Yeats – The Poems

‘The Pity of Love’ has one of the loveliest lines in poetry:

‘A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love’

More provocatively, in ‘The Tower’ Yeats posed another question about love:

‘Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or woman lost?’

In ‘The Folly of Being Comforted’ it seems that either way, there ‘ain’t no cure for love’. It survives the loss of beauty, youth, vitality – and rages on.

‘O heart! O heart! If she’d but turn her head,
You’d know the folly of being comforted’

In ‘Friends’ the gentle beauty of Olivia Shakespeare, with whom he had an affair after falling in love with Maud Gonne (to follow Maud Gonne meant one was always second), is praised, as is the indomitable spirit of Lady Gregory. And the third friend in this famous poem, what of Maude Gonne? Twenty-three years after he’d met her he writes that when he thinks of her

‘up from my heart’s root
So great a sweetness flows
I shake from head to foot.’

Long, long love. ‘Women, Beware Women’, wrote Thomas Middleton. What do they want? The utterly impossible, as Freud probably knew. In ‘Before the World was made’ the narrator searches in mirror after mirror for her mythical, mystical face. She is not in quest of a Lacan-like moment of psychological insight but of the power that would entice her lover to

‘love the thing that was
Before the world was made.’

It’s a little-known poem and undeservedly so.

The poem ‘Easter, 1916’ was inspired by the tragic military failure of the rebellion, of which Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me . . . all the work of years has been overturned.’ The patriotic self-sacrifice of MacDonagh and MacBride, Connolly and Pearse, led to the poem that presages the birth of a nation. The iconic line ‘A terrible beauty is born’ contains both warning and blessing. The word ‘terrible’, I believe, requires equal weight with the word ‘beauty’. The rhythms and repetitions in the poem seem to keep pace almost irresistibly with the destiny of the men. The lines

‘Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart,’

sound another note of ambivalence, which was possibly the reason that Maud Gonne was less than impressed by the poem.

‘The Municipal Gallery Re-visited’ is, he said, ‘a poem about the Ireland we have all served, and the movement of which I have been a part’. He had just visited the gallery and, as he looked at the portraits of so many old friends, memories of old loves flooded in:

‘Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.’

‘Adam’s Curse’ reminds us, as he once wrote, that ‘we achieve, if we do achieve, in little sedentary stitches as though we were making lace’. Often in secret, ‘All that is beautiful in art is laboured over’ in ‘the hidden hours unnoticed by bankers, schoolmasters and clergymen’. ‘Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,/Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.’ And love? ‘We sat grown quiet at the name of love . . . I had a thought . . . That you were beautiful, and that I strove/To love you in the old high way of love.’

‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, written late in life, is one of the greatest poems ever to deal with the creative tension between art and life. Yeats says,

‘Maybe at last being but a broken man
I must be satisfied with my heart’,

and continues:

‘Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.’

Where else?

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