slouching towards bethlehem

I may be going to hell for posting this poem on Easter. Plus side: Jews don't believe in hell. Or Easter.

Seriously, though, every year I post a Yeats poem, and every year it isn't this poem, and every year I make some oblique reference to the fact that I'm not posting this poem, and so this year, I am -- whether or not you all had to memorize it in school, as I did. The real truth is that I love this poem.

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?

~William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), The Second Coming, 1919.

golden apples of the sun

The problem with William Butler Yeats is that nothing ever quite compares to "Sailing to Byzantium", but that does not mean I do not love his other stuff. (Actually, it occurred to me while I was browsing that not everyone may have been forced to memorize "The Second Coming" in secondary school, and maybe it isn't quite as widely known as I'd thought.) I am not really in the mood for "The Second Coming" today, however.

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 a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone 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.

~W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), "The Song of Wandering Aengus", from The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899.

time and the world

This is probably asking for it on May Eve, but it wouldn't be poetry month without Yeats, even if I can't post "Sailing to Byzantium" again. And this is, I think, a good poem on which to conclude. Maybe next year I'll be more versatile -- or at least, as organized as I was last year.

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

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight gray;
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 gray twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.

~William Butler Yeats, "Into the Twilight," The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899.

the singing-masters of my soul

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 foul, 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 by 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.

~William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium, from The Tower, 1928

Speaking of William Butler Yeats, I just barely managed to prevent myself from writing "Philaster lacks all conviction and Arethusa is full of passionate intensity," in my Philaster chapter this afternoon. I am drowning, but eventually, I expect, I will find a boat or a raft or a very large fish or something.