si avvicina il natale, e come è consuetudine rileggo (venerando ad uno a uno i suoi versi) William Butler Yeats e, in particolare, le poesie dei cigni selvatici di Coole. Mi avvicina a lui un'immagine: quella di una scogliera. si sentiva muto e appassionato come uno scogliera. gli Yeats erano uomini di molte idee e nessuna passione. Se non fosse stato per il ramo materno non avrebbe trovato parole da prestare a quella scogliera. E le parole gli venivano anche da quell'amore culminato nel matrimonio di Maud Gonne con il maggiore MacBride a Parigi. L'infrangersi del sogno di poter sposare Maud recherà talmente tanta sofferenza al poeta che egli cercherà di placare il dolore pensando che questa sofferenza era il germoglio più importante per far nascere la sua opera. Scrivere è un tentativo di spiegarsi a lei. "Avrei potuto gettare via le povere parole", dice in una sua bella poesia "e accontentarmi della vita". l'infelicità dei poeti è la nostra felicità. le loro parole resina di estremo dolore, equilibrio tra morte e vita, aspra solitudine.
Passate un buon natale.

Some of these poems are hauntingly wonderful; others touch my admiring part rather than my affections. Re-visited after reading another book about the north west and happy to be back in touch with literary Ireland.

this poem made me fall in love with yeats, full of wild mystical potential

A really beautiful of sometimes elaborate and difficult (but so very worthwhile!!) poetry. The version I downloaded is the 1919 version (there are two related collections published in 1917 and 1919 with the same name, per Wikipedia.)

I've lately been occupied in reading these poems aloud to a friend of mine who is a baby (having friends who are babies is an excellent excuse for reading books aloud without feeling silly about it), and the act of reading them aloud makes me aware in a whole new way of how great they are. This collection has always been close to my heart -- many years ago, in adolescence, it inspired me to use mountainhare as an alias on blogging platforms, etc. This time around, my favorite piece is probably "Her Praise," but I'm finding something to love in virtually every poem, even the long ones that I didn't care for so much when I was younger. Like these lines in "The Double Vision of Michael Robartes":

"my dreams that fly...
And yet in flying fling into my meat
A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat"

Or these tender, relatable stanzas in "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory," about how his friend Robert, who died young, used to help him out with home maintenance issues:

"What other could so well have counselled us
In all lovely intricacies of a house
As he that practised or that understood
All work in metal or in wood,
In moulded plaster or in carven stone?
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
And all he did done perfectly
As though he had but that one trade alone.

"Some burn damp fagots, others may consume
The entire combustible world in one small room
As though dried straw, and if we turn about
The bare chimney is gone black out
Because the work had finished in that flare.
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
As 'twere all life's epitome.
What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?"

I love Yeats. I wish I knew more about him and his work, but even in ignorance, his words move me.

The rhythm is very good. I believe I missed a couple of relevant points, since there seems to be a lot of symbolism and the Irish mythos goes way above my knowledge of world culture... So a "guide" probably would be an appropriate reading as well.
Since this is actually in preparation for Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, hopefully there'll be some clarification once I start that book.

I liked quite a lot Mr. Peter Tucker as a narrator. He definitely has the voice for poetry and a good eye for the rhythm.

(So, to be clear, the minus one star has to do more with being unable to understand some of the layers rather than a poor presentation from Mr. Yeats or Mr. Tucker.)

The last two lines of "The Song":

'...For who could have foretold
That the heart grows old.'

Yeats' truths can sometimes hurt in his most heartfelt work, some
of which is represented in this volume.

Eh, I find that both this audiobook & the poems therein leave me lukewarm. I may try other Yeats poems but not in audio form...

Aging, death, farewells. Yeats' language is so simple, yet he says so much.

(Ver. 1919) Recopilación de poemas del autor.
La primera vez que escuché hablar de Yeats fue mientras vi hace alrededor de una década el primer capítulo de la segunda temporada de In the Flesh, donde uno de los personajes principales cita los siguientes versos de An Irish Airman Forsees His Death:
"I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balace with this life, this death."
Tremendo fue el impacto que tuvo en mí que todavía recuerdo parar el capítulo, buscar los versos en Google y descubrir de dónde venían. Sin embargo, hasta la fecha no me había atrevido a leer a Yeats de principio a fin y me alegro de haber esperado.
Ha sido una lectura preciosa y muy apta en contexto de sus años de creación y publicación. Hay algunos poemas que siguen temáticas similares y otros que van por libre (de ahí viene un poco mi pequeño disgusto con el poemario, que no está nada ordenado ni por temática ni nada), al igual que unos se desbordan de calidad y otros están bien sin más. Como sé los que me han gustado sé a dónde volveré en el futuro. Es lo bueno de este tipo de poemarios.

While I liked a few of the poems in this selection, most were just humdrum for me. I didn't hate them or find them impossible to understand (which is far too often the case with poetry for me) but they didn't speak to me.

These are the poems I liked best in the collection: "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", "The Living Beauty", "The Hawk", "The Cat and the Moon" and "Another Song of a Fool"