Poems about growing older and change and how things will never be the same.

CONTENTS
page
The Wild Swans at Coole 1
In Memory of Major Robert Gregory 4
An Irish Airman foresees his Death 13
Men improve with the Years 14
The Collar-Bone of a Hare 15
Under the Round Tower 17
Solomon to Sheba 19
The Living Beauty 21
A Song 22
To a Young Beauty 23
To a Young Girl 24
The Scholars 25
Tom O'Roughley 26
The Sad Shepherd 27
Lines written in Dejection 39
The Dawn 40[viii]
On Woman 41
The Fisherman 44
The Hawk 46
Memory 47
Her Praise 48
The People 50
His Phoenix 54
A Thought from Propertius 58
Broken Dreams 59
A Deep-Sworn Vow 63
Presences 64
The Balloon of the Mind 66
To a Squirrel at Kyle-Na-Gno 67
On being asked for a War Poem 68
In Memory of Alfred Pollexfen 69
Upon a Dying Lady 72
Ego Dominus Tuus 79
A Prayer on going into my House 86
The Phases of the Moon 88
The Cat and the Moon 102
The Saint and the Hunchback 104[ix]
Two Songs of a Fool 106
Another Song of a Fool 108
The Double Vision of Michael Robartes 109
Note 115

Periodically I revisit Yeats, and, this year marking his 150th anniversary, it seemed appropriate now to do him the courtesy again. He's always mystified me slightly. His early work is a bit Edwardian (or whatever the Irish Nationalist equivalent) for me, and I don't think I've ever given the later stuff the attention it probably needs to tease out its symbols and nuances. I didn't really feel like taking on either on my brief summer holiday, so I went for this, a kind of mid-point.

It was very telling. Written during his early 50s, most of the poems here dwell on ageing, lost love, loss in general, and the struggle involved in making something durable out of impermanent life. In my mid-50s myself, they now make sense in a way they never could when I read them younger. There are still a few too many kings and queens, shepherds and goatherds, etc, for my tastes, and the dialogue form of some of the longer pieces is distracting, but as meditations on what it means to be growing old, these are profound and touching reflections. There's startling and apposite Modernist imagery too - "the dark leopards of the moon" (Lines Written in Dejection); "The struggle of the fly in marmalade" (Ego Dominus Tuus). Also, humour, both rueful (Men Improve With The Years) and savage (On Going Into His House).

This has been a worthwhile revisitation. I've never quite managed to love Yeats as I do Pound and Eliot, but, I hope, there's time. Happy 150th, WBY !

Poetry is not of the genre which I can claim I have read extensively, or heck even decently. The most memorable poem in my head, is The Solitary Reader by William Wordsworth. That too because of a passionate 10th grade English Tutor.

Then there was  Gitanjali, the collection of works by  Rabindranath Tagore. But those were more spiritual in nature, one's appreciation is more towards the depth of the lyrics rather than its flow.

This year, I've been trying to rectify that shortcoming, but Gods it's not as easy as reading prose.

With literary fiction, you can usually get hooked on the narration. The premise, the characters, what they do, how they do it, what doing it does to them, does to the story, the twists, the turns, the parables, the subtext, the works. With Poetry, I'm drawing a blank.

There is also the case that I might not have chosen necessarily the best work to get started. Some of the entries by Mr. Yeats describe common themes of loss, friendship, melancholy and the likes. But many are phrased in a way that only a proper English gentlemen might gain full appreciation of them. With all the burrows, fords, birches, hedges and whatnot. A really Engh-lish gentlemen.

Hope the rest were able to gain better appreciation of the work, because I didn't, though perhaps through no fault of the source material, but rather the incongruity.

Fabulous. As one would expect of Yeats. It really produces that Stillness feeling you'd get from looking at the Lake at Coole Park. It's believed this Poem was written when Yeats was staying with a friend - Lady Gregory at Coole Park in Ireland. This is fabulous poetry. 5 stars.

Lovely poems on death and growing old.

i want to read this one

I've never read Yeats poetry until this book and I find he's got skill when writing about nature. I especially liked the lines about autumn and felt like I could see what he was describing. It created such a longing in me, I was tempted to go online and look at fall pictures. I think I hate this time of year and this cold and snow doesn't help. Perhaps I just really love autumn. In any case, I still found the poem enchanting. You could easily imagine the swans he was seeing.

Thanks to my daughter, I was fortunate to encounter the poems of W.B. Yeats upon my recent visit to Dublin. Having visited the Yeats exhibition at the National Library of Ireland, I was intrigued by this complex man who wrote so deftly about issues, such as aging and death, as well as love, and the beauty of nature. I especially loved the poem to which this collection was named, ‘The Wild Swans of Coole,’ a place of extraordinary beauty in which Yeats contemplates how the lovely swans, unlike himself who is weary, still experience life passionately and freely. In witnessing the swans paddling in the cold, or the lovely moment of the ‘bell-beat of their wings’ above his head, Yeats also realizes how fleeting this moment of beauty can be, as he considers how when he awakens some day, the swans may have flown away.
It seems to me that Yeats often wrote about his relationships with women, and since he was promiscuous throughout his life, he was awarded with ample writing resources. Throughout his life, Yeats possessed an unrequited love for a well-spirited woman named Maude Gonne with whom he maintained a close friendship throughout his life. In this anthology, Yeats writes a very short poem, entitled ‘Memory,’ in which he compares the love of his life to a mountain hare, for where the hare lies, its form cannot be held in the mountain grass. To me, Yeats speaks of the elusiveness of this idyllic relationship. Written with only a few lines, this poem to me is almost perfection, as a haiku, which succinctly speaks profoundly with minimal words.

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Yet again another boring poem which really did torture me while I was reading it because it was so uninteresting for me.

The plot was super boring and really had a hard time trying to like this poem which I failed to do in the end.

The writing style here was super bad as well and it really made this poem to a torture of reading it.

Despite the inclusion of a wider-spanning "narrative" arc, and numerous nested or branching poems, as well as a general looking-backward towards past work and forward towards future work, none of what is included here really connected, for me.

In the poem, Yeats replicates on how his life has altered since he was a younger man and walked ''with a lighter tread''. The poem gives us an image of personal gloom that uses the enduring magnificence of the swans to highpoint the brevity of human life.

Look at how the poem comes to a close. Yeats writes:

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

The poem concludes with Yeats wondering where the swans will go next to ''Delight men's eyes''. Perhaps he means that they, unchanged, will continue to bring pleasure to others who stand as he does now, watching them glide once more on the still water.

The poem is set in autumn, and winter will unavoidably follow, for the poet. The swans seem unscathed by everything and will remain to ''drift on the still water''. Yeats may be thoughtful of his creativity when he ponders on the vagaries that time has fashioned. The swans are invariable, gratified, almost eternal. He is none of these things. In a way, the swans represent the life-force. Their hearts are unaffected by time. They find the stream intimate, regardless of the cold.

In Yeats’ mind, the swans embody the amalgamation of time and the timeless. The sense of the ‘anonymous’, the ‘unidentified’ and ‘exquisiteness’ which the swans evoke in the poet, makes the poem almost Wordsworthian. Especially, the poem is extraordinary for its manifestation of the sense of defeat and forfeiture.

Yeats at his typical gloomy but not impenetrable self.

Some favorite lines:

Though pedantry denies
It’s plain the Bible means
That Solomon grew wise
While talking with his queens
Yeats, “On Women”

A PRAYER ON GOING INTO MY HOUSE
GOD grant a blessing on this tower and cottage
And on my heirs, if all remain unspoiled,
No table, or chair or stool not simple enough
For shepherd lads in Galilee ; and grant
That I myself for portions of the year
May handle nothing and set eyes on nothing
But what the great and passionate have used
Throughout so many varying centuries.
We take it for the norm ; yet should I dream
Sinbad the sailor’s brought a painted chest,
Or image, from beyond the Loadstone Mountain,
That dream is a norm ; and should some limb of the devil
Destroy the view by cutting down an ash
That shades the road, or setting up a cottage
Planned in a government office, shorten his life,
Manacle his soul upon the Red Sea bottom.