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What is your favorite yeats poem? on author William Butler Yeats


  • Kevin
    Feb 8 1:37 PM 2006
    Reply
    I'm partial to
    The Wild Old Wicked Man
    BECAUSE I am mad about women
    I am mad about the hills,'
    by William Butler Yeats 63 lines
    (To make a link to your poem, just go [ poem number ], without the spaces before/after [)

  • Eusebius
    March 21, 2006
    Reply

    "Song Of The Wandering Aengus"

    "Song Of The Wandering Aengus" is pure and beautiful magic, completely transcendent! A masterpiece!

  • minnaloushe
    May 17, 2006
    Reply
    the one with minnaloushe in! i forget the name.... maybe 'the cat and the moon?'

    innisfree is beautiful too, and lately i like reading the one that starts 'turning and turning in the widening gyre' sorry, i'm rubbish at remembering names

    but almost any yeats' poem is brilliant! he and sylvia plath are my favourite poets

  • RonPrice
    July 10, 2007
    Reply

    The Second Coming

    The Second Coming is my favorite poem, but my comment here is a more general one:
    _________________________
    HURT INTO POETRY

    The poet, and the poetry of, Seamus Heaney is not a product of the Northern Ireland conflict, except in the sense that his is a sensibility that seeks to assuage and to heal. It would not be true to say of Heaney, as Auden wrote of Yeats, that “mad Ireland hurt Heaney into poetry,” or that the conflict in his native province, as has been suggested, has significantly stimulated him as a writer. Unlike the early Auden, whose genius was sharpened by the revolutionary currents of the thirties, Heaney would prefer not to have lived in a time of violence.” On the other hand, if Heaney is seen as a symbol of rapprochement and healing, then the political symbolism of his Nobel Prize is brilliantly apt. -Richard Tillinghast, “Seamus Heaney’s Middle Voice” The Criterion Online, Vol. 17, No. 9, May 1999.

    When Heaney was 14 his family left the farm where he had been reared from his birth in 1939. His life since then, since 1953, has been a series of moves farther and farther away from his birthplace. But these departures have been more geographical than psychological. Rural County Derry, the "country of the mind" is where much of Heaney's poetry is still grounded. Heaney's poems first came to public attention in the mid-1960s when he was in his mid-twenties. Heaney always had a deep preoccupation with the question of poetry's responsibilities and prerogatives in the world. His poetry was poised, such was Heaney’s view, between his need for creative freedom and the pressure he felt to express his sense of social obligation as a poet and as a citizen. –Ron Price with thanks to “Biography of Seamus Heaney,” Nobelprize.org.

    I, too, moved further and further away
    from my birthplace and, by the end of
    my years, I was about as far away as I
    could be and still be on the planet Earth.

    The country of my mind was not the land
    where I was born, though it often appeared
    in my mind’s eye unannounced without even
    knocking at the door and making its own cup
    of tea in the kitchen before sitting down to chat.

    My poetry came much later that yours, Seamus:
    poured out of me about the time I was fifty and
    still does in these early years of late adulthood1
    And yes, it’s all about poetry’s responsibilities
    and prerogatives and my social obligations in an
    Order that is the structure of a moderate freedom2
    for humanity in the tempest of this antediluvian Age.

    And was I hurt into poetry as Yeats way back then?
    Well, partly Seamus, partly--then there was healing
    and the river flowed down to the sea quietly at times
    often in swirling-white currents going every which way.

    1 developmental pscyologists define late adulthood as the years 60 to 80.
    2 Letter to the Followers of Baha’u’llah in the United States of America,” The Universal House of Justice, 29 December 1988

    Ron Price
    10 July 2007











    • RonPrice
      August 25, 2007
      Reply

      A Pot-Pourri of Poetry and Prose

      You think it horrible that lust and rage
      Should dance attendance upon my old age;
      They were not such a plague when I was young:
      What else have I to spur me into song?
      -W.B. Yeats in On Poetry and Poets, T.S. Eliot, Faber and Faber, London, 1947, p.257.
      _____________________________________
      I have 'taken-off' on the above quotation and ventured into many fields of poetry and prose. I trust readers here will grant me some extenuating circumstances for making quite clearly what are my tangential remarks.
      _____________________________________
      Can it be that I do not envy any more?
      No desire to be young or handsome?
      No desire to receive some recognition
      by being elected or appointed?
      Perhaps a wishing that I might have
      become something more: purer?
      more independent? more courageous?
      Horace said those who envy grow thin.
      Perhaps thats why Im getting chubby.
      Found: a sign for the absence of
      the least trace of envy--chubby
      old men and women. No, that cant be.

      Ive been envying all my life.
      There was always someone better
      at something than me. Now, well,
      I just dont care. Is this the root
      of my spiritual gainer: insouciance?
      The contextual nuances for envy
      are multitudinous and I must confess
      that occasionally, even now,
      admiration finds envys trace element
      like a cold wind from the Arctic blowing
      faintly, so faintly across my face.
      I nearly miss it; it goes so fast,
      but it sticks for an instant in my liver,
      or is it my kidney, unbeknownst.

      Envys microscopic trace, extracted,
      purple? black? colourless? only the
      psychoanalytic-geologist would know for sure.

      Theres been a thinning going on
      underneath my nose leaving my
      wanting faculty highly pruned, sorted.
      What, pray, has slaked my envy?
      Has that primary envy of my mothers
      breast just run out of gas?
      This theological problem, abating,
      perhaps is taking a new form: pride?
      Good God, no! What is founn in
      desires quiet new receptacle?
      Erudition, those who can amuse,
      who have money to travel,
      those who have radiant acquiescence,
      courage--the list seems endless,
      quieter but endless.
      Lots of work still to do.

      Ron Price
      28 November 1995
      (updated: 26/8/07)

      My wife has helped me in achieving whatever 'spiritual tranquillity' I have achieved in a marriage relationship, but this was achieved only when I learned to enjoy her soul and not lust after her body, a process too long to describe here.

      The Russian poet Pushkin was the first writer I read who express the above idea that also became my own experience. The plethora of women's and men's magazines now on the market, life-style magazines like Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, Women's Weekly, inter alia which deal with relationships, marriage, sex and love have not been of much value to me; for I have never been much of a reader of this dense forest of reading material. Nor have the other dense forests of magazines: cars, fishing, food, domestic, fashion and on-and-on contributed much to my life, spiritual or material. This is not to say, of course, that I have not been affected by this plethora of an often engrossing trivia, a quotidian reality which bathes the senses of everyday man with its enticing attractions.

      The car, for example, which Roland Barthes sees as the equivalent of the Gothic cathedrals, with their magical spirit and utility, has given me much pleasure and practical value over more than 40 years since I first got my license at the beginning of my pioneering life in 1962.(Mythologies, 1967, p.99.)
      _____________________________
      SUICIDE AND DEPRESSION
      EXPANSE

      Tis a dangerous moment for anyone when the meaning goes out of things and Life stands straight and no content comes to fill the abyss. Yet such moments are. If we survive them, they expand us. -Emily Dickinson, Prose Fragment 49.

      I clutched at sounds
      and groped at shapes
      and still my heart did groan
      in some endless wilderness
      it wailed, lamented bone.
      I could not find the golden lines,
      silver or hyacinth--only a base metal
      from which I made a nail
      for my sackcloth shirt and tail.

      I felt it in the afternoons
      when the light angled low;
      it left a scar; it left a hurt
      deep down, a feeling, woe.
      Twas a sense of full despair
      and it hung like weighted rocks.
      When it went I felt expanse,
      Immortality, like darkness
      leaving from the grass and
      all creation in a dance.

      Ron Price
      25 June 1995
      ____________________________
      Stephen Gill writes, in his analysis of the poetry and life of William Wordsworth, that the poet doesn't deal with fact but with the poetry of the imagination. The brain, he says, generates its own cues for recalling memories. And so it is that the recreation of the self hinges on infusing mental states into the environment and on the ability to change the self-image in beneficial directions so that one can undertake the arduous task of a poetic vocation. Gill, of course, is writing about Wordsworth, but I have found over the years that much that applies to Wordsworth and his writing applies to me and my writing. The self, writes Gill, is a biproduct of a reality monitoring process; it is perceptually driven and reflectively generated.

      Autobiography became for Wordsworth what it has become for me, a way of watching over my conduct, of giving it shape, of inventorying and stylizing daily behaviour and of constructing identity. As I attempt to comment on the several issues that I do in this section of my writing the commentary of Stephen Gill is highly relevant.
      __________________________
      REGRET AND REMORSE

      VICTORY THROUGH FAILURE

      Nothing is more fruitful for man than the knowledge of his own shortcomings.-Abdul-Baha,PUP,p.244.

      ...you cannot lay remorse upon the innocent nor lift it from the heart of the guilty. Unbidden shall it call in the night, that men may wake and gaze upon themselves.-Kahlil Gibran,Prophet,p.43.

      Unbidden it called this morning, early,
      heavy it laid upon my pillow and climbed
      around my ears like a sleepy mosquito
      who was only into dull roars. It headed
      for my eyes and my shutting them had no
      effect as it climbed right on into my brain,
      slowly eating its way to my heart, stopping
      on its way to burn my liver if it could-and it did.

      I looked upon myself like some prisoner
      whose regret was like some jail-cell barring
      me from joy and colouring my morning with
      the nethermost fire of remorse. I would be here
      again, I thought, for I was so far from the
      immortal Wine. And yet, and yet, I would
      not be estranged from this Cause and these
      vicissitudes of fortune would not draw me away
      from my Goal: I hoped! I hoped! I hoped!

      For I found meaning here, right here, in
      these tribulations. I was not radiant, not happy;
      I had not learned this yet, but I had learned
      to search for meaning and this would have to do
      and I did. The radiance came later, years later.

      Weary, I stood at the window at dawn and watched
      the rising sun. Slowly my eyes gladdened, invaded
      and sustained with the fresh meaning of gold
      and the subtle tempter, for the moment, slipped away.
      My sense of fitness returned. Perhaps this fire
      would be removed; perhaps it would go on for years.
      For great forces churned inside me and tore me apart
      & had all my days.Tremendous energies were often
      released. I trust this will happen again perhaps
      through my failures, yet again, yet again.

      Ron Price
      16 December 1995
      (updated 26/8/07)
      _____________________
      One of the twentieth century's famous feminists, Simon de Beauvoir, wrote that in writing her autobiography she wanted to create an identity of her own and win for herself an ethical centre. She knew that in this struggle she was not successful in all respects. So is this true of me as I go about commenting on these issues and struggling with my poetic and everyday battles.
      ______________________
      That's all folks!

  • Stegofreak
    September 4, 2007
    Reply
    I must admit that I've always been partial to 'Easter 1916.' That and 'September 1913' I suppose. Actually, I love most of his poetry. My second favourite Irish poet.

  • Ahkam
    September 7, 2007
    Reply

    For Anne Gregory

    My Favorite poem by Yeats is 'For Anne Gregory' because the poem is very simple and meaningful
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