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Thompson, Yeats and Shelley
I mentioned that Jalen Thompson's poem reminded me of Yeats, and recommended Yeats as worth reading. I own The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, revised second edition, Finneran editor. The poems are presented chronologically and are numbered.
My Soul is a Pack of Coyotes reminded me immediately of Yeats' The Fascination of What's Difficult, number 99 in the collection. Numbers 98, 103, 110, 116, 141, 154, 161, 171 ("To a Squirrel"), 172, 194, 200 ("The Second Coming" - his most famous work, see below), 241 ("Death" - perhaps his best), 255 (The hilariously insulting "For Anne Gregory"), 287 ("I am of Ireland" glossed by Kate Bush) and many others are among my favorites. I intend to comment on some of these at length when time and inspiration allow.
For now, let me state that the standard criticisms of Yeats, that he is a pessimist and a mystic, are not baseless. Yet he is an Irishman who witnessed both the terrible trials of his own land and the worst disaster of human history - The Great War - and his distress was neither unfounded nor all-consuming. His so-called mysticism is not a solipsistic floating subjectivism, but an immersion in the common mythology of his Catholic and Celtic roots. Some of his poems cannot be understood without a rather detailed knowledge of these subjects, but he offers more than enough of value outside these realms so that anyone who can read English can enjoy his humanistic insights and his mastery of our common tongue.
Yeats' poetry is quite modern in all sense save those that give the modern a bad name - he rhymes, he follows form but is not a slave to it, he is ironic at times but never cynical, facetious or a nihilist. He uses concrete visual imagery (as has Jalen, above) to build a mood and express an abstract theme. Perhaps the best praise I can give Yeats is that my mother, a well-read, intelligent, but not over-educated homemaker said, upon reading him at my suggestion, "This is the first poetry that I have ever read that I have both understood and enjoyed."
Published in the aftermath of the First World War, his most famous poem is seen as a mystic and pessimistic commentary on the last century of the Second Millenium. Robert Bork made it the frontispiece of his Slouching Towards Gomorrah. I reproduce it here without any other commentary than to note the beauty of its substance and form. Below I have reproduced Shelley's Ozymandias, which I have always seen as its more benevolent 18th Century counterpart.
The Second Coming
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: somewhere in sands of the desert
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
Reel 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?
-W.B. Yeats
Ozymandias
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.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Both poems were copied from the Wondering Minstrels website at http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/index.html
Ted Keer
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