HERE at right of the entrance this bronze head,
Human, superhuman, a bird's round eye,
Everything else withered and mummy-dead.
What great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky
(Something may linger there though all else die)
And finds there nothing to make its terror less
Hysterica passio of its own emptiness?
No dark tomb-haunter once; her form all full
As though with magnanimity of light,
Yet a most gentle woman; who can tell
Which of her forms has shown her substance right?
Or maybe substance can be composite,
profound McTaggart thought so, and in a breath
A mouthful held the extreme of life and death.
But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,
I saw the wildness in her and I thought
A vision of terror that it must live through
Had shattered her soul. Propinquity had brought
Imagination to that pitch where it casts out
All that is not itself: I had grown wild
And wandered murmuring everywhere, "My child, my
child! '
Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall;
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave,
And wondered what was left for massacre to save.
Notes
First published, March 1939, in /The New Republic/.
'The Bronze Head,' Refers to a bronze painted plaster cast of Maud Gonne by Lawrence Campbell, which can be found in the Municipal Gallery of Moden Art in Dublin.
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W.B.Yeats was way ahead of his time... it seems he's talking about Lara Croft many decades before she graced our computer screens. A true genius indeed
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I liked to know what is his mean about Mc Taggart & tomb-haunter exactly! is anybody to describe it for me?
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I agree with Cwm sculpture. Melody
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Have to agree with Cwm but I think also he is talking about Ireland herself, and her travail.
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I think he's talking about the sculpture and imaging it being in some type of scene somewhere...
could be wrong...
~CWM~ -
This was one of the poems we had to interpret in HS Lit. It was interesting to see how many different ways we all interpreted and we were all wrong. No one thought it was actually referring to some type of sculpture. We all thought it was some type of metaphor. I thought it was a metaphor for the moon. lol
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