TS Heavy Hitters Poll #1: Yeats vs. Shakespeare

today, a cat
THE CAT AND THE MOON

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

HE cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

imagine being so good you can write that for a bloody cat tho

I remember at school, and English was my subject, mind, that sailing to Byzantium was only nonsense, whispers caught in the wind and the odd image of echoing history, a scatty lament, nothing more. read it again tonight and welp

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

maybe its been mentioned earlier but reading yeats in school i found his delusional sad-sack obsession with maud gonne pitiful and led to some gratuitous bitterness in his poems.

true, yet even unworthy sentiments weren't wasted on him, looking at the outputs he generated from them. even if twere relevant tbh

whenever he writes an empty booming phrase like "the artifice of eternity" he belts me with "Of hammered gold and gold enamelling/To keep a drowsy Emperor awake."

a belt of hammered gold would be alright imo

otm

Yeats really really getting to me lately, like I open and read and am completely drowning within a few lines

this is no country... for yeats!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

― max, Monday, May 31, 2010 7:04 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

thread making me think i should give frost another chance

i don't know why i posted upthread about being embarrassed by yeats because i had been obsessed with him as a teenager. teenagers otm.

i would have voted shakespeare but this is really hard.

all otm

got a good compendium of Yeats and yeah maybe I just need my Shakespeare performed for me, cf my hopkins , but nobody reads like Yeats imo

btw, regarding the discussion upthread, dickinson is our american genius, surely? i'm willing to believe frost is better than i know but there's no way he's that good.

She's more "original" in the formal sense.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal

;_;

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show

;_; ;_; ;_;

late Yeats is so raw

I was youtubing poetry to ease the idleness of food preparation yday and I remembered this thread and looked up frost and had a go and the person reading it was an *american* person and I know the fault is in me and the stuff reads well up thread but I had to drop a potful of good roosters just to get to Richard Burton growling something about farms and youth I have some work yet to do with frost I admit

xp raw is a v good word its brutal at times

faw:

First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go

raw too

the first poem i ever memorized was "Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty" and i didn't even have to try because the lines

When my arms wrap you round I press
my heart upon the loveliness
that has long faded from the world

just stuck in my head indelibly upon first reading. how does he do that?

Shakespeare was a creep:

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
But if thou live, remember'd not to be,
Die single and thine image dies with thee.

all those sonnets that are like, you're super-hot, you should go plow some lady so that your hotness lives on creep me out the worst.

but then there's Lear, so

"Adam's Curse" is the bomb. When I used to teach poetry explaining the narrative to students provoked excellent responses. It has the quiet revelations of a short story but the compression of a great lyric.

when you are old and grey has a slap in it too, tbf

the procreation sonnets are kind of 3rd-tier but I like them as an opening to the semi-narrative of the sequence - like Shakespeare has taken on this weird family politics patronage job where he's trying to persuade a good-looking young aristo to turn out a kid to keep the line up, but then bang sonnet 18 forget about having babies, shakespeare is in love.

the beat drops

all those sonnets that are like, you're super-hot, you should go plow some lady so that your hotness lives on creep me out the worst.

In Shakespere's day infant/child mortality was extremely high (I'm thinking around 30%) and life expectancy for those who successfully reached adulthood was still only about 50. Death was very, very real to those people and when they wrote about how fleeting life and love and beauty were, they weren't kidding.

i take seriously that those early sonnets are about mortality. it's the triangulation that's creepy. and interesting, later in the sonnets.

Lines Written on a Seat
on the Grand Canal, Dublin

'Erected to the memory of Mrs. Dermot O'Brien'

O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water, preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
A swan goes by head low with many apologies,
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges -
And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb - just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.

I'm just gonna, having let that mature, offer aero or whoever their pick against kavanagh, as a way of getting the ball rolling here

Dylan Thomas might make a good match-up.

but then we're heading towards a poetry 6 nations.

nothing wrong with that itd keep the yanks out (not that they'd respect it but no harm setting a stall out maybe)

all those sonnets that are like, you're super-hot, you should go plow some lady so that your hotness lives on creep me out the worst.

― horseshoe, Monday, 1 September 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I look out for this paperbk ed of the sonnets, intro by Germaine Greer.

feel like Kavanagh/D Thomas/Ted Hughes might be an interesting stand-off (great but not dominant-great, like Yeats or someone), but I'd be uncertain of a Scottish poet to throw in the mix (I think MacDiarmid is too heavy a hitter for them, or his major achievements are more long-form maybe, and then I'm no good on the next step down, like MacCaig and Morgan) & then I wouldn't know at all to pick a French or Italian poet - it'd be names from a hat for me tbh.

Berryman/Plath might be an interesting head-to-head.

I dont think there are any bad ideas there tbh I just like reading ilx poetry hedz thrash it out also I think maybe Kavanagh needs some spotlight

is there a good selection of Yeats' best lyrics? I'm reading through the Collected in full, & there's a lot in the early volumes that seems... unnecessary

then again, it could just be the actual formatting that's throwing me: giant font + poems starting in midpage = the shorter, pithy stuff tends to get lost in the shuffle; combine that with the frustrating similarity of the titles & I end up rereading a whole volume of poems because I can't spot the ones I liked when I'm paging through :/

the recent separate issue of 'the tower' is nice

yeah I've got that & 'The Winding Stair' in separate volumes (nice cuz they're both good books & the covers are pretty). would love to see this get the same reissued-facsimile treatment:
http://www.themargins.net/images2/bib/B/BL/BL17_228.jpg

ooh, i didn't know there was another one of those

Depends. How are you defining "early"? No Yeats is complete without "The Sorrow of Fergus" and "Adam's Curse."

you referring to "Fergus and the Druid" or another poem? definitely "early", but perhaps a "dramatic fragment" rather than a "lyric"...

"Adam's Curse" = early-middle Yeats?

I've been reading Harold Bloom's Yeats study in tandem with the Collected, & he draws the line right at the turn of the century, which is convenient; but unlike Bloom, I find much to admire in the 'middle poems' of Responsibilities (1914) & The Green Helmet (1910). I'm somewhat less charmed by 1904's In the Seven Woods, so it's simple enough to shunt that one off to the early track.

rosenthal's 'selected poems and four plays' is the standard, right, or used to be? i feel like i may have been recommended it on this board. this thread, possibly.

i just cant with yeats tho in general

Responsibilitie would be my cutoff point, and I'd include several of its poems.

That Bloom book is excellent on among other things Yeats' indebtedness to Shelley.

xp yeah I was just looking at the Rosenthal... it's still like 300 pages tho! & I already have all the plays

I feel like my appreciation of a poet depends heavily on my ability to carry a book around with me for several weeks, reading & rereading during my little snatches of downtime. pocket-sized facsimile editions of The Tower & The Winding Stair have made some inroads towards the later Yeats, but if I want to dip into The Wind Among the Reeds I'm stuck lugging around a 600-page brick :/

are you reading this thread on a printout?

who says he wants to appreciate us