W. B. Yeats – Fourteen Lines: Recent Episodes
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What I learned is the difference between of destiny and fate. We are all fated to die. Destiny is recognizing the radiance of the soul that, even when faced with human impossibility, loves all of life. Fate is the death we owe to Nature. Destiny is the life we own to soul.
Marion Woodman
The Glimpse of Something In The Ovenby Robert Bly
Childhood is like a kitchen. It is dangerous
To the mice, but the husband gets fed; he’s
An old giant, grumbling and smelling children,
The kitchen is a place where you get smaller
And smaller, or you lose track. In general
You become preoccupied with this old lady
In the kitchen…. She putters about, opens oven doors,
The thing is the old woman won’t discuss anything.
The giant will. He’s always been a fan of Aristotle,
Knew him at school. It is no surprise to him
That the Trojan War lasted ten years, or how it
Ended. He knows something you don’t.
Your sister says, “Say, what’s that in the oven?”
I am consciously aware that I am causing Robert to squirm a bit in his grave. I worry that he maybe thinking I have not been listening to all he has left behind for me to read. Many of Bly’s later poems are postcards and discussions with the dead. Why shouldn’t I engage in the same act with him in this blog?
Bly would likely protest being eulogized in a way on a blog that is loosely founded around sonnets. In a wonderful essay by Mark Gustafson in Robert Bly In This World, he reminds us that Bly wrote an essay in his magazine The Fifties – titled The Necessity Of Rejecting A Shakespeare Sonnet. The point being, Bly was so at war with the east coast ivy schools snobbery of the ideas of what was and wasn’t poetry in the 1950’s that Bly would have rejected even a resurrected Shakespeare, had he submitted a new poem for Bly to publish, on the grounds that his language was “exhausted, and dead.” And yet Bly embraced myths and stories that go back thousands of years before Shakespeare. It begs the question what is beyond time and what does time forget? The radicals of yesterday are the rejected patriarchy of today. Our grandfather’s rebellious leaders are rarely our own grandchildren’s vaulted idealists. Every generation heralds its own martyrs, holds precious its revolutionaries that suffer for their unique generation’s injustices. This is true even in poetry. Never mind that nothing much has changed in thousands of years in the human condition and that what once was old is always new again. Great literature is great literature, whether the telling of ancient oral stories or lauded over-hyped shiny new bard covers.
Do you remember the ending of the Trojan War? A war fought to a stalemate? It only ended when the sword of innovation combined with the destructiveness of ruthless revenge, were pulled willingly inside the very impenetrable fortress they had been trying to overcome, the courage of the underdog’s ingenuity wins the day. The drunken overconfident dominant culture fell asleep in their revelry of victory and the unthinkable happened; it’s mighty King Agamemnon wakes to find his fortress ransacked, the kingdom’s children slaughtered, his women enslaved, and his beautiful wife Helen, for whom all this nasty business has been fought over for 10 long years, is recaptured. What happens next? Helen either goes to Mount Olympus to live with the gods or returns to Sparta and her old husband Menelaus, depending on which version of the retelling you believe. Agamemnon meanwhile, isn’t around to learn about Helen’s end of the story. He’s murdered on his return from Troy by Clytemnestra.
Why are myths, stories and legends important? Marion Woodman and Robert Bly would argue they are important because they are a connection to our ancestors thoughts and imagination before any concepts of psychology had poisoned the veracity of their subconscious. Stories are literary DNA of our humanity and of our cultures, the footprints left in the fossilized mud of the impervious nature of the human condition to change. Stories connect us to our literary immortality and many would believe to their faith in a literal immortality.
Both Bly and Yeats like to name drop in their poetry. I like that aspect of their writing. It makes me think. Many of the formal “interpretations” of Yeats sonnet, Leda and the Swan, in my opinion, miss the mark. (And yes, I think Bly would have published Yeat’s sonnet below had he the opportunity to be the first in his magazine, so something about the sonnet form must still be relevant. Maybe Robert can go back to napping, and stop worrying, I am paying attention.) Many traditional interpretations of Yeats’ sonnet I feel are too literal, seeing it as the powerful raping the vulnerable, the ruling class vandalizing beauty, the patriarchy inseminating the divine feminine with its own lusty desires and trampling on the rights of women. They view it as sexual and violent. However, since both Yeats and Bly utterly disliked literal and conservative interpretations of poetry and myth, I am perplexed why anyone would think that is what Yeats intended.
Let’s think more openly about Leda and the Swan. I personally think there is lots more going on in this poem. A quick reminder on whom begot whom in the incestuous family tree of the Greek pantheon. Zeus, infatuated by Leda’s beauty, turns into a swan, powerful, white (virginal?), a swan is an unusual expression of male dominance and more traditional symbol of femininity, and lays with Leda lustily and without her apparent consent. Leda, realizing afterwards, that she might be with child, goes to her husband and beds him as well, on the same day, to assuage any suspicions should there be progeny from this mythic day. In fact, there are four offspring from these unions, two girls, Helen and Clytemnestra, and two boys, Castor and Pollux. Which are mortal and immortal? Which are the offspring of Zeus or her mortal husband is somewhat fluid in the retelling, there is no 23 and me technology to sort out the genetic mysteries of the gods and myths. However in most versions Helen and Pollux are immortal at first. Pollux, later gives up half of his immortality so that his brother Castor might live again after dying in battle. They continue as the constellation Gemini, the twins, looking down from the heavens. My point is everything is interconnected in this story. Helen is the daughter of Leda and Zeus, her sister, Clytemnestra, murders the King who abducted her sister. There are multiple crimes of passion and retribution and rebirth. Everything is cyclical.
I think the myth of the Trojan war, Yeat’s poem below, and Bly’s poem above, all are connected to the same idea; the presence and unification of the masculine and feminine in each of us. Yeat’s poem starts with violence, but is it physical, metaphorical or psychological? Isn’t new understanding, new found growth in ourselves, often feel like a staggering blow? Does not new knowledge, whether it be societal, scientific or personal, often feel ugly at first? Rarely do new ideas drop gently down in Disney-esque fairy dust upon our soul or collective understanding, Rather the brutal reality that the earth is round and revolves around the sun is met with a sham trial and rejection because of old school dogma by vested interests, where as subsequent generations see the truth of this new idea as fact. A cancer diagnosis, the sudden death of a child or loved one, the betrayal of a spouse, the resignation of a trusted colleague, all can feel like your world has suddenly been turned upside down. New ideas and new knowledge is often encased in bloody, dark webs, that might repulse us at first, while at the same time caressing our inner sanctum. Climate change is real, but even those that see the unmistakable impacts of that change also may feel the ugly violence of its effects and want to reject it rather than accept. If new ideas were summarily welcomed, we wouldn’t have a sense of reeling from the realizations that emerges from some new understandings of ourselves and of our world.
I view the poem below as Leda, in that moment, has a choice of what to do with this new reality of what has just taken place. She was not in control, was violated, but once she processes what has just happened, she has decisions to make in the aftermath of this unwanted insemination of her new identity? Does she accept the dominance of the patriarchal past to diminish her or does she take from it whatever new found knowledge and power she feels is worthy of herself and instill the best of that in her children? Does she realize that she will rear the next generation, not Zeus, not the giant at the kitchen table? She will control how she nourishes both the masculine and the feminine, to the best of her abilities, in her children. Maybe this poem illustrates the power of the divine feminine? Maybe it is about Leda realizing she will always be a minor player in the great mythology, but her decisions will cast a long shadow on the future? Maybe Leda realizes she is quietly in full control of her own destiny, that the initial act of Zeus, is not the final act. Maybe, she realizes she will have plenty of time to influence her children, for many years to come, in her own kitchen, at her own hearth, in her own way.
Leda And The Swanby William Butler YeatsA sudden blow: the great wings beating stillAbove the staggering girl, her thighs caressedBy the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.How can those terrified vague fingers pushThe 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 thereThe broken wall, the burning roof and towerAnd Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up,So mastered by the brute blood of the air,Did she put on his knowledge with his powerBefore the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Eva Gore-Booth and Connie Markievicz
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
W. B. Yeats
Comradesby Eva Gore-Booth
The peaceful night that round me flows,
Breaks through your iron prison doors,
Free through the world your spirit goes,
Forbidden hands are clasping yours.
The wind is our confederate,
The night has left her doors ajar,
We meet beyond earth’s barred gate,
Where all the world’s wild Rebels are.
In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con MarkieviczBy W. B. YeatsThe light of evening, Lissadell,Great windows open to the south,Two girls in silk kimonos, bothBeautiful, one a gazelle.But a raving autumn shearsBlossom from the summer’s wreath;The older is condemned to death,Pardoned, drags out lonely yearsConspiring among the ignorant.I know not what the younger dreams –Some vague Utopia – and she seems,When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,An image of such politics.Many a time I think to seekOne or the other out and speakOf that old Georgian mansion, mixPictures of the mind, recallThat table and the talk of youth,Two girls in silk kimonos, bothBeautiful, one a gazelle.Dear shadows, now you know it all,All the folly of a fightWith a common wrong or right.The innocent and the beautifulHave no enemy but time;Arise and bid me strike a matchAnd strike another till time catch;Should the conflagration climb,Run till all the sages know.We the great gazebo built,They convicted us of guilt;Bid me strike a match and blow.
Eva Gore Booth (1870 – 1926)The Lake Isle of InnisfreeBy William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,And live alone in the bee-loud glade.And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,And evening full of the linnet’s wings.I will arise and go now, for always night and dayI hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
The Little Waves of BreffnyBy Eva Gore-BoothThe grand road from the mountain goes shining to the sea,And there is traffic in it and many a horse and cart,But the little roads of Cloonagh are dearer far to me,And the little roads of Cloonagh go rambling through my heart.A great storm from the ocean goes shouting o’er the hill,And there is glory in it and terror on the wind,But the haunted air of twilight is very strange and still,And the little winds of twilight are dearer to my mind.The great waves of the Atlantic sweep storming on their way,Shining green and silver with the hidden herring shoal,But the Little Waves of Breffny have drenched my heart in spray,And the Little Waves of Breffny go stumbling through my soul.
To go for a drink is one thing, to be driven to it is another. Michael Collins The Stare’s Nest by My Window by W. B. Yeats The bees build in the crevicesOf loosening masonry, and thereThe mother birds bring grubs and flies.My wall is loosening; honey-bees,Come build in the empty house of the … Continue reading We Are Closed In
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. W. B. Yeats The Artist by Erin Redfern The discovery of lapis lazuli in the dental calculus of an 11th-century religious woman is without precedent in the European medieval archaeological record and marks the earliest direct evidence for the use … Continue reading Some Calculus Takes Centuries To Read
Peace begins with a smile. Mother Teresa Peace by W. B. Yeats Ah, that Time could touch a formThat could show what Homer’s ageBred to be a hero’s wage.‘Were not all her life but stormWould not painters paint a formOf such noble lines,’ I said,‘Such a delicate high head,All that sternness amid charm,All that sweetness … Continue reading Sown With Seeds Of Freedom
“For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives in the valley of its making where executives would never want to tamper, flows on south from ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives A way of happening, a mouth….” W. B. Yeats For Laura by Don Share … Continue reading The Inevitable Colt of Disarray
Ulysses by James Joyce (1882 – 1941) Excerpt from Molly Bloom’s final soliloquy …..O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the … Continue reading The Golden Apples Of The Sun
The Mother of God By William Butler Yeats The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare Through the hollow of an ear; Wings beating about the room; The terror of all terrors that I bore The Heavens in my womb. Had I not found content among the shows Every common woman knows, Chimney corner, garden … Continue reading The Mother Of God
Wild Swans Near Gladstone by James P. Lenfestey A pair of swans lingers in the bay opposite the freeway in upper Michigan in summer. “Mated for life,” I point out to my wife, “Mute swans,” she says, not looking, “no need to talk.” I note the graceful mute life, she driving her quiet Prius, me … Continue reading And Now My Heart Is Sore
When You Are Old by W. B. Yeats When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved … Continue reading The Wide Blossom On Which The Wind Assails
In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W. H. Auden III Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual … Continue reading A Rapture Of Distress
A Drinking Song by W. B. Yeats Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That’s all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh. After Sex by Chana Bloch A man after … Continue reading Lean Over, Greedy