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Passionvine

  • Last seen on Feb 13 10:19 AM 2006. Member since February 14, 2006.

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  • on Politics by William Butler Yeats, on June 25, 2004
    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.

  • on An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by William Butler Yeats, on June 25, 2004
    At a time when the gyre has spun into another empire drowning in the desert, this poem has especial meaning now for our brothers and sisters engaged in a rough beast’s war. The airman’s attitude in combat neither hating the enemy nor loving his masters is one borne by many a soul caught up in conflicts of vague purpose and even vaguer ending.

    My last play to be produced was about the tragedy of the USS Shenandoah, a prophecy of the death of the age of dirigibles. This poem sat on my desk in a framed copy as I wrote.

  • This is a wonderful poem for me now as Florida is being drenched and dazzled with afternoon thunderstorms. I just planted some passion flowers as well, which will hopefully benefit from the rain and the poetic inspiration.