Difficult to resist. I just have to publish a Yeats poem.
A slight one for starters, but perhaps not so slight. It is very beautiful, and typical of Yeats' later writing. It was written in 1938, and is one of his last. An irreverence, a sort of "mask", beneath which you can feel the true reverence of the heart. To begin with, it is deliberately unlyrical, as suits title and subject matter, but in the last four lines in come alternating, lilting tetrametre and trimetre, as the poet expresses his true longing, for beauty. Although a Senator at one point in his life, Yeats preferred to avoid directly mentioning politics in most of his poetry, in favour of what his friend the artist AE (George Russell) would call "the politics of eternity" as opposed to "the politics of time". Here, what more worthy subject in our age of conflict? Love, nostalgia and tenderness, at seeing a girl standing there:
Politics
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.
It is extraordinary how much these 'slight' poems reveal to us about their authors and about poetry in general. They especially reveal to us a lot about love as manifested and expressed in poetic writing.
ReplyDeleteHere are two more ‘slight’ poems. The first is again by W. B. Yeats:
**A Drinking Song**
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
This piece, although published in the 1914 collection called *Responsibilities*, is probably one of the poems Yeats wrote about the heartache that Maud Gonne prompted in him by turning him down and marrying John MacBride in 1903.
The ‘drinking song’ speaks for itself. Indeed, what is so striking about it is the deliberate, even exaggerated sense of simplicity it conveys. Yeats’s plight seemed to him at once so ironically straightforward and meaningless that the poem even implies that getting drunk appeared as the only way to alleviate his sorrow.
William Blake, that profoundly mystical poet and Yeats's master in so many things, seems to have reacted to lost love in a somewhat comparable manner, as can be seen from this short piece:
**Love's Secret**
Never seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind doth move
Silently, invisibly.
I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears.
Ah! she did depart!
Soon after she was gone from me,
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.
Again, a minor poem, for all the loveliness and beauty of its simple imagery and despite its sorrowful, dirge-like metre.
It is not clear what personal experience prompted Blake to write these lines. Nor is it probably very important. What is interesting to know is that the piece was written in or around 1793 – that is, about one year before *Songs of Experience* was released – and William Blake, who printed his poems himself, never published it during his lifetime. It was Dante Gabriel Rossetti who included it in his 1863 edition of Blake’s poems.
Some scholars have wondered if the reason why William Blake refrained from printing “Love’s Secret” was that he thought that it fell below the usual standard of his poetry. An alternative explanation is, of course, that he could simply not make it fit with the other poems in either *Songs of Innocence* or *Songs of Experience*.
Be this as it may, this poem clearly breaks away from Blake’s more frequent themes of lost innocence, imagination and social evils as well as from his denunciation of what he perceived as the fetters imposed on the human mind by political regulation or organised religion.
Several interpretations have been given to the piece. Some have seen in it above all a reflection on the mystical value of silence (there is certainly an element of this in it), or even a reflection on death. I am rather inclined to think that it is to be primarily taken at face value.
There is something moving, almost unsettling, in seeing such visionaries as William Blake or William Butler Yeats, oft occupied with the loftiest subjects and using the most sublime imagery, writing such ‘slight’ pieces. It tells us a lot about the human mind and its affections and passions. Behold, and wonder, as these mighty poets, these towering intellects, struggling in the throes of lost, unrequited or impossible love, give vent to their pain and heartbreak through harrowing lines so simply mirroring their feelings.
“I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all”