Wed 7th February
We met at Diana’s and started by discussing the various titles for our future bi-monthly meetings. These were:
The theme of ‘Journeys’ suggested by Sue
The theme of ‘Love’ suggested by Helen.
Sggestions were also made including Sylvia Plath, T.S Eliot, John Betjamin, Dylan Thomas, Robert Graves, Tony Harrison, DH Lawrence and Stevie Smith.
We followed this by reading in turns the next section of Jeff’s book ‘The Saga of Thørkil’ and we completed chapter eight.
After distributing a leaflet on ‘WB Yeats poetry collections and selected poems from them’ Diana then introduced us to WB Yeats biography. She told us he was born into an artistic family in 1865 in Dublin. His father was a lawyer but gave that up to become a painter. He moved the family to London in search of commissions and this set the pattern of WB’s future life moving regularly between Dublin and London summering in the country setting of Sligo. Yeats was determined to be a poet and had his first work published age seventeen. For the next fifty seven years he distinguished himself as poet, playwright and literary critic. In 1899 he, along with George Moore, Lady Augusta Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Irish Literary Theatre to promote Irish plays in Dublin. This later became the famous Abbey Theatre which is still flourishing today. The three main themes that dominate his work were the revitalisation of Irish culture, his personal search for a spiritual identity and his unrequited infatuation with the gifted actress Maud Gonne. She was an activist in the Irish Independence movement. He was a member of the occult society ‘Order of the Golden Dawn’ so they attended each other’s meetings and were equally influenced. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 and he became a senator in the Irish Free State. He was still writing new poems at the time of his death in France in 1939.
Diana then read ‘When You are Old’ Which starts with:
"When you are old and grey and full of sleep” and if we are in any doubt about to whom this is addressed when he follows it subsequently with,
“..and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once,” we know that it is addressed to Maud Gonne. Nevertheless it has a universal feel too, with which we can identify. He reveals himself as ‘one man’ who "loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;" separating himself from the generality who just loved her youthful beauty. In the last stanza he imagines her reaching towards the fire-grate and regretting her lost love who is no more.
She followed this with ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ in which an anonymous flyer knows that he is destined to die in the air during the First World War. It is, therefore, before the founding of the Irish Free State, hence his two statements:
“Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love” He goes on to say that he identifies only with his parish of Kiltartan Cross in Galway and with the poor people who live there. It is a truly sad poem wherein the pilot feels that his death won’t have any effect on this community. He rebuffs the idea that he was motivated by any noble motives, by any stirring of the soul by any great speeches or by the cheering of any crowds but by “A lonely impulse of delight” so that in this we note the only uplifting emotion of the poem in, ‘delight’ but even that is modified by the word ‘lonely’ and we feel his depression when he says that apart from what he is experiencing in “...this tumult in the clouds” nevertheless he says
“The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.”
Her third poem was ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ which starts with the well known phrase,
“That is no country for old men.” The world he inhabits he says is for young lovers, for those loving the senses with little thought for their mortality or for “Monuments of unageing intellect.” Therefore, he sets off for Constantinople where he expects to find an ‘old world’. He describes those of us of a certain age as,
“An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick,” but then he qualifies it by saying,
“...unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,” In saying this Yeats is giving us an aspect to our lives which he posits is eternal. As time moves on he says he wishes his soul to come back as a golden bird to sing
“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.”
Marie read ‘Anne Gregory’ to us which is flippant about men’s visual sexual attraction to aspects like beautiful hair a metaphor for external loveliness. It is posed as a conversation between a woman, (to whom men are attracted by the beauty of her blonde hair), and the poet. She insists that she would be as loved if she dyed her hair brown, black or orange but the poet replies that he knows an “old, religious man” who had
“found a text to prove
That only God, my dear
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.” This response elicited merriment from the group its wit being acknowledged. However, its theme that only God can love our inner beauty and that human beings can only love those who display physical attractiveness probably doesn’t ring quite so true in the 21st century.
Marie’s second poem was ‘Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland’ in which WB gives us three stanzas each starting with observations on nature,
“The old brown thorn trees break in two high over Cummen Strand” and speaking for the Irish people Yeats, in the third line makes a direct comparison,
“Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies” But he then asserts that hidden deep in their Irish hearts is some of the flashing defiance seen in the eyes of Cathleen, daughter of of Houlihan. He continues in the second stanza to describe how the wind “has bundled up the clouds high over Knocknarea
"And thrown the thunder on the stones for all that Maeve can say” He likens the anger of the wind and clouds to that of the Irish people referring to the warrior Queen Maeve who was of great strength, resilience and ruthlessness but nevertheless he says “...we have all bent low and low and kissed the quiet feet
Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.” The last stanza repeats this form finishing by making the “...heavy flooded waters our bodies and our blood” but again the idea of a fine new, free Ireland is epitomised in “...purer than a tall candle before the Holy Rood
Is Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.”
Her third poem was probably Yeats’ most well-known one ‘The Isle of Innisfree’ which he starts with the archaic phrase
“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,” It was the, first poem in which he was to concentrate on working within the Irish idiom. “..my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music” He was walking down Fleet Street in London feeling very homesick when he “heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem “Innisfree,” In the first stanza Yeats imagines himself settling on the uninhabited Isle of Lough Gill and building himself a wood cabin, having a garden and bees for sustenance. In the second he imagines the peace and beauty he will have.
“And evening full of the linnet’s wings.” In the last stanza
“While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey” he will be able to relive his memories,
“...in the deep heart’s core.”
Suzanne’s turn started with ‘The Collar bone of a Hare’ Where the poet wishes himself away from the real world to abscond to “...the comely trees and the leaves
The playing upon pipes and the dancing” and he would hope to come upon the collar bone of a hare
Worn thin by the lapping of the water,” He would, he says, drill a hole in it. Suzanne summed it up perfectly in her own words:
‘The tone of the poem is angry and resentful about the restrictions imposed by a religious life. The collar bone of a hare represents the old world of folklore and mysteries before Christianity when to look through a pierced stone was thought to enable one to see things as they really are and to pierce any disguises.’
Her second piece was ‘No Second Troy’ in which Yeats conflates the death and destruction that Helen’s awful beauty visited on Troy and the subsequent wars that followed her abduction with his unrequited love for Maud Gonne. The poem ends with his recognition that Helen and Maud, now as one being, were blameless through their being born:
“With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?” and lastly,
“Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?”
Geoff’s first poem should actually have been the last one as Yeats insisted that in his last publication that it should come on the last page and be seen as the last lyric poem he ever wrote. It is called ‘Politics’ and was written near the end of his life when the Spanish Civil War was raging and published in 1939, the year of his death. The dread of the impending World war is referred to:
“And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,” He says that he is a ‘travelled man,’ that he is knowledgeable and a politician
“That has read and thought” but as in the first line he is transfixed by “that girl standing there” and the yearning of an old man completes the poem with:
“But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!”
The last poem to be read was ‘The Second Coming’ It was written in 1919 just after the First World War. He uses the metaphor of the falconer whose falcon:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre” loses touch with him and so,
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” this idea of Yeats’s, this ‘gyring’ or circling echoes the Platonic theory of the heavens circling and spinning in perfect harmony and once a slight imbalance occurs somewhere, all sorts of catastrophes and kinds of mayhem will take place here on earth. The poem is totally despairing, lacking all hope. Yeats having lived through the ‘War to End all Wars’ and writing at the time when the asiatic flu’ was killing millions in Europe and elsewhere one isn’t surprised, I suspect, when he says,
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” he is relating it to the situation in Ireland and maybe foreseeing the coming Irish war and to the entrance of the hated ‘Black & Tans’. He gives us a false sense of security when he starts the second stanza with,
“Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!” At this thought Yeats takes us back to pre-Christian times, to the Sphinx and to a mystical world where stone images start to flex their muscles and
“Twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,” Our equivocal response to this last line which juxtaposes ‘nightmare’ with the image of an innocent baby Jesus is immediately squashed by his vision of “what rough beast’ which,
“Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”
We then enjoyed Diana’s tea and cakes to the full! Thanks to Diana for making us all so welcome.
Geoff W
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