W.B. Yeats

[Georg Törless]

Hello, i am a new user here. My first topic is about one of the bests poets os all time: William Buttler Yeats.

In begining i post one of his best poems, in my opinion:

When You Are Old

When you are old and gray 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 among a crowd of stars.

[David]

It's a good one indeed, Georg.

I've just discovered that there is no Yeats in the classic poems section of this site. Is that the expression of a personal preference Cam?

Does no-one read Yeats any more? They must do, surely.

[Georg Törless]

Well, i think that W.B. Yeats is the most famous e recognized ireland's poet of all time.

Another Yeat's poem:

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 Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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?

1920

[barrie]

I have a copy of Yeats which cost 6/- in 1969 (Macmillan) - I read it quite regularly, bit discoloured but still in one piece.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

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.

Nowt wrong wi' a bit 'o Yeats!

Barrie

[camus]

I have a version of Yeat's The Stolen Child by the Waterboys

Superb.

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid out faery vats,
Full of berries
And the reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters of the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

[Georg Törless]

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

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.

This one i didn't know, but is very good.

I think the yeat's best books are The Tower and The Winding Stair and Other Poems.

[Georg Törless]

The Stolen Child

This is one of the firts published poets of W.B. Yeats. It is included in Crossways (1925), his first poem's book.


Young Yeats

[Georg Törless]

Yeat's grave and his epitaph.

[Lia]

Georg,

Along with Keats and Tennyson, Yeats was one of the first poets I remember reading. He's certainly a poet to be recognised.

I've been busy the last few days listening to the audio links from the thread 'Audio Poetry On The Net'. I found this reading by Yeats from 1932 on Cameron's link. It's terrific!..

Just click the title of the poem in the red box:

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarch ... oetId=1688

Lia

[cameron]

No, no, no David - I love Mr Yeats. It's just that he hasn't been dead for 70 years, so his work is still copyright.

[spencer_broughton]

I have a copy of Yeats which cost 6/- in 1969 (Macmillan) - I read it quite regularly, bit discoloured but still in one piece.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

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.

Nowt wrong wi' a bit 'o Yeats!

Barrie

Probably one of my favourite poems ever written. I love the way he rhymes dreams with dreams, feet with feet, cloths with cloths etc. but you don't even notice because it is so beautifully written.

[Georg Törless]

Georg,

Along with Keats and Tennyson, Yeats was one of the first poets I remember reading. He's certainly a poet to be recognised.

I've been busy the last few days listening to the audio links from the thread 'Audio Poetry On The Net'. I found this reading by Yeats from 1932 on Cameron's link. It's terrific!..

Just click the title of the poem in the red box:

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarch ... oetId=1688

Lia

Lia,

I know this site, it's very good.

[Georg Törless]

Yeats is generally considered to be one of the twentieth century's key English-language poets. Yet, unlike most modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the traditional verse forms. The impact of modernism on Yeats' work can be seen in the increasing abandonment of the more conventionally poetic diction of his early work in favour of the more austere language and more direct approach to his themes that increasingly characterises the poetry and plays of his middle period, comprising the volumes In the Seven Woods, Responsibilities and The Green Helmet.

Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize. Whereas he received the Prize chiefly for his dramatic works, his significance today rests on his lyric achievement. His poetry, especially the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life (the symbol of the winding stairs), and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life.

[Georg Törless]

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.

1919

[morningstar]

wine comes in at the mouth,
and love comes in at the eye
this is all we shall know for truth
before we grow old and die
i lift my glass to my mouth,
i look at you and i sigh

ah Willie....

ok this topic isn't so recent, but i'm guessing no one here really cares about time frame for a topic. they just kinda keep running!
just thought i'd add my bit to the Yeats collection as he is wonderful. oh yes and that version of The Stolen Child by The Waterboys. i've heard it - absolutely brilliant! i love that!
there's some great recordings out there for W.B reciting his poems. heard a really good one of The Lake Isle of Innisfree. what a voice! oh and i love that previous poem, Irish Airman. that's about Robert Gregory isn't it? Lady Gregory's son.

well here's one of my favourite poems by W.B Yeats. enjoy!

INTO THE TWILIGHT

OUT-WORN heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.


isn't it great!!! ok..just one more lol

SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

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.

ok sorry, but just one more! this is only the last two stanzas of Under Ben Bulben. just thought i'd throw this in cus the final lines are written on his gravestone. it's like his final farewell to Ireland. quite a sad little ending actually

Irish poets, earn 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 the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.


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!

[barrie]

Donovan did a version of Yeats' The Song of a Wandering Aengus back in the Seventies.

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

[David]

OK, if we're all pitching in with a bit of Yeats, here's this. I love it.

The Collar-Bone of a Hare

Would I could cast a sail upon the water
Where many a king has gone
And many a king's daughter,
And alight at the comely trees and the lawn,
The playing upon pipes and the dancing,
And learn that the best thing is
To change my loves while dancing
And pay but a kiss for a kiss.

I would find by the edge of that water
The collar-bone of a hare
Worn thin by the lapping of water,
And pierce it through with a gimlet, and stare
At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,
And laugh over the untroubled water
At all who marry in churches,
Through the thin white bone of a hare.