sadmanbarty

Well-known member
so is the poem completely and utterly asinine?

is it really just regurgitating a tired cliche with a couple of metaphors a cleaver 8 year old could have come up with?
 

luka

Well-known member
That Medusa one is great.

Here's an obscure one that nobody's ever heard of:

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

Corpses yeats thing goes way back
 

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.”

bed time stories often have repetition in them. parents will repeat a word to maked the kid bored and less focused. "the dragon had a long, long tale and flew higher and higher and higher in the sky..."

this is evoking that "old, old", "one by one".

"drifts away" is actually terminology we use to denote sleeping and dreaming.
 

luka

Well-known member
Stop trying so hard! Poetry isn't about that kind of stuff. That's for GCSE students.
 

luka

Well-known member
it's called
The Old Men Admiring Themselves In The Water.
Which is fairly important to know.
 

luka

Well-known member
So you have, first of all, in your mind, old men, watching their reflections in the water. You have to see it. This is what it means to read. Now In and of itself I find that quite affecting. When I look in the mirror now I see signs of aging. My skin is coarser. The pores are growing wider on my cheeks. I'm red and windblown. I've got grey in my beard. I'm bald. I've crossed a threshold. I'm starting to decay. I'll never be beautiful again. So I can perhaps relate more easily to these old men admiring themselves in the water.

And you have to hear their voices, and you have to allow them to be real. You have to let the old men talk to you. They are real. In Alan Moore's way of telling it they reside in the immateria.
One by one we drop away
You have to be willing to invite death into your thoughts. Not to skip over it, yeah yeah everyone dies whatever mate but actually take the time to let the reality of death, the death of those you love, your death, to enter you. And let it settle. How do you conceive of life? What does it mean to you, this dropping away?

And then we visualise these men, these gnarled, knotted, twisted, woody old men. These nature spirits. Broken by labour and by time. Bodies used up and broken by toil. Becoming a part of the landscape. Trees among trees by the water.

All the beautiful girls they knew, all the beautiful boys, dead or wizened. What is this? Why does this happen? What is time? The moving image of eternity.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
so there's no code to crack? i'm not supposed to look for cleaver hidden meanings or anything.

i shouldn't be trying to glean information from it.

there's not much rhythmic or phonetic intrigue as far as i can tell. nothing like those drill lines we like quoting which are really satisfactory on those counts.

if it's literally about conjuring an image in my mind, it's an incredibly bland one.


i don't understand what i'm supposed to do with it.
 

luka

Well-known member
I do think it is worthwhile learning to read. It's not like learning to play an instrument, which is also worthwhile, but boring and difficult. It's easy and it makes the mind a more interesting place.
 

luka

Well-known member
so there's no code to crack? i'm not supposed to look for cleaver hidden meanings or anything.

i shouldn't be trying to glean information from it.

there's not much rhythmic or phonetic intrigue as far as i can tell. nothing like those drill lines we like quoting which are really satisfactory on those counts.

if it's literally about conjuring an image in my mind, it's an incredibly bland one.


i don't understand what i'm supposed to do with it.

No, you aren't supposed to glean information from it but it turns your attention away from your surface fiddling and directs it towards the meaning of time about the fact of decay and death about the reality of not being able to hold on to anything at all.
 

luka

Well-known member
If the image in your mind is bland that is not the fault of yeats it's a failure of your imagination,
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
So you have, first of all, in your mind, old men, watching their reflections in the water. You have to see it. This is what it means to read. Now In and of itself I find that quite affecting. When I look in the mirror now I see signs of aging. My skin is coarser. The pores are growing wider on my cheeks. I'm red and windblown. I've got grey in my beard. I'm bald. I've crossed a threshold. I'm starting to decay. I'll never be beautiful again. So I can perhaps relate more easily to these old men admiring themselves in the water.

And you have to hear their voices, and you have to allow them to be real. You have to let the old men talk to you. They are real. In Alan Moore's way of telling it they reside in the immateria.
One by one we drop away
You have to be willing to invite death into your thoughts. Not to skip over it, yeah yeah everyone dies whatever mate but actually take the time to let the reality of death, the death of those you love, your death, to enter you. And let it settle. How do you conceive of life? What does it mean to you, this dropping away?

And then we visualise these men, these gnarled, knotted, twisted, woody old men. These nature spirits. Broken by labour and by time. Bodies used up and broken by toil. Becoming a part of the landscape. Trees among trees by the water.

All the beautiful girls they knew, all the beautiful boys, dead or wizened. What is this? Why does this happen? What is time? The moving image of eternity.

you could take any old shit and do that to it.

yeets has produced something completely devoid of any aesthetic merit and you've willed yourself into finding some resonance in it.

every single poster on dissesus could write something better than that given 30 minutes.
 

luka

Well-known member
You're not demanding enough of yourself. You're being lazy. You're not using the whole of your apparatus. It's not linked up.
 
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