The Tower by WB Yeats

This collection is available to read freely online here.

For Garrett.

1. There are some astounding lines in here:

"Now I shall make my soul."
"What shall I do with this absurdity—"
"Strange, but the man who made the song was blind."
"He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro."
"The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,"
"Having inherited a vigorous mind"
"It is time that I wrote my will,"
"Life overflows without ambitious pains;"

Yeats is working with lines that, when taken out of context like this, appear to mean one thing but, when read in the poem, mean something different. This is interesting structurally, but I find the constant shift between what is implied and what is actually said to be fatiguing over the length of this whole collection.

2. In the first two poems I see a combination of The Wind Among the Reeds and Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The former plays with words and is easy to understand. The second constructs complex patterns and is wider ranging in thoughts and topics, circling and including and ruminating towards a conclusion. This collection draws from both, but might not do either as well as those earlier works.

3. The second poem, titular, is very tight. It is constructed like "A Prayer for My Daughter": it starts simply, confronting aging, then goes ranging wide before coming back to a concise close. At first it seems somewhat rambling, but each example, thought, and memory is called back in later to influence other thoughts. Every one. This is controlled, and tight. But, the seeming divergences risk sidetracking and losing me when they first appear. Yeats does not connect them clearly enough until later in the poem, and that's my biggest problem here.

4. Here, Yeats' long poems are not quite as good as his shorter ones. And with the dates they were written, I suspect these are B-sides interspersed with shorter poems. I know that's terrible, but the disparity of poetic quality in my perception is that great. I think the rhyme schemes often hurt the longer poems by forcing them into too patterned a cadence. In the first poem, the enjambment really works, and I wonder if the longer poems should have had more of it to break them from their overpowering pattern.

5. His repetition is often immediate and often exact:

"A faithful love, a faithful love."
"Are but loose thread, are but loose thread."

This pauses the poem, allowing the reader time to reflect. Yeats also uses some formulaic repetition: "self-sown, self-begotten." But I end up wishing there was more, and more varied, repetition and formulaic repetition. I've seen him use both so extensively and well in the past that I wonder why he sets them aside. They're scarce in this collection. Why? Is he trying to say something that he feels they will not help? Is he bored with them? Is he pushing himself away from them?

6. "Owen Aherne and His Dancers": what a great poem! Repetition here comes back in force, but it's not the formulaic, almost repetition of a phrase, rather it's repeated words that take the stage: wind and wild, heart and mad, cage and run. This poem discusses the poet's own thoughts and feelings and contrasts them with each other. These long lines are used to allow large words space to be couched in sense-making phrases. It worries at a sliver of thought, at the reaction to the aging, and approaches it from multiple sides at once: eventually putting the aging man in his place, and the young in theirs. But it's all set in longing—an old man for a young woman's beauty and activity. Through this specific situation, the people are all placed in their proper realms—and even the poet's heart and mind are situated.

7. I also liked "Meditations in Time of Civil War" with its uncomfortable honesty, shame, and look at how people exist during Civil War times: not extraordinarily, but mundanely. Just a bunch of glimpses of life during this time period, but together they're greater than the sum of their parts.

8. "The New Faces" complexly weaves a number of phrases in this mystic, paradoxical reflection on one lover dying before the other. The stilted, stopping, jagged, cut-up rhythm and cadence supports this theme and reflects the mental state of the partner left behind. Brilliant pairing of structure and theme.

9. Due to the rambling, wide ranging, sidetracking nature of these poems, they're often difficult at first read—and without relying upon repetition but being forced into a rhyme scheme, the sounds do more to confuse the reader than carry them through. These are not poems whose progression is standard logic or easy to follow at first. But once the logic is revealed at the end, the second read is more rewarding than the first. To restate this in gallery art terms, these look jumbled from 20 feet away, somewhat clearer from 10 feet, and still more clear from five. But these too often require deep study just to get the gist of it. And in this way I think these are mostly failed experiments. Fascinating and at times breathtaking, but failed.

10. The theme here is contradictions or contrasts and learning to appreciate both sides of them: old and young, love and loneliness, Civil War and the day-to-day mechanics of life, etc. These are sometimes a grass-is-greener longing, and sometimes a condemnation, but always appreciative of both sides and wishing for their combination. Like in "The Tower", where a song praising a country-maid's beauty leads to a drowning:

Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;
Yet, now I have considered it, I find
That nothing strange; the tragedy began
With Homer that was a blind man,
And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.
Oh may the moon and sunlight seem
One inextricable beam,
For if I triumph I must make men mad.

Those two lines, "Oh may the moon and sunlight seem / One inextricable beam," are key to the whole collection, and stunningly beautiful. He longs for the binding of the paradox, the understanding of both moon and sun as one, the mystical. The place where the best of both sides of the contradiction come together and shed off their negatives: the vigor and beauty of youth with the imagination and experience of age; the triumph of silent solitude and the togetherness of love; the spirit that drives men towards freedom and that which drives them to a paycheck. And this theme of contrasts is supported by both word choices and sentence structures—long and short lines exist in the same poems, monosyllabic and multisyllabic words all have meaning and importance, poems of many parts and poems of one stanza share pages in the same collection, longer poems embrace multiple forms to make multiple points. This interaction of theme and mechanics shows how holistic Yeats' writing has become by this stage. It's a staggering display of skill.

11. My favorites are: "Owen Aherne and His Dancers", "Meditations in Time of Civil War", "The New Faces", "Youth and Age", and "Sailing to Byzantium", that classic mythical poem. I almost would put "The Tower" on this list, there're some incredible lines in there but I just can't.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer by WB Yeats

This collection is available to read freely online here.

For Garrett.

1. In this collection, Yates experiments structurally, often drawing out sentences. For instance, a line in "The Leaders of the Crowd" reads:

"How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone
and there alone, that have no solitude."

That final phrase, "that have no solitude", took me multiple reads to understand. I think it's because the phrase is so far separated from the "they" that it modifies. I find this often weak here: it breaks the flow of the poem with the complexity that requires figuring out before the poem is trackable. The modifier and the modified are just too far apart for first-read legibility.

2. This collection requires effort from the reader and multiple reads of each poem. The poems shift directions, topics, and locations. These shifts endanger reader engagement. Three other examples come to mind:

—The two stanzas in "The Second Coming" differ wildly: the first is a despondent diagnosis of the world and man's affect, while the second is a spiritual reflection on a possible future growing out of this.

—The second example is "A Prayer for my Daughter", where nearly every stanza is separated by topic, time, person, action, or location. Like in a sonnet with a distinct volta, both the point and counterpoint have space in the poem—room to breathe and infect the reader's imagination.

—For the third example, let me use a short poem to really drive home how much space he gives to point and counterpoint in this sixteen-line poem. In "Under Saturn", the first three lines are given over to pining for lost love, then two to the comfort of present love, then five reflect on aging, then four recollect a recent situation, and finally two sum up the poem in a rumination. These significant changes throughout the poem puzzle the first-time reader and take time to parse out.

These three examples explain why I had to read most of these poems multiple times to get a sense of what is said. This complexity is not inherently a negative though: I think it works well in "A Prayer for My Daughter" because it's all driven by the title—yes it's a rambling, jumping prayer, but it is still the poet praying for his daughter—and in "The Second Coming", where each stanza is given space enough, memorable lines enough, and distinction enough to really work as a whole. Though these are puzzling poems, they are not generally too puzzling to unpack for two reasons: first, the unpacking is a pleasurable exercise because it's rewarding—"The Leaders of the Crowd" became one of my favorites after not understanding it initially. Second, some of the beautiful lines are gripping and allow the poems to impart something memorable on first read:

"And of a red-haired Yates whose looks, although he died
before my time, seem like a vivid memory."

3. These complex poems and associations of ideas or thoughts start out focused before wandering off into a widening gyre of association, then closing with a newly focused perspective. This works, but often on second or third read—not first. He seems more interested in the construction of arguments and progression of ideas than sounds. For example, in "Under Saturn", he opens focused on a specific situation—the poet accused of wool-gathering lost loves—then he touches on three other events and ideas before he focuses in again at the end, stating the actual cause of his "saturnine" mood, a cause which reflects back on the rest of the poem to cast it all in a new light. These three other events are consecutive, connected thoughts and memories growing wider in scope before narrowing again to the end. I think length of both line and poem allows these complex constructions to work: "A Prayer for my Daughter" also follows this pattern, but was more quickly understood because its length gave me time to get comfortable with the shifts. He starts one place, wanders wide through myriad reflections, and ends up another place.

4. This collection is characterized by contrasts. Let me take one poem for an example: "A Prayer for my Daughter". Yeats contrasts her peaceful sleep inside and the raging storm outside, her infancy and her future, the storm and his prayerful walk, beauty and kindness, the poet himself and his daughter, his wishes for her and society's, public courtesy and private same, ceremony and custom—all this while contemplating virtuous life. But in the end he chooses one over the other and, through his wishes for his daughter, he reveals himself and his priorities. This is just one example, but the rest of the poems in the collection are also characterized by contrasts. These contrasts allow him witty, judgmental summations—notably the one about Helen of Troy:

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,

5. Here, some phrases pull double weight: in "The Second Coming", the line "what rough beast" can be read as interrogative or exclamatory and it works both ways. This is strong writing because Yeats does not do it too often. If he did, I would feel like the poem was meaningless. But by giving a rare single line here and there an available alternate meaning, it forces the reader to think about that option, and hence, the poem.

6. I had thought his incantatory voice was a byproduct of formulaic repetition. But here it comes from using exclamatory phrases followed by rolling stress patterns that come off ominously. He also uses some exact repetition—like in the second stanza of "The Second Coming", where the sentence structure and stress pattern changes to a more flowing, fast pace, punctuated by exact repetitions of phrase and word.

7. There is less formulaic end-rhyme here. Even in the mostly end-rhymed "The Leaders of the Crowd", the long lines and enjambment soften the impact of those end-rhymes: only four of the twelve lines are end-stopped. Often, end-stopped end-rhymes overwhelm a poem, but he does it well here through enjambment and long lines.

8. The theme here is revolution, war, daily life during both, and a contemplation of daily life in the future—which is the reason for both, the hope of both—and the past—which provides the reasons leading to both. This is a fairly focused collection and the first four poems contemplate the past, the next eight or so examine the present, while the last three focus on the future. This organizational structure helps the reader place poems that may at first appear ambiguous.

9. My favorites here are "A Prayer for my Daughter", "The Leaders of the Crowd", and "Under Saturn". I hated no poem, but found the first two off-putting in some way. I don't think I get them yet. I hope I do not have to read A Vision before understanding them.

The Wind Among the Reeds by WB Yeats

This book is available for free from Project Gutenberg.

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 Sidhe

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.

2. 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?
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 Beauty

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.

5. 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.

"He Mourns for the Change That Has Come upon Him and His Beloved, and Longs for the End of the World,"

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.

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.

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 Sedge

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.

8. 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.

The Plague by Albert Camus

For Garrett

1. This is a failure. It failed to hold my attention, my interest, or my empathy. It is a convoluted mess, and it leaves me to think that Camus can't be bothered to tell a story, write a sentence, or communicate an idea. At the least he cannot here. His characters are flat and uninteresting and they all speak in the same voice - they are mostly indistinguishable throughout the novel. Even if the character similarities are intentional for some obscure point about "mankind", this is just bad writing. A lot of the pages seem like filler - like they do not illuminate characters, situations, the plot, or the underlying ideas. It also seems like a shallow description of a plague ravaged town that carries little weight or believability. Camus is forever telling his readers that he will explain something later, which I think is a bad writing tactic.  But by the time I got to the end of the book, I wished he would've explained some of the book itself.

2. What is it actually about? I could not argue effectively against a surface interpretation - it could be just a fictional story about a plague town. Where he does gain depth, it's all over the place - Christianity, communalness, love, individuality, revenge, and violence. But I also could not argue against any of those being "the plague". Perhaps violence is the strongest argument simply because Tarrou states explicitly that is the plague to him. But he's not the main character, so have a grain of salt. The third option is contextually based: a besieged city during either world war. The book is based in some unnamed Mediterranean city, and many of those went through similar experiences shortly before the book was written. I don't know, but if Camus did, he should've gotten to the point eventually.

3. It's moderately interesting that the main character is the plague, not a human. But, Charles Dickens did this better in A Tale of Two Cities. And that is the first time I have ever said that Dickens did anything better than anybody.

4. Maybe this was well written in French, but this translation makes it seem poorly written. The translator isn't even named on the cover or inside the book. I can't read the one character struggling to write a single sentence without believing that he is voicing Camus' own frustrations. There are some beautiful descriptions, some poetic metaphors, and an over-arcing mood of strangeness that are all well done. But they are rare enough to be notable.

5. Ultimately, his arguments are ineffective. His anti-Christianity is straw-mannish and overly bitter. His anti-death penalty is idealistic and naive. His saintliness is confusing, but interesting - though he may be actually talking about citizenship. His "love is egoism" argument is shallow and self evident, aside from being repeated so often that I'm sick of it by the end. His individuality arguments are undermined by the lack of same in all of his characters. His arguments about revenge can be summed up with: all people want revenge at times, and sometimes that is a bad thing. The broader argument that adversity draws people together and tears them apart is self evident and not explored in any interesting way that illuminates humans or humanity.

6. If he was satirizing something, I missed it. By writing a bad book he failed to satirize it effectively. If one writes a bad book intending to make fun of bad books, they've just added another bad book to the list. Nothing else. I don't think he was satirizing anything, but I certainly am having a hard time understanding this book. What did I miss here?

7. On reflection of a couple of weeks time, I do think that his main theme is saintliness without god. This explains much, but not everything. I still do not like this book, but realizing this as an ideal helps fit this novel into the oeuvre of Camus' work.