For Garrett
1. From the first poem, three characteristics came out: repetition, Irishness, and a wonderful rhyming lyricism. It's lyric in the senses of expressing emotions from the poet's point of view, being song-like in rhymes and stress patterns, unrestrained enthusiasm, and the typical shortness of the poems—the longest in this collection is 44 lines. Once the Irish pronunciations are guessed at, this is simply fun to read and sounds great aloud. It's Irishness comes from these pronunciations and the subject matter being Irish mythical heroes. In one sense, I feel like I would need to read those stories to fully understand the poem's implications. But, I can easily understand the universal emotions of hope and confidence described. I get something out of the poem without needing any pre-knowledge or too many suppositions. This applicability is phenomenal. But the Irishness adds another layer available for study, another depth to plumb.
The Hosting of the Sidhe2. The rhyme and repetition are the real stars of this collection. In this first poem they stand out strongly, but what exactly are they doing?
The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare;
Caolte tossing his burning hair
And Niamh calling Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are a-gleam,
Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;
And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.
The host is rushing 'twixt night and day,
And where is there hope or deed as fair?
Caolte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away.
a. Rather than a villanelle's literal repetition, this is formulaic repetition of sentence structures, words, and sounds: "our ___ are ___," instead of repeating "our cheeks are pale" three times. It's a repetition of formula: conjoined repetition instead of identical. At the end, "hope and deed" are repeated words placed in a new structure to keep the poem both focused and moving along in a new direction, towards a new reflection. This broad variety of ways things repeat and echo keeps the repetition fresh, keeps any one tactic from taking over too much.
b. Repetition and rhyme support each other. Their combination leads to this lyric quality that makes the poems memorable. They also add depth to the discussed emotion through offering different ideas and reflections in distinctly similar sounding ways. The similar sounds link two ideas together, allowing one subject to pull the weight of two clauses concisely. The internal rhyme of the possessive "our" and the verb "are" adds another layer, another dimension to this repetition and rhyme mastery. All of the internal rhyme helps soften the impact of the end-rhymes. The end-rhymes feel like just another rhyme, rather than the rhymes that the rest of the poem is built around.
c. "The Host of the Air" and "Cap and Bells" do end-rhyming well. I typically do not like end-rhymes, but I like this. I was surprised by that. The end-rhyming follow the pattern ABCB. This scheme does not get too repetitive or annoying because the lines are long enough for it to never feel over-the-top or forced, and because it seems appropriate for a rhyme-poor language like English to attempt less end-rhymes. In some of the other poems, end-rhyming is intermittent—a couplet here there, but not every line. Rather than trying to end rhyme each line, which often feels forced, this feels natural and engaging because of its rarity. Rather than forcing the poem into end-rhymes, they come only when they help the poem, only to help the poem.
d. Yeats enjambs more rarely than I expected. Typically two to three lines per poem are enjambed, but I guess I expected to find more. In the short "The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love," enjambment allows a broad thought to be contained within a small poem. As it often does, enjambment helps here to soften the impact of the end-rhymes by allowing the internal rhymes to be more apparent, making the end-rhymes less conspicuous and merely some of the many rhymes present. His enjambment is strong and helps his poems, so I wish he did it more.
3. The titles are typically strong. For instance, "The Host of the Air" pulls triple weight as a title. First, it describes the birds and drakes that take to the air when O'Driscoll arrives. Second, it describes the noise that issues from a host of people at the party. Third, and most importantly, it calls to mind the spiritual aspect of the heavenly hosts, reinforced by the Lord's supper of bread and wine at the party. And perhaps, in some strange sense, O'Driscoll is the host of all three of these that exist in his perception, his mind, and his heart. I found many of the titles in this collection had a similar deep relation with the poem they titled.
4. In "The Fish," all lines are nine syllables except one. It is an eight line poem, and the sixth has eight syllables. This effectively provides a natural pause of one syllable. This billboards the end coming. This keeps the rest of the poem from being too repetitive, too formulaic, and too sing-songy. This variety resonates with me. It makes me suspect that he is using the poem, rather than allowing himself to be used by it. What I mean is that instead of forcing the issue of nine syllables, or fitting that end-rhyme in at all costs, he chooses what's best for the poem.
He Tells of the Perfect Beauty5. The word choices are a strange mix of mostly everyday words, some specific Irish terms that I had to look up, and a few archaic terms like tillage, tufted, and dappled, among others. [Of course, these may not have been archaic in 1899.] The choice to largely rely on standard words keeps the poems understandable. But he uses these common words in exciting ways: internal rhyme, formulaic repetition, surprising nouns used as adjectives, and new words created from linking two known words with a dash—dream-heavy, out-worn, dove-grey, dew-cold, wise-tongued, flower-like, dream-awakened, et cetera. This latter example concisely communicates an adjective. His language isn't about finding the perfect obscure word, but about using the words well. Further, he uses grammar instead of being used by it: he uses an extra "and" or two or three instead of commas, or he dashes two words together in a surprising combination and context that isn't quite grammatically correct, but communicates.
O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes
The poets labouring all their days
To build a perfect beauty in rhyme
Are overthrown by a woman's gaze
And by the unlabouring brood of the skies:
And therefore my heart will bow, when dew
Is dropping sleep, until God burn time,
Before the unlabouring stars and you.
"He Mourns for the Change That Has Come upon Him and His Beloved, and Longs for the End of the World,"6. Though many poems deal on a high emotional plane, Yeats keeps from drowning the reader in unrelenting sentimentality in two ways. First, he varies the subject matter throughout the collection. Listing seven consecutive poems and their topics shows this variety: a frustrated fisherman, a reflection on sin and natural forces, a call to take wonder in natural phenomenon, a mythical parable, an old woman's complaints, a young woman's love, and the lover lamenting his loss of love. Second, he uses extended metaphor and allegory to make a surface reading of the poem about a different topic altogether. In "He Mourns for the Change That Has Come upon Him and His Beloved, and Longs for the End of the World," the next poem after the seven poem topics listed above, Yeats still talks about love, but through a metaphorical narrative of a hound who has been tamed and laments his lost relationship with nature and prey. This tactic effectively allows Yeats to incessantly talk about love and death without annoying the reader by expecting them to superhumanly persist in keyed-up-sentimentality. He talks about topics in parable and myth instead of directly. Then, when he does talk about it directly, it is not already annoying, but almost refreshing because of the contrast.
Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns!
I have been changed to a hound with one red ear;
I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns,
For somebody hid hatred and hope and desire and fear
Under my feet that they follow you night and day.
A man with a hazel wand came without sound;
He changed me suddenly; I was looking another way;
And now my calling is but the calling of a hound;
And Time and Birth and Change are hurrying by.
I would that the boar without bristles had come from the West
And had rooted the sun and moon and stars out of the sky
And lay in the darkness, grunting, and turning to his rest.
7. Is there a theme to the collection? Perhaps humans interfacing with the worlds they exist in, but that's too general to be useful. Let me think this through a little further:
a. Throughout the collection certain phrases and topics are repeated: lovers, dreams, art like music and poetry and song and dance, the spiritual and physical hosts of the air, the sublime beauty of nature, and Irish myths. These flavors are shot through the entire collection.
b. But they are never unrelated to the reader. They either relate through the poet's perspective, or through the ruminations and revelations of the poet, the evoked emotions. For instance, the valley full of lovers is a weird image. What exactly is it? This is potentially quite off-putting. Yeats first explains what "valley full of lovers" means physically, through the perspective of the poet: "I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs, / For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood." Second, he evokes the emotions of longing, "And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood / With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes," wanting some time alone with one's lover, "I cried in my dream 'O women bid the young men lay / 'Their heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with your hair," as well as wanting others to also be happy and in love forever, "'Or remembering hers they will find no other face fair / 'Till all the valleys of the world have been withered away.'" These are all emotions that are relatable to the reader. This relation keeps the repeated phrases and topics grounded in humanity and legible to me, even when he discusses Irish myths that are new to me.
c. Going through this exercise, I realize the difficulty of nailing down a narrow, specific, overarching theme for this many-topiced collection. That difficulty is not bad though: the variously-topiced poems always relate to me, so I don't need it to have an overarching theme.
d. But because of the repeated phrases and topics, it feels like there is one. In discussing this collection and question with Garrett, we discussed some of the themes throughout the book and what Yeats seems to focus on. We discussed the way he relates those themes to his human audience. Though this discussion I came to believe that the theme is allowing the supernatural to be, accepting that it exists, and finding our place in it, within the hierarchy of it. This fits his calls to observe the sublimity of nature, the repeated discussion of the hosts of the air, the lowest sedge reed being a reflection of that hierarchy and hence worthy of praise and reflection (see poem quoted below), as well as the prioritization and relative importance of lovers and dreams and myths and arts. This works for me as the theme. The book may not be very tightly focused on that theme, but it certainly doesn't need to be.
He Hears the Cry of the Sedge8. To list the poems I most enjoyed, which I typically do, would require listing every one. Even in the ones whose sounding I don't appreciate as much as others, like "The Fish", I find something that I can learn. I think my most favorite three were probably "The Hosting of the Sidhe", "Into the Twilight", and "He Mourns for the Change That Has Come upon Him and His Beloved, and Longs for the End of the World". Those three, along with "He Tells of the Perfect Beauty," are probably my favorites. Actually, those four with "The Blessed" are surely my— Well, those five and "The Fiddler of Dooney" are definitely— Wait, those six and "The Hosts of the Air", which really crystallizes the themes this collection ruminates on, are my favorite seven. I'll stop there. Every poem in here is good. Most are great. Why haven't I read this earlier? This is one of the best collections of poetry I have read. It's up there in my top ten. I learned a lot from Yeats' work here. I initially had only heard Yeats' greatest hits and wasn't too interested in the rest of his stuff, but this makes me need to read everything he ever wrote. This still sounds fresh and cutting edge today. Some of this reaction might be because he is doing things I attempt to do poetically—this is right up my alley.
I wander by the edge
Of this desolate lake
Where wind cries in the sedge
Until the axle break
That keeps the stars in their round
And hands hurl in the deep
The banners of East and West
And the girdle of light is unbound,
Your breast will not lie by the breast
Of your beloved in sleep.
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