HOW can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!
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Politics is beautifull and highly impressive lyric poem.It deals with touching and emotional state of mind.Yeats starts the poem with his idea or question;theme of the poem.
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This one has always made me smile. Yeats shows once again his talent in a strange way: a nostalgic backward glance at youth, perhaps?
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Oh My. As an aging artist and polemicist the poem makes me gasp with recognition, delight, wry laughter, and no small amount of rue.
This is another poem that adorns my office door. It has resonances for me at least with the poem Among School Children. There is an arc to the poet’s career where nothing is ever as emotionally authentic as the verses penned while young. However juvenilia lack craft. The craft that allows the emotional impact to come alive for others occurs later in the arc. There is a point in each writer’s career at which emotional authenticity and craft are balanced – I think this is when most poets write the best work. It is not tied to age necessarily – but this poem addresses the complexities of writing later in life. This poem also echoes the poet’s The Scholars:
Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.
Poetry at its heart is youthful and more about amorous entanglements and emotional truths than ever it is about the polemicist’s tirades. Something I too often forget.
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