[WB YEATS: SIAPAKAH WB YEATS?]

ipes2

Sebahagian besar ahli kesusateraan bahasa Inggeris adalah dari keturunan Irish. WB Yeats (1865-1939) adalah salah seorang dari mereka.

William Butler Yeats lahir di Dublin dan membesar di London dan belajar di Godolphin School, Hammersmith, London (1877) sebelum melanjutkan pelajarannya di Erasmus Smith High School, Dublin. Sejak kecil Yeats menulis puisi-puisi yang indah berkenaan dengan kecantikan dan betapa mystic nya Irish countryside di Ireland. Beliau membesar di Dublin semasa Ireland dibawah jajahan British. Di waktu dewasanya, beliau mula menulis puisi dan sajak tentang politics yang berbau pro-Irish.

Puisi-puisi dan sajak-sajak mystical Yeats mempengaruhi sudut spiritual dan philosophical system ramai orang manakala yang berkenaan politics nya menyemarakkan semangat pro-Irish di kalangan pengikutnya.

WB Yeats mendapat ''Nobel Prize in Literature'' pada tahun 1923. Yeats Societies adalah associations yang ditubuhkan bagi penduduk dunia untuk appreciate karangan Yeats di serata dunia (International Yeats Society, Yeats Society Sligo, Yeats Society Korea, Yeats Society Japan, WB Yeats Society of New York). International Yeats Society menghubungkan pelbagai persatuan-persatuan dan peminat-peminat Yeats diserata dunia.

ipes2

The Lake Isle Of Innisfree (WB Yeats, 1888)


I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.


And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes droppingslow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricketsings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.


I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

234126

Orang2 cerdik pandai suka baca yeats ni. Kalau dlm movie kalau ada watak student2 belajar kat any ivy league uni tu mesti ada yang sebut reading yeats takpun Kipling, salinger, kafka, tolstoy. Tapi yang hebat maybe akan ckp dia baca proust. Sebab susah nak paham proust punya level deep tu

ipes2

234126 replied at 14-12-2018 08:13 AM
Orang2 cerdik pandai suka baca yeats ni. Kalau dlm movie kalau ada watak student2 belajar kat any iv ...

Rudyard Kipling penah baca masa kecik, ade la yg level sy boeh paham ha ha.
Reading is so so enriching

234126

ipes2 replied at 14-12-2018 04:00 PM
Rudyard Kipling penah baca masa kecik, ade la yg level sy boeh paham ha ha.
Reading is so so enri ...

True! reading tu enriching.  New generation ni i wonder kenal tidak nama2 kita sebut. If malas membaca pun paling2 tidak tengok movie pasal history pun jadi ler

adila39

Late grandpa, and my dad baca. Me, belum lagi level cendikiawan.
The handwriting is beautiful.

seribulan

Stadi orang Dublin ni

seribulan

When You Are Old

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEAT

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.


Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

seribulan

234126 replied at 14-12-2018 07:13 AM
Orang2 cerdik pandai suka baca yeats ni. Kalau dlm movie kalau ada watak student2 belajar kat any iv ...

MUST READ PROUSTHAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARCEL
By Joshua Zajdman)

At the corner of 114th and Broadway, Linda the bookseller held court in a role it played. It sagged and creaked and scraped against the concrete. Linda was large, pale, and managed to look perennially exasperated. I’d never heard her speak. There were tables of books, all in pristine condition and all for $5—exotic, colorful and inviting. But I hadn’t yet felt the significant pull that one can only experience when having discovered what to read next. I reached for something, and then I heard a girlish voice say, “This is the one for you.”

I put down $5, squeaked out a “thank you” and walked away with a bright-red cloth-covered volume of Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust. I’d heard of Proust, but aside from nominal recognition, I had little else. But if it got Linda talking, I was intrigued. I got on the downtown 1 at 110th and flipped the book open. “For a long time, I used to go to bed early…” That was it. I was hooked.

Now we have less a shelf of Proust than a bookcase devoted to him. There are three different translations of In Search of Lost Time, four different biographies, collections of letters and several works of literary criticism. Consider this a call-to-arms. You, yes, you, must read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It’s the book of life and the book of a lifetime.

What is it about Proust’s masterwork that people find so daunting? So few actually read it or even take a stab at it compared to other modernist classics. Since 1998, two translations of In Search of Lost Time have been published. There is Lydia Davis’s astounding edition, which has sold approximately 80,000 copies since its 2004 trade paper publication. There’s also the updated Moncrieff translation published in 1998, which clocks in at around 40,000 copies. All told, about 100,000 copies sold over nearly 20 years. This is compared to the nearly 60,000 copies of Finnegans Wake sold since 1999, the 613,000 copies of Mrs. Dalloway sold since 1990, or the 370,000 copies ofThe Sound and The Fury since 1990. Since 2006 alone, Infinite Jest has sold 354,000 copies. To put it in in really haunting perspective, Atlas Shrugged has sold nearly two million paperbacks since 1996.

Before you say, well, those are each only one book, I say pah! There are plenty of other multi-volume series doing terrifically. Plenty of people, including a Gilmore Girl and a First Lady, are tackling the 1,700 pages of Ferrante. And then there are the 3,600 pages of Knausgaard—which outstrips Proust by 300. This is why considering the seven volumes of Swann’s Way separately would be of value.

When you look at the other great works of modernism (or Atlas Shrugged), Swann’s Way, andIn Search of Lost Time to a larger extent, are far more accessible, inspiring, aesthetically pleasing and of greater resonance in today’s society.

Better even than James or Wharton, Proust is the consummate social novelist. He offers portraits of varied social classes that are psychologically resonant in ways other authors can’t even begin to replicate. For Proust, the duchess and the seamstress are of equal interest, their desires and shortcomings treated with the same deftness. That’s what makes the work so important and viable. It isn’t, as culturally assumed, an elitist, inaccessible collection of memories concerning aristocracy written by a weak, if not outright, invalid aristocrat. That is a reductionist viewpoint that couldn’t be further from the truth.

However, In Search of Lost Time is more than the transposition of people to page, an incisive look at the social lives, minds, foibles and aspirations of people you end up knowing more about than most family members. At root, it’s about the decisions people make or the customs they adhere to in the name of social customs. Whether you’ve ever flirted with an attempt at social ascendency, suffered from loneliness, or love to gossip: you, or someone like you but more French, is in this book.

If you or anyone you know is Jewish, you must read Proust.

At the beginning of Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer says, “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.” This resonates with In Search of Lost Timein the same way its considerations of religion, ethnicity, and discrimination resonate with ourtime. Proust was half-Jewish, and one wonders about the amount of Rothian self-loathing he suffered from given the depiction of Jews throughout In Search of Lost Time. Instances of discrimination and anti-Semitism, specifically the Dreyfus affair, are prevalent. As a historical record, it’s fascinating and offers ringside seats to the anti-Semitic hysteria that seized France in the late 19th century. Most famously, and irritatingly, there is Bloch, narrator Marcel’s friend from childhood. As the novel progresses, we are introduced to Bloch’s family and the myriad ways in which they are discriminated against by characters (see: Marcel’s grandfather) or distrusted by society at large (Bloch’s uncle, M. Nissim Bernard, is portrayed as one of the novel’s most untrustworthy characters. A better protracted consideration of Judaism, anti-Semitism and the danger of breeding it is impossible to find. The motivations for this kind of discrimination, and its social acceptance are all the more frightening while reading Proust in this Trumpian era.

If you have ever been in love, you must read Proust.

Each section of Ulysses corresponds to a different organ, while the entirety of In Search of Lost Timecorresponds to one organ. No, not that one. It’s the heart. Whether requited or otherwise, In Search of Lost Time is a novel dedicated thoroughly and deeply to love. In a sense, it serves as a compendium of the different ways we can love, do love, andshould love. Of course, one of its central insights is into the ways that we shouldn’t love—whether that means loving the wrong person or in the wrong way. Luther Ingram’s “If Loving You is Wrong” would be the opening track on a Proustian Playlist.

If you have ever had your heart broken, you must read Proust.

I have often wondered whether this novel is more about love or heartbreak. But then it hit me: you can’t cleanly separate the two. Proust routinely explores the very specific strain of sadness that can only occur in romance. This extends from a minimal snub that feels significant to the complete dissolution of relationships. Each stop along the route of amorous pilgrimage is treated with the same forensic interest as the social customs mentioned above. One could picture Marcel listening to Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood and nodding along knowingly.

If you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make sense of your parents, you must read Proust.

You do, I do, and Proust does too; there’s no shame in it. Our first association in life remains one of the most baffling. In Swann’s Way, young Marcel very famously bemoans the prospect of a night without his mother’s goodnight kiss. He hatches a plan to get it and, upon doing so, is devastated by the air of pity and yielding to despair incumbent in the giving of it. Proust is willing to keenly illustrate the disappointment, frustration, tenderness, confusion, irritation and lack of understanding that is intrinsic to the parent-child relationship because it is also underscored by love.

If you are or are considered a human, you must and you can read Proust.

Above all, I must reiterate that In Search of Lost Time isn’t merely the greatest reading experience available but is also, contrarily to popular belief, one of the most accessible. It’s magic is extraordinary for it works with whatever you bring to it. If you haven’t yet experienced what Marcel is remembering, then he prepares you for it. If you have, then he enlightens the experience, provides insight and understanding in a way those closest to us cannot. There are too many reasons to be hesitant. If it’s a matter of translation, just read the first two pages of each and pick the one that feels best. You don’t need to read each volume back to back, though who can blame you if you want to? He shapes the world for you. You can’t shake loose of what he shows you and you wouldn’t want to.

Yesterday, July 10th, was Proust’s birthday. There isn’t a Bloomsday-like celebration. Instead, there’s confusion about cork-lined rooms, madeleines, eyeliner, fur coats and whether or not he and Joyce spoke to each other. I urge you to celebrate Proust by giving his work the chance it deserves. Who knows what can happen or where you’ll go if you take the chance? For as Proust says, “reality, even if it is inevitable, is not completely predictable.” Neither are we. You think you may know about Proust, but you have no idea.

ipes2

234126 replied at 14-12-2018 07:40 PM
True! reading tu enriching.  New generation ni i wonder kenal tidak nama2 kita sebut. If malas mem ...

ye, tapi mungkin depa hanya kenal mobile apps sahaja
agak merisaukan perkembangan mereka

234126

seribulan replied at 14-12-2018 10:55 PM
MUST READ PROUSTHAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARCEL
By Joshua Zajdman)

This compels me to try reading proust hehehe thank you! Hope tak kandas tgh jalan dlm tercari2 makna bait2 ayat.

seribulan

Adam's Curse
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,   
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,   
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.   
Better go down upon your marrow-bones   
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones   
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;   
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet   
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen   
The martyrs call the world.’
                                          And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake   
There’s many a one shall find out all heartache   
On finding that her voice is sweet and low   
Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.’
I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing   
Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be   
So much compounded of high courtesy   
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks   
Precedents out of beautiful old books;   
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;   
We saw the last embers of daylight die,   
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky   
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell   
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell   
About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:   
That you were beautiful, and that I strove   
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown   
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

n/a
Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

ipes2

seribulan replied at 14-12-2018 10:52 PM
When You Are Old

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEAT

sedap sangat sangat lenggang lenggok nya
berisi dan lembut

ipes2

adila39 replied at 14-12-2018 08:13 PM
Late grandpa, and my dad baca. Me, belum lagi level cendikiawan.
The handwriting is beautiful.

Masa saya remaja, 15 or 16 gitu, saya ingat saya ada baca this line:

''tread softly, as you tread on my dreams''
bagi saya, line ini mengatakan kepada seseorang untuk berhati-hati dan berlembut kerana seseorang itu memegang hatinya

seribulan

ipes2 replied at 19-12-2018 03:12 AM
sedap sangat sangat lenggang lenggok nya
berisi dan lembut

Seswai kan


William Butler YeatsIRISH AUTHOR AND POET


WRITTEN BY:

• The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
  

William Butler Yeats
IRISH AUTHOR AND POET

View All Media

BORNJune 13, 1865
Sandymount, Ireland
DIEDJanuary 28, 1939 (aged 73)
Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France
NOTABLE WORKS

• “The Wild Swans at Coole”
• “Leda and the Swan”
• “Easter 1916”
• “The Second Coming”
• “The Countess Cathleen”
• “Sailing to Byzantium”
• “The Celtic Twilight”
• “The Green Helmet”
• “At the Hawk’s Well”
• “The Winding Stair”
  

MOVEMENT / STYLE

• Irish literary renaissance
  

AWARDS AND HONORS

• Nobel Prize
  

FOUNDER OF

• Abbey Theatre
  

FAMILY

• Brother Jack Butler Yeats
  

VIEW BIOGRAPHIES RELATED TOCATEGORIES

• dramatic literature
• poetry
• essay
• Nobel Prize (all)
• Nobel Prize in Literature
  

DATES

• January 28
• June 13
  

William Butler Yeats, (born June 13, 1865, Sandymount, Dublin, Ireland—died January 28, 1939, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France),Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prizefor Literature in 1923.

READ MORE ON THIS TOPIC
Irish literature: Yeats

the Irish literary renaissance was William Butler Yeats, whose remarkable career encompassed…

Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats, was a barrister who eventually became a portrait painter. His mother, formerly Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a prosperous merchant in Sligo, in western Ireland. Through both parents Yeats (pronounced “Yates”) claimed kinship with various Anglo-Irish Protestant families who are mentioned in his work. Normally, Yeats would have been expected to identify with his Protestant tradition—which represented a powerful minority among Ireland’s predominantly Roman Catholic population—but he did not. Indeed, he was separated from both historical traditions available to him in Ireland—from the Roman Catholics, because he could not share their faith, and from the Protestants, because he felt repelled by their concern for material success. Yeats’s best hope, he felt, was to cultivate a tradition more profound than either the Catholic or the Protestant—the tradition of a hidden Ireland that existed largely in the anthropological evidence of its surviving customs, beliefs, and holy places, more pagan than Christian.

In 1867, when Yeats was only two, his family moved to London, but he spent much of his boyhood and school holidays in Sligo with his grandparents. This country—its scenery, folklore, and supernatural legend—would colour Yeats’s work and form the setting of many of his poems. In 1880 his family moved back toDublin, where he attended the high school. In 1883 he attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, where the most important part of his education was in meeting other poets and artists.

Meanwhile, Yeats was beginning to write: his first publication, two brief lyrics, appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885. When the family moved back to London in 1887, Yeats took up the life of a professional writer. He joined the Theosophical Society, whose mysticism appealed to him because it was a form of imaginative life far removed from the workaday world. The age of science was repellent to Yeats; he was a visionary, and he insisted upon surrounding himself with poetic images. He began a study of the prophetic books of William Blake, and this enterprise brought him into contact with other visionary traditions, such as the Platonic, the Neoplatonic, the Swedenborgian, and the alchemical.

Yeats was already a proud young man, and his pride required him to rely on his own taste and his sense of artistic style. He was not boastful, but spiritual arrogance came easily to him. His early poems, collected in The Wanderings of Oisin, and Other Poems(1889), are the work of an aesthete, often beautiful but always rarefied, a soul’s cry for release from circumstance.

Yeats quickly became involved in the literary life of London. He became friends with William Morris and W.E. Henley, and he was a cofounder of the Rhymers’ Club, whose members included his friends Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons. In 1889 Yeats metMaud Gonne, an Irish beauty, ardent and brilliant. From that moment, as he wrote, “the troubling of my life began.” He fell in love with her, but his love was hopeless. Maud Gonne liked and admired him, but she was not in love with him. Her passion was lavished upon Ireland; she was an Irish patriot, a rebel, and a rhetorician, commanding in voice and in person. When Yeats joined in the Irish nationalist cause, he did so partly fromconviction, but mostly for love of Maud. When Yeats’s playCathleen ni Houlihan was first performed in Dublin in 1902, she played the title role. It was during this period that Yeats came under the influence of John O’Leary, a charismatic leader of theFenians, a secret society of Irish nationalists.

After the rapid decline and death of the controversial Irish leaderCharles Stewart Parnell in 1891, Yeats felt that Irish political life lost its significance. The vacuum left by politics might be filled, he felt, by literature, art, poetry, drama, and legend. The Celtic Twilight(1893), a volume of essays, was Yeats’s first effort toward this end, but progress was slow until 1898, when he met Augusta Lady Gregory, an aristocrat who was to become a playwright and his close friend. She was already collecting old stories, the lore of the west of Ireland. Yeats found that this lore chimed with his feeling for ancient ritual, for pagan beliefs never entirely destroyed byChristianity. He felt that if he could treat it in a strict and high style, he would create a genuine poetry while, in personal terms, moving toward his own identity. From 1898, Yeats spent his summers at Lady Gregory’s home, Coole Park, County Galway, and he eventually purchased a ruined Norman castle called Thoor Ballylee in the neighbourhood. Under the name of the Tower, this structure would become a dominant symbol in many of his latest and best poems.

In 1899 Yeats asked Maud Gonne to marry him, but she declined. Four years later she married Major John MacBride, an Irish soldier who shared her feeling for Ireland and her hatred of English oppression: he was one of the rebels later executed by the British government for their part in the Easter Rising of 1916. Meanwhile, Yeats devoted himself to literature and drama, believing that poems and plays would engender a national unity capable of transfiguring the Irish nation. He (along with Lady Gregory and others) was one of the originators of the Irish Literary Theatre, which gave its first performance in Dublin in 1899 with Yeats’s playThe Countess Cathleen. To the end of his life Yeats remained a director of this theatre, which became the Abbey Theatre in 1904. In the crucial period from 1899 to 1907, he managed the theatre’s affairs, encouraged its playwrights (notably John Millington Synge), and contributed many of his own plays. Among the latter that became part of the Abbey Theatre’s repertoire are The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The Hour Glass (1903), The King’s Threshold (1904), On Baile’s Strand (1905), and Deirdre (1907).

Yeats published several volumes of poetry during this period, notably Poems (1895) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), which are typical of his early verse in their dreamlike atmosphere and their use of Irish folklore and legend. But in the collections In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet (1910), Yeats slowly discarded the Pre-Raphaelite colours and rhythms of his early verse and purged it of certain Celtic and esoteric influences. The years from 1909 to 1914 mark a decisive change in his poetry. The otherworldly, ecstatic atmosphere of the early lyrics has cleared, and the poems in Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (1914) show a tightening and hardening of his verse line, a more sparse and resonant imagery, and a new directness with which Yeats confronts reality and its imperfections.

In 1917 Yeats published The Wild Swans at Coole. From then onward he reached and maintained the height of his achievement—a renewal of inspiration and a perfecting of technique that are almost without parallel in the history of English poetry. The Tower (1928), named after the castle he owned and had restored, is the work of a fully accomplished artist; in it, the experience of a lifetime is brought to perfection of form. Still, some of Yeats’s greatest verse was written subsequently, appearing in The Winding Stair (1929). The poems in both of these works use, as their dominant subjects and symbols, the Easter Rising and the Irish civil war; Yeats’s own tower; the Byzantine Empire and its mosaics; Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry; and the author’s interest in contemporary psychical research. Yeats explained his own philosophy in the prose work A Vision (1925, revised version 1937); this meditation upon the relation between imagination, history, and the occult remains indispensable to serious students of Yeats despite its obscurities.

In 1913 Yeats spent some months at Stone Cottage, Sussex, with the American poet Ezra Pound acting as his secretary. Pound was then editing translations of the nō plays of Japan, and Yeats was greatly excited by them. The nō drama provided a framework ofdrama designed for a small audience of initiates, a stylized,intimate drama capable of fully using the resources offered bymasks, mime, dance, and song and conveying—in contrast to the public theatre—Yeats’s own recondite symbolism. Yeats devised what he considered an equivalent of the nō drama in such plays as Four Plays for Dancers (1921), At the Hawk’s Well (first performed 1916), and several others.

In 1917 Yeats asked Iseult Gonne, Maud Gonne’s daughter, to marry him. She refused. Some weeks later he proposed to Miss George Hyde-Lees and was accepted; they were married in 1917. A daughter, Anne Butler Yeats, was born in 1919, and a son, William Michael Yeats, in 1921.

In 1922, on the foundation of the Irish Free State, Yeats accepted an invitation to become a member of the new Irish Senate: he served for six years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Now a celebrated figure, he was indisputably one of the most significant modern poets. In 1936 his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935, a gathering of the poems he loved, was published. Still working on his last plays, he completed The Herne’s Egg, his most raucous work, in 1938. Yeats’s last two verse collections, New Poems and Last Poems and Two Plays, appeared in 1938 and 1939 respectively. In these books many of his previous themes are gathered up and rehandled, with an immense technical range; the aged poet was using ballad rhythms anddialogue structure with undiminished energy as he approached his 75th year.

Yeats died in January 1939 while abroad. Final arrangements for his burial in Ireland could not be made, so he was buried at Roquebrune, France. The intention of having his body buried in Sligo was thwarted when World War II began in the autumn of 1939. In 1948 his body was finally taken back to Sligo and buried in a little Protestant churchyard at Drumcliffe, as he specified in “Under Ben Bulben,” in his Last Poems, under his own epitaph: “Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!”

Had Yeats ceased to write at age 40, he would probably now be valued as a minor poet writing in a dying Pre-Raphaelite tradition that had drawn renewed beauty and poignancy for a time from the Celtic revival. There is no precedent in literary history for a poet who produces his greatest work between the ages of 50 and 75. Yeats’s work of this period takes its strength from his long and dedicated apprenticeship to poetry; from his experiments in a wide range of forms of poetry, drama, and prose; and from his spiritual growth and his gradual acquisition of personal wisdom, which he incorporated into the framework of his own mythology.

Yeats’s mythology, from which arises the distilled symbolism of his great period, is not always easy to understand, nor did Yeats intend its full meaning to be immediately apparent to those unfamiliar with his thought and the tradition in which he worked. His own cyclic view of history suggested to him a recurrence and convergence of images, so that they become multiplied and enriched; and this progressive enrichment may be traced throughout his work. Among Yeats’s dominant images are Leda and the Swan; Helen and the burning of Troy; the Tower in its many forms; the sun and moon; the burning house; cave, thorn tree, and well; eagle, heron, sea gull, and hawk; blind man, lame man, and beggar; unicorn and phoenix; and horse, hound, and boar. Yet these traditional images are continually validated by their alignment with Yeats’s own personal experience, and it is this that gives them their peculiarly vital quality. In Yeats’s verse they are often shaped into a strong and proud rhetoric and into the many poetic tones of which he was the master. All are informed by the two qualities which Yeats valued and which he retained into old age—passion and joy.

ipes2

seribulan replied at 20-12-2018 09:52 AM
Seswai kan

good info, Senior Super Mod.
Thank you.

seribulan

A Dialogue of Self and Soul
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
I

My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
   Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
   Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
   Upon the breathless starlit air,
   Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
   Fix every wandering thought upon
   That quarter where all thought is done:
   Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?

My Self. The consecrated blade upon my knees
   Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,
   Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
   Unspotted by the centuries;
   That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
   From some court-lady's dress and round
   The wooden scabbard bound and wound,
   Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.

My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man
   Long past his prime remember things that are
   Emblematical of love and war?
   Think of ancestral night that can,
   If but imagination scorn the earth
   And intellect its wandering
   To this and that and t'other thing,
   Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
   Five hundred years ago, about it lie
   Flowers from I know not what embroidery—
   Heart's purple—and all these I set
   For emblems of the day against the tower
   Emblematical of the night,
   And claim as by a soldier's right
   A charter to commit the crime once more.

My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows
   And falls into the basin of the mind
   That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
   For intellect no longer knows
   Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known—
   That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
   Only the dead can be forgiven;
   But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.


II

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

The finished man among his enemies?—
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?

I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

W. B. Yeats, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed © 1961 by Georgie Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of A. P. Watt, Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.
Source: The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (1989)

ipes2

seribulan replied at 20-12-2018 10:12 PM
A Dialogue of Self and Soul
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
I

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deep
rasanya ada political sikit

seribulan

Photograph of William Butler Yeats in a rocking chair.
DN-0071801, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum
William Butler Yeats is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He belonged to the Protestant, Anglo-Irish minority that had controlled the economic, political, social, and cultural life of Ireland since at least the end of the 17th century. Most members of this minority considered themselves English people who  happened to have been born in Ireland, but Yeats was staunch in affirming his Irish nationality. Although he lived in London for 14 years of his childhood (and kept a permanent home there during the first half of his adult life), Yeats maintained his cultural roots, featuring Irish legends and heroes in many of his poems and plays. He was equally firm in adhering to his self-image as an artist. This conviction led many to accuse him of elitism, but it also unquestionably contributed to his greatness. As fellow poet W.H. Auden noted in a 1948 Kenyon Review essay entitled "Yeats as an Example," Yeats accepted the modern necessity of having to make a lonely and deliberate "choice of the principles and presuppositions in terms of which [made] sense of his experience." Auden assigned Yeats the high praise of having written "some of the most beautiful poetry" of modern times.

In 1885, an important year in Yeats's early adult life, he saw his first publication, in the Dublin University Review, of his poetry and the beginning of his important interest in occultism. It was also the year that he met John O'Leary, a famous patriot who had returned to Ireland after totaling 20 years of imprisonment and exile for revolutionary nationalistic activities. O'Leary had a keen enthusiasm for Irish books, music, and ballads, and he encouraged young writers to adopt Irish subjects. Yeats, who had preferred more romantic settings and themes, soon took O'Leary's advice, producing many poems based on Irish legends, Irish folklore, and Irish ballads and songs. As he explained in a note included in the 1908 volume Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats: "When I first wrote I went here and there for my subjects as my reading led me, and preferred to all other countries Arcadia and the India of romance, but presently I convinced myself ... that I should never go for the scenery of a poem to any country but my own, and I think that I shall hold to that conviction to the end."

As Yeats began concentrating his poetry on Irish subjects, he was compelled to accompany his family in moving to London at the end of 1886. There he continued to devote himself to Irish subjects, writing poems, plays, novels, and short stories—all with Irish characters and scenes. In addition, he produced book reviews, usually on Irish topics. The most important event in Yeats's life during these London years, however, was his acquaintance with Maud Gonne, a tall, beautiful, prominent young woman passionately devoted to Irish nationalism. Yeats soon fell in love with Gonne, and courted her for nearly three decades; although he eventually learned that she had already borne two children from a long affair, with Gonne's encouragement Yeats redoubled his dedication to Irish nationalism and produced such nationalistic plays as The Countess Kathleen (1892), which he dedicated to her, and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), which featured her as the personification of Ireland in the title role.

Gonne also shared Yeats's interest in occultism and spiritualism. Yeats had been a theosophist, but in 1890 he turned from its sweeping mystical insights and joined the Golden Dawn, a secret society that practiced ritual magic. The society offered instruction and initiation in a series of ten levels, the three highest of which were unattainable except by magi (who were thought to possess the secrets of supernatural wisdom and enjoy magically extended lives). Yeats was fascinated by the possibility of becoming a magus, and he became convinced that the mind was capable of perceiving past the limits of materialistic rationalism. Yeats remained an active member of the Golden Dawn for 32 years, becoming involved in its direction at the turn of the century and achieving the coveted sixth grade of membership in 1914, the same year that his future wife, Georgiana Hyde-Lees, also joined the society.

Although Yeats's occult ambitions were a powerful force in his private thoughts, the Golden Dawn's emphasis on the supernatural clashed with his own need—as a poet—for interaction in the physical world, and thus in his public role he preferred to follow the example of John Keats, a Romantic poet who remained—in comparison with Romantics William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley—relatively close to the materials of life. Yeats avoided what he considered the obscurity of Blake, whose poetic images came from mystical visions rather than from the familiar physical world. Even so, Yeats's visionary and idealist interests were more closely aligned with those of Blake—and Shelley—than with those of Keats, and in the 1899 collection The Wind among the Reeds he featured several poems employing occult symbolism.

Most of Yeats's poetry, however, used symbols from ordinary life and from familiar traditions, and much of his poetry in the 1890s continued to reflect his interest in Irish subjects. During this decade he also became increasingly interested in poetic techniques. He befriended English decadent poet Lionel Johnson, and in 1890 they helped found the Rhymers' Club, a group of London poets who met to read and discuss their poems. The Rhymers placed a very high value on subjectivity and craftsmanship and preferred sophisticated aestheticism to nationalism. The club's influence is reflected in the lush density of Yeats's poetry of the times, culminating in The Wind among the Reeds (1899). Although Yeats was soon to abandon that lush density, he remained permanently committed to the Rhymers' insistence that a poet should labor "at rhythm and cadence, at form and style"—as he reportedly told a Dublin audience in 1893.

The turn of the century marked Yeats's increased interest in theatre, an interest influenced by his father, a famed artist and orator whose love of highly dramatic moments in literature certainly contributed to Yeats's lifelong interest in drama. In the summer of 1897 the author enjoyed his first stay at Coole Park, the County Galway estate of Lady Augusta Gregory. There he devised, with Lady Gregory and her neighbor Edward Martyn, plans for promoting an innovative, native Irish drama. In 1899 they staged the first of three annual productions in Dublin, including Yeats's The Countess Kathleen, and in 1902 they supported a company of amateur Irish actors in staging both George Russell's Irish legend "Deirdre" and Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan. The success of these productions led to the founding of the Irish National Theatre Society with Yeats as president. With a wealthy sponsor volunteering to pay for the renovation of Dublin's Abbey Theatre as a permanent home for the company, the theatre opened on December 27, 1904, and included plays by the company's three directors: Lady Gregory, John M. Synge (whose 1907 production "The Playboy of the Western World" would spark controversy with its savage comic depiction of Irish rural life), and Yeats, who was represented that night with On Baile's Strand, the first of his several plays featuring heroic ancient Irish warrior Cuchulain.

During the entire first decade of the 20th century Yeats was extremely active in the management of the Abbey Theatre company, choosing plays, hiring and firing actors and managers, and arranging tours for the company. At this time he also wrote ten plays, and the simple, direct style of dialogue required for the stage became an important consideration in his poems as well. He abandoned the heavily elaborated style of The Wind among the Reeds in favor of conversational rhythms and radically simpler diction. This transformation in his poetic style can be traced in his first three collections of the 20th century: In the Seven Woods (1903), The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), and Responsibilities (1914). Several poems in those collections use style as their subject. For example, in "A Coat," written in 1912, Yeats derided his 1890s poetic style, saying that he had once adorned his poems with a coat "covered with embroideries / Out of old mythologies." The poem concludes with a brash announcement: "There's more enterprise / In walking naked." This departure from a conventional 19th-century manner disappointed his contemporary readers, who preferred the pleasant musicality of such familiar poems as "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," which he wrote in 1890.

Simplification was only the first of several major stylistic changes. In "Yeats as an Example?" an essay in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, the prominent Irish poet Seamus Heaney commended Yeats for continually altering and refining his poetic craftsmanship. "He is, indeed, the ideal example for a poet approaching middle age," Heaney declared. "He reminds you that revision and slog-work are what you may have to undergo if you seek the satisfaction of finish; he bothers you with the suggestion that if you have managed to do one kind of poem in your own way, you should cast off that way and face into another area of your experience until you have learned a new voice to say that area properly."

Eventually, Yeats began experimenting as a playwright; in 1916, for instance, he adopted a deliberately esoteric, nonrealistic dramatic style based on Japanese Noh plays, a theatrical form to which he had been introduced by poet Ezra Pound. These plays were described by Yeats as "plays for dancers."

While Yeats fulfilled his duties as president of the Abbey Theatre group for the first 15 years of the 20th century, his nationalistic fervor, however, was less evident. Maud Gonne, with whom he had shared his Irish enthusiasms, had moved to Paris with her husband, exiled Irish revolutionary John MacBride, and the author was left without her important encouragement. But in 1916 he once again became a staunch exponent of the nationalist cause, inspired by the Easter Rising, an unsuccessful, six-day armed rebellion of Irish republicans against the British in Dublin. MacBride, who was now separated from Gonne, participated in the rebellion and was executed afterward. Yeats reacted by writing "Easter, 1916," an eloquent expression of his complex feelings of shock, romantic admiration, and a more realistic appraisal.

The Easter Rising contributed to Yeats's eventual decision to reside in Ireland rather than England, and his marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917 further strengthened that resolve. Earlier, in an introductory verse to Responsibilities, he had asked his ancestors' pardon for not yet having married to continue his Irish lineage: "Although I have come close on forty-nine, / I have no child, I have nothing but a book." Once married, however, Yeats traveled with his bride to Thoor Ballylee, a medieval stone tower where the couple periodically resided. With marriage came another period of exploration into complex and esoteric subjects for Yeats. He had long been fascinated by the contrast between a person's internal and external selves—between the true person and those aspects that the person chooses to present as a representation of the self. Yeats had first mentioned the value of masks in 1910 in a simple poem, "The Mask," where a woman reminds her lover that his interest in her depends on her guise and not on her hidden, inner self. Yeats gave eloquent expression to this idea of the mask in a group of essays, Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918): "I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self." This notion can be found in a wide variety of Yeats's poems.

Yeats also continued to explore mysticism. Only four days after the wedding, his bride began what would be a lengthy experiment with the psychic phenomenon called automatic writing, in which her hand and pen presumably served as unconscious instruments for the spirit world to send information. Yeats and his wife held more than four hundred sessions of automatic writing, producing nearly four thousand pages that Yeats avidly and patiently studied and organized. From these sessions Yeats formulated theories about life and history. He believed that certain patterns existed, the most important being what he called gyres, interpenetrating cones representing mixtures of opposites of both a personal and historical nature. He contended that gyres were initiated by the divine impregnation of a mortal woman—first, the rape of Leda by Zeus; later, the immaculate conception of Mary. Yeats found that within each 2000 year era, emblematic moments occurred at the midpoints of the 1000 year halves. At these moments of balance, he believed, a civilization could achieve special excellence, and Yeats cited as examples the splendor of Athens at 500 B.C., Byzantium at A.D. 500, and the Italian Renaissance at A.D. 1500.

Yeats further likened these historical cycles to the 28 day lunar cycle, contending that physical existence grows steadily until it reaches a maximum at the full moon (phase fifteen), which Yeats described as perfect beauty. In the remaining half of the cycle, physical existence gradually falls away, until it disappears completely at the new moon, whereupon the cycle begins again. Applying this pattern both to historical eras and to individuals' lives, Yeats observed that a person completes the phases as he advances from birth to maturity and declines toward death. Yeats further elaborated the scheme by assigning particular phases to specific types of personality, so that although each person passes through phases two through 14 and 16 through 28 during a lifetime, one phase provides an overall characterization of the individual's entire life. Yeats published his intricate and not completely systematic theories of personality and history in A Vision (1925; substantially revised in 1937), and some of the symbolic patterns (gyres, moon phases) with which he organized these theories provide important background to many of the poems and plays he wrote during the second half of his career.

During these years of Yeats's esoterica Ireland was rife with internal strife. In 1921 bitter controversies erupted within the new Irish Free State over the partition of Northern Ireland and over the wording of a formal oath of allegiance to the British Crown. These issues led to an Irish civil war, which lasted from June 1922, to May 1923. In this conflict Yeats emphatically sided with the new Irish government. He accepted a six-year appointment to the senate of the Irish Free State in December 1922, a time when rebels were kidnapping government figures and burning their homes. In Dublin, where Yeats had assumed permanent residence in 1922 (after maintaining a home for 30 years in London), the government even posted armed sentries at his door. As senator, Yeats considered himself a representative of order amid the chaotic new nation's slow progress toward stability. He was now the "sixty-year-old smiling public man" of his poem "Among School Children," which he wrote after touring an Irish elementary school. But he was also a world renowned artist of impressive stature, having received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

Yeats's poems and plays produced during his senate term and beyond are, at once, local and general, personal and public, Irish and universal. At night the poet could "sweat with terror" (a phrase in his poem "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen") because of the surrounding violence, but he could also generalize those terrifying realities by linking them with events in the rest of the world and with all of history. The energy of the poems written in response to these disturbing times gave astonishing power to his collection The Tower (1928), which is often considered his best single book, though The Wild Swans at Coole (1917; enlarged edition, 1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower, The Winding Stair (1929); enlarged edition, 1933), and Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932), also possess considerable merit.

Another important element of poems in both these collections and other volumes is Yeats's keen awareness of old age. Even his romantic poems from the late 1890s often mention gray hair and weariness, though those poems were written while he was still a young man. But when Yeats was nearly 60, his health began to fail and he was faced with real, rather than imaginary, "bodily decrepitude" (a phrase from "After Long Silence") and nearness to death. Nevertheless, despite the author's often keen awareness of his physical decline, the last 15 years of his life were marked by extraordinary vitality and an appetite for life. He continued to write plays, including Sophocles' King Oedipus and Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus (translations performed with masks in 1926 and 1927) and The Words upon the Window Pane (1934), a full-length work about spiritualism and the 18th century Irish writer Jonathan Swift. In 1929, as an expression of gaiety after recovering from a serious illness, he also wrote a series of brash, vigorous poems narrated by a fictitious old peasant woman, Crazy Jane. His pose as "The Wild Old Wicked Man" (the title of one of his poems) and his poetical revitalization was reflected in the title of his 1938 volume New Poems.

As Yeats aged, he saw Ireland change in ways that angered him. The Anglo-Irish Protestant minority no longer controlled Irish society and culture, and with Lady Gregory's death in 1932 and the consequent abandonment of the Coole Park estate, Yeats felt detached from the brilliant achievements of the 18th Anglo-Irish tradition. According to Yeats's unblushingly antidemocratic view, the greatness of Anglo-Irishmen such as Jonathan Swift, philosopher George Berkeley, and statesman Edmund Burke, contrasted sharply with the undistinguished commonness of contemporary Irish society, which seemed preoccupied with the interests of merchants and peasants. He stated his unpopular opinions in late plays such as Purgatory (1938) and the essays of On the Boiler (1939).

But Yeats offset his frequently brazen manner with the personal conflicts expressed in his last poems. He faced death with a courage that was founded partly on his vague hope for reincarnation and partly on his admiration for the bold heroism that he perceived in Ireland in both ancient times and the 18th century. In proud moods he could speak in the stern voice of his famous epitaph, written within six months of his death, which concludes his poem "Under Ben Bulben": "Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!" But the bold sureness of those lines is complicated by the error-stricken cry that "distracts my thought" at the end of another late poem, "The Man and the Echo," and also by the poignantly frivolous lust for life in the last lines of "Politics," the poem that he wanted to close Last Poems: "But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms."

Throughout his last years, Yeats's creative imagination remained very much his own, isolated to a remarkable degree from the successive fashions of modern poetry despite his extensive contacts with other poets. Literary modernism held no inherent attraction for him except perhaps in its general association with youthful vigor. He admired a wide range of traditional English poetry and drama, and he simply was unconcerned that, during the last two decades of his life, his preference for using rhyme and strict stanza forms would set him apart from the vogue of modern poetry. Yeats's allegiance to poetic tradition did not extend, however, to what he considered an often obscure, overly learned use of literary and cultural traditions by T. S. Eliot and Pound. Yeats deplored the tremendous enthusiasm among younger poets for Eliot's The Waste Land, published in 1922. Disdaining Eliot's flat rhythms and cold, dry mood, Yeats wanted all art to be full of energy. He felt that the literary traditions furnishing Eliot with so many allusions and quotations should only be included in a poem if those traditions had so excited the individual poet's imagination that they could become poetic ingredients of the sort Yeats described in "The Tower": "Poet's imaginings / And memories of love, / Memories of the words of women, / All those things whereof / Man makes a superhuman / Mirror-resembling dream."

Yeats wanted poetry to engage the full complexity of life, but only insofar as the individual poet's imagination had direct access to experience or thought and only insofar as those materials were transformed by the energy of artistic articulation. He was, from first to last, a poet who tried to transform the local concerns of his own life by embodying them in the resonantly universal language of his poems. His brilliant rhetorical accomplishments, strengthened by his considerable powers of rhythm and poetic phrase, have earned wide praise from readers and, especially, from fellow poets, including W. H. Auden (who praised Yeats as the savior of English lyric poetry), Stephen Spender, Theodore Roethke, and Philip Larkin. It is not likely that time will diminish his achievements.

seribulan

ipes2 replied at 22-12-2018 08:54 AM
susah yg ni
deep
rasanya ada political sikit

Try this...

Among School Children
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS


I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;

A kind old nun in a white hood replies;

The children learn to cipher and to sing,

To study reading-books and history,

To cut and sew, be neat in everything

In the best modern way—the children's eyes

In momentary wonder stare upon

A sixty-year-old smiling public man.



II


I dream of a Ledaean body, bent

Above a sinking fire, a tale that she

Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event

That changed some childish day to tragedy—

Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent

Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,

Or else, to alter Plato's parable,

Into the yolk and white of the one shell.



III


And thinking of that fit of grief or rage

I look upon one child or t'other there

And wonder if she stood so at that age—

For even daughters of the swan can share

Something of every paddler's heritage—

And had that colour upon cheek or hair,

And thereupon my heart is driven wild:

She stands before me as a living child.



IV


Her present image floats into the mind—

Did Quattrocento finger fashion it

Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind

And took a mess of shadows for its meat?

And I though never of Ledaean kind

Had pretty plumage once—enough of that,

Better to smile on all that smile, and show

There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.



V


What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap

Honey of generation had betrayed,

And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape

As recollection or the drug decide,

Would think her son, did she but see that shape

With sixty or more winters on its head,

A compensation for the pang of his birth,

Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?



VI


Plato thought nature but a spume that plays

Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;

Solider Aristotle played the taws

Upon the bottom of a king of kings;

World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras

Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings

What a star sang and careless Muses heard:

Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.



VII


Both nuns and mothers worship images,

But those the candles light are not as those

That animate a mother's reveries,

But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

And yet they too break hearts—O Presences

That passion, piety or affection knows,

And that all heavenly glory symbolise—

O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;



VIII


Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?






[size=0.75]W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed © 1961 by Georgie Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of A. P. Watt, Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.
[size=0.75]Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989