights in her automatic writing.

Was the great man so desirous of finding a meaningful universe behind appearances that he alllowed himself to succumb to these idiotic notions?

You do beg the question, don't you - "these idiotic notions"? They may be so, but you assume they are, rather than show them to be so. In contrast, Yeats describes the scene in which this happens, down to the peculiar smell of violets or roses, which has been noted by other investigators into spirit and automatic writing. That doesn't by itself prove anything, except it slows you down a bit from totally dismissing them. Or does it? I mean, if the "notions" inspire great poetry, are they so idiotic?