The success of many of Yeats poems in the selection In the Seven Woods can be attributed to their ambiguous dissonance of ideas also known as negative capability. This struggle of the binary gives his poems rich depth and complexity; never resolved, there meaning wavers in flux for an eternity.
Yeats is also interested in delineating the abstract but then abstracting that which has form. This passage in Withering of the Boughs is my favorite example of this:
I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds:
‘Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will,
I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words,
For the roads are unending, and there is no place to my mind.’
The moon yearns for the bird’s words, which the readers automatically hear as song, giving an abstract quality to the words he longs for; words and song that house his emotion give place to the river of his mind, delineating this depth of nebulous emotion. I see this moon as stating one of Yeats’ poetic goals: to give place to his mind, reminiscent of that hammer he talked about.
He does this in the poem In Seven Woods:
I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods
Make there faint thunder, and the garden bees
Hum in the lime-tree flowers; and put away
The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness
Such a vivid and tangible image delineates the abstraction of sorrow. This is beautiful. But even more then this he adds another level of depth to the dichotomy and in this poem, by exulting the unconscious side of this dichotomy. I can only think of describing it as favoring buddhistic awareness, an awareness and wisdom that it not tainted by consciousness and manifested by delineating the depth of the abstract into words. I pick up where I left off:
and put away
The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness
That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile
Tara uprooted, and new commonness
Upon the throne and crying about the streets
And hanging its paper flowers from post to post.
The depth that the outcries and old bitterness was given in the first few lines is taken away in the proceeding line. Could this be because they were given place and now we only have paper flowers to commemorate our sorrows?
This preference of buddhistic wisdom can also be found in The Withering of the Boughs. This is how I interpret No Boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams. Giving dreams form destroys them.
A king and queen are wandering there, and the sound
Has made them so happy and hopeless, so deaf and so
blind
With wisdom, they wander till all the years have gone by;
This is this buddhistic wisdom that I am taking about, a wisdom that defies time and consciousness.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Monday, January 28, 2008
Posting One
The Madness Of King Goll:
The madness of King Goll starts out with the king boasting about how, while sitting on his cushioned and comfortable chair, away from all harms, anything he said became law; this kept peace, and under his law the country was lush and plentiful with surplus. In the second stanza, this perfection was interrupted by pirates (the Vikings?). There is an interesting shift in the second stanza when he writes, “And under the blinking of the stars”. The heavens become unstable and have the mortality of humanity. This utopia is put into question. In the third stanza, the king leaves his cushy thrown and the king seems to loose his mind. He slowly kills, and all of a sudden those blinking stars are shining again, and birds flutter, water rolls, in his ecstatic state where the fire was birthed inside of his spirit. In the fourth stanza King Goll is much different from the King we were introduced to. He is no longer drinking wine away from the beasts, he is wandering the woods, trying to tame and guide them (“I lead along the woodland deer”), but at the same time he joins the beasts (“the grey wolf knows me”). Still, he cannot tame the beasts; even the rabbits do not heed him( he has no handle on the warfare). He lingers in this forest a long time, them finally reaches a town but meets no people. He sings and beats his drum alone and speaks of how, when the sun dies, and the earth is near it’s end, “orchil” cover’s this death up. Though his ‘ fire’ seems to be quenched fro a second, he still wanders on. “They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.’ I’m unsure of how to interpret this. Maybe it’s speaking of the constant discontent Ireland has with itself. Turmoil will never cease to stir, reaching far back into the past and future.
The Ballad of Moll Magee:
The word choice and rhyme is simple, just like the simple, hard workingwomen this poem speaks about. The sparseness of the word choice and the shortness of the lines (especially in contrast with King Moll) understate her tragedy (she accidentally rolled over onto her baby and killed it in her sleep) just as the people around her do. There is some hope offered; she is given a bit of food, someone one reassures her that he husband will want her back, and she believes that he little dead daughter is up in heaven with God, watching over her. In the end, this tale is told as a lesson to all of us to not throw stones but pity the unfortunate.
However, I have a hard time buying Yeats' faith in God, especially after reading The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland. I think Moll’s faith in God could be interpreted as a defense that arose out of her simple mind. In a life of tragedy, this poor woman who life is nothing but work and sorrow creates a god and an afterlife to allow her to not only move on, but also scold those who fling stones at her. This God gives her dignity. Or maybe The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland came at a time in Yeats’ life when God died. Death is everywhere in the poem and hovers above every thought. The man in the poem dreams of life after death: “the tale drove his fine angry mood away.” However, when death comes, this fairy tale of heaven is of no use to him. The earth takes him, and finally he has at last “ unhaunted sleep,” indicating there is absolutely nothing after death. The vocabulary and structure of this poem is a lot more advanced compared with Moll Magee, which indicates a seriousness of subject, while Moll Magee seems satirical.
To An Isle in the Water and The lake Isle of Innisfee both have interesting sounds. An Isle is simple, for a simple love and a girl who the author knows little about. The sh sound in shy is repeated numerous times throughout this short poem, creating the shhhhhh, which compliments the idea of the word shy and creates a feeling of softness and the sound of quiet water. She is isolated like the island, but brings light in this damp dismal word.
The Lake Isle follows a pattern of stress and then breaks it in parts where Yeats talks about sound. It’s as if the poet is musing in his head, and these thoughts are interrupted by the bees, crickets, and water. This seems to exult the tangible world of nature and reveal the abstractions of the mind.
The madness of King Goll starts out with the king boasting about how, while sitting on his cushioned and comfortable chair, away from all harms, anything he said became law; this kept peace, and under his law the country was lush and plentiful with surplus. In the second stanza, this perfection was interrupted by pirates (the Vikings?). There is an interesting shift in the second stanza when he writes, “And under the blinking of the stars”. The heavens become unstable and have the mortality of humanity. This utopia is put into question. In the third stanza, the king leaves his cushy thrown and the king seems to loose his mind. He slowly kills, and all of a sudden those blinking stars are shining again, and birds flutter, water rolls, in his ecstatic state where the fire was birthed inside of his spirit. In the fourth stanza King Goll is much different from the King we were introduced to. He is no longer drinking wine away from the beasts, he is wandering the woods, trying to tame and guide them (“I lead along the woodland deer”), but at the same time he joins the beasts (“the grey wolf knows me”). Still, he cannot tame the beasts; even the rabbits do not heed him( he has no handle on the warfare). He lingers in this forest a long time, them finally reaches a town but meets no people. He sings and beats his drum alone and speaks of how, when the sun dies, and the earth is near it’s end, “orchil” cover’s this death up. Though his ‘ fire’ seems to be quenched fro a second, he still wanders on. “They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.’ I’m unsure of how to interpret this. Maybe it’s speaking of the constant discontent Ireland has with itself. Turmoil will never cease to stir, reaching far back into the past and future.
The Ballad of Moll Magee:
The word choice and rhyme is simple, just like the simple, hard workingwomen this poem speaks about. The sparseness of the word choice and the shortness of the lines (especially in contrast with King Moll) understate her tragedy (she accidentally rolled over onto her baby and killed it in her sleep) just as the people around her do. There is some hope offered; she is given a bit of food, someone one reassures her that he husband will want her back, and she believes that he little dead daughter is up in heaven with God, watching over her. In the end, this tale is told as a lesson to all of us to not throw stones but pity the unfortunate.
However, I have a hard time buying Yeats' faith in God, especially after reading The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland. I think Moll’s faith in God could be interpreted as a defense that arose out of her simple mind. In a life of tragedy, this poor woman who life is nothing but work and sorrow creates a god and an afterlife to allow her to not only move on, but also scold those who fling stones at her. This God gives her dignity. Or maybe The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland came at a time in Yeats’ life when God died. Death is everywhere in the poem and hovers above every thought. The man in the poem dreams of life after death: “the tale drove his fine angry mood away.” However, when death comes, this fairy tale of heaven is of no use to him. The earth takes him, and finally he has at last “ unhaunted sleep,” indicating there is absolutely nothing after death. The vocabulary and structure of this poem is a lot more advanced compared with Moll Magee, which indicates a seriousness of subject, while Moll Magee seems satirical.
To An Isle in the Water and The lake Isle of Innisfee both have interesting sounds. An Isle is simple, for a simple love and a girl who the author knows little about. The sh sound in shy is repeated numerous times throughout this short poem, creating the shhhhhh, which compliments the idea of the word shy and creates a feeling of softness and the sound of quiet water. She is isolated like the island, but brings light in this damp dismal word.
The Lake Isle follows a pattern of stress and then breaks it in parts where Yeats talks about sound. It’s as if the poet is musing in his head, and these thoughts are interrupted by the bees, crickets, and water. This seems to exult the tangible world of nature and reveal the abstractions of the mind.
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