Yeats' Sailing To Byzantium (#poetry, #humblebrag... ;-)

 

Sailing to Byzantium

I

 

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds on the tree

--Those dying generations--at their song,

The salmon falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in the sensual music, all neglect

Monuments of unaging intellect.

 

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap his hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there any singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire,

As in a gold mosaic on a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre

And be the singing masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fasted to a dying animal

It knows not what it is, and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

 

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take 

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Out of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

-W. B. Yeats

Not exactly an unknown poem, but a good one. I've had it in my head lately because (here comes the humble brag part...) I'm now halfway through that 'monument of unaging intellect' Gibbon's Decline and Fall (1500 out of 3000 pages), which was going to be my summer reading project, but it's clear it will extend into the fall. The Roman empire has fallen in the west, Odoacer is the Gothic king of Italy and I will be sailing to Byzantium myself now. 

 

There are better (and shorter!) histories of the Roman empire these days, but one reads Gibbon now for the style and the wit. I've been collecting quotes, which will likely show up in a separate post someday.

 

 

Also: am I the only person who thinks that poem is meant (at least a little bit) to be funny? Sure, Cormac McCarthy stole the opening for his novel (which I haven't read) and then the Coen brothers made it into a movie, which wasn't particularly funny, but still.

 

I was poking around on the internets and it certainly seems like nobody does agree with me. But consider: studying those monuments of unaging intellect is useful for what? Keeping a drowsy emperor awake? Doesn't sound like Yeats is exactly praising study here. 'Perne in a gyre' feels to me like Yeats making fun of his own habits in diction. Gyre is a favorite of his (and one, I see, unknown to my spell-checker) which means a corkscrew motion, also used as a verb. The only other work I recall seeing it in is Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky', where it's usually taken as another one of Caroll's made-up words. And really, can anybody doubt Yeats thinks he would be happier sleeping with Maud Gonne (or Iseult) than being whacked into some sort of gold sculpture?

 

I kind of think there might be a clue to Yeats' approach. The eight-line stanza it's written in is ottava rima. According to Dr. Oliver Tearle (whoever he is) in this post, it's an 'an appropriately august form for the ancient and the timeless'. Well, no... The most famous English poem in ottava rima is Byron's Don Juan, certainly deeply ironic and occasionally uproarious. Byron uses the meter because its the meter of Orlando Furioso, one of the world's great mock-epics. (And also very funny.)

But, however you read it, it is a great poem.

Ezra Pound, from Hilda's Book (#poetry)

Child of the grass

The years pass Above us

Shadows of air All these shall Love us

Winds for our fellows

The browns and the yellows

    Of autumn our colors

Now at our life's morn. Be we well sworn

Never to grow older

Our spirits be bolder At meeting

Than e'er before All the old lore

Of the forests & woodways

Shall aid us: Keep we the bond & seal

Ne'er shall we feel

    Aught of sorrow

 

    Let light flow about thee

    As     a cloak of air

 

-Ezra Pound 

 

This is the first poem in Ezra Pound's Hilda's Book, a hand-assembled book of poems on vellum that Pound gave to his girlfriend, the poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) in 1907. Pound was 22 and H.D. was 21. This is the first poem in the book (and the first poem in the Library of America volume of Ezra Pound shown above). But, except for a few poems that were recycled into Pound's first published volume A Lume Spento, none of the poems in Hilda's Book were known until after H.D. died in 1961. The two of them talked of getting married, but never did. (Her parents were opposed.)

This appears now because I'm reading Guy Davenport's collection of essays The Geography of The Imagination of 1981, but reprinted earlier this year with a new introduction. Superb. In one of his several essays on Pound, he quotes this poem, remarking how much the early Pound was influenced by Yeats. (Now that I've had it pointed out to me, I have to agree...I tend to think of the best of Pound being all about Browning, but maybe not always.)

Of course, Pound. In an era when politics are all, Pound's are about as objectionable as they come. At the end of a passage describing Pound's rabid anti-Semitism, Davenport writes, "Southerners take a certain amount of unhinged reality for granted," which is not, of course, justification. (Davenport was from Kentucky.) It's possible I'll have more to say about the Davenport.

 

But anyway, the young Pound could write love poems with the best of them: 'Be we well sworn/Never to grow older...Let light flow about thee/As   a cloak of air".

 

I'm in the Internet-free Zone as this appears.