‘Death’ . . . W.B.Yeats

[  # 98 of My Favourite Short Poems  ]

This poem, ‘Death’, by W.B.Yeats (1865 – 1939} is one of his shortest.   It attempts to contrast the death of of animals, who do not possess such a concept, with the centrality, the significance and the certitude of what death means in the experience of all human beings.   Yeats wrote this poem in 1929 and published it in his 1933 collection, ‘The Winding Stair and Other Poems’. 

Death

Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath;
He knows death to the bone –
Man has created death.

 

Author: William Butler Yeats

W.B.Yeats – ‘Leda and the Swan’

[  # 91 of My Favourite Short Poems  ]

Detail from ‘The Swanmaster’ by Diana Thomson FRBS … sculpture at Staines-on-Thames, England. Photo WHB. ©

‘Leda and the Swan’ by W.B.Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

The Irish poet, W.B.Yeats,  wrote ‘Leda and the Swan’ in 1923, the year in which he was awarded the Nobel prize for Literature.   Yeats, who had a great love of both folklore and mythology, chose to write his version of the story of Leda and the Swan as a Petrarchan sonnet.  It tells the story of Zeus, the Father of the Greek Gods, and his seduction in the form of a swan, of Leda, daughter of King Thestius.  One interpretation of the story as presented by Yeats, is to see its theme as a metaphor for British involvement in Ireland.  Alternatively, it can be read as a generalised representation of the way western civilisation has developed. His choice to write the poem as a sonnet can also be viewed as an ironic comment, contrasting what is a rape with a poetic form normally associated with love and romance.

 

Pastiche Poems #1

A pastiche, created in PRISMA, of a painting of my own of Venice

PASTICHE POETRY

Following on from my opening outline of Pastiche Poetry (see my blog yesterday titled ‘Pastiche Poetry’ ), here are some of my own efforts (you may call them concoctions or confections if you’d rather) which I have based on the well-known opening lines of six different poets  . . .

‘Home Thoughts, From Abroad’, Robert Browning …

Oh to be in England
Now that April’s there; 
Whate’er the goddamn weather
It’s March I just can’t bear.

---

 

‘If’, Rudyard Kipling …

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
Then you’re a very special person
And I’m another bloody cockatoo.

---

 

‘This be The verse’, Philip Larkin …

They tuck you up your mum and dad,
Make sure you go to sleep, 
And then they get the cards out
While from you there’s not a peep.

---

 

‘Casablanca’, Felicia Dorothea Hemans …

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled.
He couldn’t help but think ‘By heck! 
Those clods left me for dead.’

---

 

‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, William Wordsworth …

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vale and hill,
When all at once I saw a shroud,
It made my very heart standstill.

---

 

‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, W.B.Yeats …

I will arise and go now
And go to Innisfree;
I need to meet my muse there,
Commune with Calliope.

 

W.B.Yeats – ‘The Salley Gardens’

William Holman Hunt – The hireling Shepherd (detail) 1851 (Manchester Art Gallery, UK

The Salley Gardens

 

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

 

William Butler Yeats
1865-1939

 

Yeats has said that his composition of this poem was “an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballisdoare, Co.Sligo.  “Salley” or “sally” is a form of the Standard English word “sallow”, i.e., a tree of the genus  Salix. It is close in sound to the Irish word saileach, meaning willow.   Click on the link below to hear a sung version of Yeats’ poem by Maura O’Connell with Karen Matheson …

‘Down By The Sally Gardens’