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Feb. 1st, 2011 02:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception18. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage
19. W.B. Yeats: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney
a) Heaney on Yeats: Yeats' essential gift is his ability to raise a temple in the ear, to make a vaulted space in language through the firmness, in-placeness and undislodgeableness of stanzaic form.
Yes! Interesting how similar that is to Keats' method as self-described in "Ode to Psyche" - I think the main difference is that with Keats the holy thing is presented as before him and he responds to it, whereas with Yeats his incanting makes him one side of the air-temple hollowed. Also Keats' name has a kickstand.
b) But I love early Yeats a lot more than Heaney does. More than almost all later Yeats.
c) Yeats ends almost every poem with some connection between him and sky, sometimes mediated through birds.
d) Herzog's Heart of Glass coda reminded me of something and now I know what - "Lapis Lazuli"! Though message-wise probably closer to Thurber's "The Last Flower" - i.e. humanistic, where Yeats is being fascinatingly atrocious. Though the main body of that movie is more like the wonderful "Meru."
e) Loved most "The Rose of the World" this time 'round I think:
Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna’s children died.
We and the laboring world are passing by:—
Amid men’s souls that day by day gives place,
More fleeting than the sea’s foam-fickle face,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before ye were or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one stood beside His seat;
He made the world, to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.
f) But bits of 1919 were really great too. Tell me these stanzas don't exactly describe the 1992-2001, 2001-2004 shift:
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
Section five of that poem's great also. And of course "The Wild Swans at Coole" and "Dialogue of Self and Soul" and all those others in amid the fruitcake-y ones, some of which are unfortunately rhetorically peerless.
g) Another curious Yeats/Borges connection: in "Beautiful Lofty Things" he talks of c. 79 year-old Lady Gregory responding to a death threat by saying, "I told him that nightly from six to seven I sat at this table, / The blinds drawn up." Borges told a similar story about his mother telling off a Peronist threatening to kill her and Borges - how her son was easy to find at his library and she was always at home and about to die anyway.
19. W.B. Yeats: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney
a) Heaney on Yeats: Yeats' essential gift is his ability to raise a temple in the ear, to make a vaulted space in language through the firmness, in-placeness and undislodgeableness of stanzaic form.
Yes! Interesting how similar that is to Keats' method as self-described in "Ode to Psyche" - I think the main difference is that with Keats the holy thing is presented as before him and he responds to it, whereas with Yeats his incanting makes him one side of the air-temple hollowed. Also Keats' name has a kickstand.
b) But I love early Yeats a lot more than Heaney does. More than almost all later Yeats.
c) Yeats ends almost every poem with some connection between him and sky, sometimes mediated through birds.
d) Herzog's Heart of Glass coda reminded me of something and now I know what - "Lapis Lazuli"! Though message-wise probably closer to Thurber's "The Last Flower" - i.e. humanistic, where Yeats is being fascinatingly atrocious. Though the main body of that movie is more like the wonderful "Meru."
e) Loved most "The Rose of the World" this time 'round I think:
Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna’s children died.
We and the laboring world are passing by:—
Amid men’s souls that day by day gives place,
More fleeting than the sea’s foam-fickle face,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before ye were or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one stood beside His seat;
He made the world, to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.
f) But bits of 1919 were really great too. Tell me these stanzas don't exactly describe the 1992-2001, 2001-2004 shift:
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
Section five of that poem's great also. And of course "The Wild Swans at Coole" and "Dialogue of Self and Soul" and all those others in amid the fruitcake-y ones, some of which are unfortunately rhetorically peerless.
g) Another curious Yeats/Borges connection: in "Beautiful Lofty Things" he talks of c. 79 year-old Lady Gregory responding to a death threat by saying, "I told him that nightly from six to seven I sat at this table, / The blinds drawn up." Borges told a similar story about his mother telling off a Peronist threatening to kill her and Borges - how her son was easy to find at his library and she was always at home and about to die anyway.
