sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Corpse please can you post a favourite poem of yours and do some close reading of it?

I will try and join in, see if I can find my way in. Learn through doing.

Thank you.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
This is a nice short one by Yeats, that I can't really explain... (but poetry shouldn't be 'explicable', just as music or a painting shouldn't).

It's good to read short poems first, because you can reread them easily and memorise them. Re-reading is where poetry comes to life, IMO - it's how you learn to identify and hear all the subtleties. Read it aloud, paying attention to the line-endings, but also striving to read naturally.

1 I heard the old, old men say,
2 “Everything alters,
3 And one by one we drop away.”
4 They had hands like claws, and their knees
5 Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
6 By the waters.
7 I heard the old, old men say,
8 “All that’s beautiful drifts away
9 Like the waters.”


1. I like the rhyme of 'alters' and 'waters' - it's not an obvious rhyme, but it rings as one - is it a slant rhyme? (Jenks help me out here). Yeats is a master of these imperfect rhymes. And this is a really great one because it points out the signal quality of water that the "old men" (and Yeats) are struck by - it's impermanence. ALSO: the rhyme is delayed, but it still resonates.

2. I like the way 'Everything alters' hits rhythmically after the extension of the first line - an extension that's created by the long vowel sounds of 'old' and 'say'. It makes the statement stick out. And then it's mirrored in 'By the waters', after the regularity of the claws/knees/trees section. Again, this is something Yeats does very well, alteration of syllable counts between lines - and it strikes me that perhaps this "the point" of how variable the line lengths are here, and the fact there are 9 lines, not 10. It's a poem that flows 'imperfectly', as the river does.

3. Modulation/repetition - the last 3 lines echo the first 3 lines, but are modulated - for one thing, the metre of the two lines following 'I heard the old, old men say" has reversed. And the water has entered their consciousnes by osmosis, as the poet likens them to thorn trees by the waters.

Waters are of course also reflective, so that in a sense they are seeing themselves as old and gnarled, all their beauty having floated off downstream.

Yeats's greatest poetry - or much of it - is about ageing, about losing your passion and beauty, withering into wisdom, etc.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I went through a stage of enjoying being mystified by Yeats. It produced a sort of pleasant fog in my head, I felt I could read and reread these little poems forever without ever 'cracking' them. There's some truth in that, but it's actually worth really scrutinising poems, not worshipping them - are they clear, do they make sense, are the words all vital or superfluous, etc.? When I started reading Yeats like that I realised how great he REALLY is because he's got much less superfluous/senseless stuff going into his lines than many others.

But you have to get intoxicated first, or else all this analysis is just gussying up. You want to read a poem, be intoxicated by it, THEN delve into it.

Personally speaking Eliot is one of the most intoxicating poets for a modern reader - the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is too long to analyse here but I think it's easy to 'get' why it's so famous. (Don't worry about the Italian at the start, it's from Dante - and is relevant, but no need to translate the first time round...)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Don't really have the time or energy to analyse this at the moment but I couldn't resist posting it after reading it because I love it.

The Sun Rising
BY JOHN DONNE

Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

She's all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
yeats poem:

is there anything to suggest that it's about reincarnation or pantheism or anything? is he mystical at all?

the nature isn't metaphorical, the old blokes literally are the trees and all that?
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
why the double "old"? is that suggesting we're not talking about geriatrics but ancients. deities or something.

or is he really just saying 'old people die'? is that the whole poem?

i'm baffled
 

luka

Well-known member
yeats poem:

is there anything to suggest that it's about reincarnation or pantheism or anything? is he mystical at all?

the nature isn't metaphorical, the old blokes literally are the trees and all that?

Yeats was a practicing magician, an initiate, a member of the golden dawn. He has a system of belief absolutely. I don't read his poetry very often but his book 'a vision' is central to my understanding of occult reality.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Yeats was a practicing magician, an initiate, a member of the golden dawn. He has a system of belief absolutely. I don't read his poetry very often but his book 'a vision' is central to my understanding of occult reality.

that's a relief. makes a bit more sense now. taken literally, it's a complete and utter non-sequitur. wanking a soft cock waiting for the magic to happen.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
1 I heard the old, old men say,
2 “Everything alters,
3 And one by one we drop away.”
4 They had hands like claws, and their knees
5 Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
6 By the waters.
7 I heard the old, old men say,
8 “All that’s beautiful drifts away
9 Like the waters.”

life is claws and thorns. sharp. unpleasant

death is immersive, engulfing water.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
life is claws and thorns. sharp. unpleasant

death is immersive, engulfing water.

This and the "old old" comment, very astute! I've never thought of that, you may be right - he may be referring to both specific (if imagined) old men looking in the waters AND the ancient authorities, who saw in the river of time the destruction of all beauty. The survival of beauty in art is an important idea in Yeats (as in a lot of poetry, e.g. Shakespeare's sonnets), "Sailing to Byzantium" is probably the most famous of his poems about this. For yeats, art offers a way to transcend the effects of time by subsuming oneself into pure form.

You're right to say it makes little sense LITERALLY. It is metaphorical, symbolic. This, again, is important in Yeats - what symbols are, what they mean, what they can do. (And this is where the occult comes in, too. Although important to remember he did LITERALLY believe in this stuff.) Ellman's book on Yeats "The Man and Masks" is all brilliant on this.

I don't personally think he's deliberately punning on "alters/altars" but what do I know?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
To my mind, the men aren't literally the trees, but since they are *like* the trees, subject to nature like them, in a sense a tree is an image of us, and we an image of nature. You can perhaps see why it took dropping acid for me to feel like I understood Yeats's mindset.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I connect Yeats with Blake because they're both convinced of the *reality of the imagination*. The *superiority* of reality to the imagination, moreover.

But it took turning towards reality to make Yeats a great poet. He was immersed in a perfumed bog of faery imagery in his early days, and then he got older and tougher and fell under the influence of Ezra Pound, who got him to knock off all the airy abstractions and write about solid things. Pound's essay on the later yeats is useful, I'll see if it's online.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Here's one of my favourite Yeats poems. This is an example where knowing his theory of history (cyclical, "gyres" etc.) is useful, insofar as you learn that for Yeats the coming of Christ was a sort of apocalyptic event. But you can also enjoy the spare, stripped down rhythms ("their ancient faces like rain beaten stones"), and the sense of potency in these ghostly figures seeking a mysterious potentiality, faced with the violence of action. (Which leads into "Leda and the Swan" - Leda impregnated by Zeus, linked to Mary impregnated by God, and the moment of conception inaugurating chaos and bloodshed )

The Magi
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
 
Top