Expecting The Impossible

What shall I do with this absurdity —
O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog’s tail?
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible —
No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,
Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s back
And had the livelong summer day to spend.

From The Tower by WB Yeats

(Read more about Yeats and his poetry collection The Tower on my daily Turnstone post) 

Yeats's Tower

In 1917 WB Yeats bought for 35 pounds an old castle with attached cottage on the banks of the river Cloon near Coole Park, County Galway, home to his dear friend Lady Gregory, and set about restoring it for his new bride Georgina Hyde-Lees, known as 'George'. He named his home 'Thoor Ballylee' ('Thoor' is Irish for 'Tower'); it became an idyllic summer retreat for Yeats and his family for twelve years. Here are some extracts from various letters he wrote enthusing about this new and inspiring environment:

... everything is so beautiful here that to go elsewhere is to leave beauty behind.

We are in our Tower and I am writing poetry as I always do here, and, as always happens, no matter how I begin, it becomes love poetry before I am finished with it.

... as you see I have no news, for nothing happens in this blessed place but a stray beggar or a heron.

It was here that Yeats wrote many of the rich and mature poems of his later years — including the 1928  volume he called, simply, The Tower. In Meditations In Time Of Civil War, one of the poems from this collection, he describes his home with these lines:

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,

A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,

An acre of stony ground,

Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,

Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,

The sound of the rain or sound

Of every wind that blows;

The stilted water-hen

Crossing stream again

Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;

A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,

A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,

A candle and written page.

The Tower contains twenty-one poems (I have my own Penguin paperback copy on the desk beside me as I write) including the well-known Sailing To Byzantium, A Prayer For My Son and Leda And The Swan. I'm particularly fond of the sequence A Man Young And Old, which begins like this:

First Love

Though nurtured like the sailing moon

In beauty's murderous brood,

She walked awhile and blushed awhile

And on my pathway stood

Until I thought her body bore

A heart of flesh and blood.

But since I laid a hand thereon

And found a heart of stone

I have attempted many things

And not a thing is done,

For every hand is lunatic

That travels on the moon.

She smiled and that transfigured me

And left me but a lout,

Maundering here, and maundering there,

Emptier of thought

Than the heavenly circuit of its stars

When the moon sails out.

After the Yeats family moved out in 1929, Ballylee fell into disuse once more; but it was restored again in 1965 as a Yeats museum. The adjoining cottage became a shop and tea room.

Below is the slate slab Yeats had carved when he carried out the initial restoration: 

    

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green slates,

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George;

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)

Tower Of Song

But you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I've gone / I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the tower of song LEONARD COHEN Tower Of Song

It's a strange but interesting fact that Rilke, Hölderlin and Yeats — three of our most brilliantly creative European poets, and three of my favourite writers — all spent part of their lives in hermit-like seclusion ensconced in 'towers', from where they produced some of their most intense and inspired work.

Here's a quatrain I wrote the other day about the ambivalent private/public life of the artist. You may also interpret it from a blogger's perspective, if you wish. I suppose 'This public refuge' could be any soul-baring, personal yet published work (or work available to others apart from the writer) — and that includes a blog. I wrote it in French because I'm drenched in French at the moment (having spoken it a lot, albeit imperfectly, during my recent week in Switzerland). Also Rilke wrote most of his Castle Muzot poems in French.

Tour de Chanson

Ce refuge public

Demi-ouvert, demi-secret

S'offre au monde

Comme un Muzot de mots

(This public refuge

Half-open, half-secret

Offers itself to the world

Like a Muzot of words)

Celtic Twilight

It's clear that in this poem by Yeats, one of my favourite poets, he's been influenced by old, romantic Celtic poems such as the one I highlighted here in my last post. (Yeats played a leading role in the Irish Literary Revival, also known as the 'Celtic Twilight', in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.) The 'golden apples' of the last line also recalls my recent post about the quinces/golden apples of the Garden of the Hesperides, the mythical Greek paradise. 

The Song Of The Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

WB YEATS

Dublin's Fair City: Drugs, Tarts, Rebels, Scholars

What's in a name? Well, quite a lot, actually ...

The General Post Office, Dublin - one of the most famous and iconic buildings in Ireland. This was the rebels' HQ during the Easter Rising of 1916. You can still see the bullet marks made by British troops on the columns outside. MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse / Now and in time to be, / Wherever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born. WB YEATS Easter 1916

Near the junction of North Earl Street and O'Connell Street you'll find a jauntily aloof James Joyce, popularly known - and forgive the vernacular - as 'The Prick with the Stick'.

(There are many literary and political statues in Dublin. The monument to Anna Livia - a personification of the river Liffey - is known as 'The Floozie in the Jacuzzi'. The buxom Molly Malone, who wheels her wheelbarrow at the end of Grafton Street, is variously nicknamed 'The Tart with the Cart', 'The Dolly with the Trolley', 'The Trollop with the Scallop', 'The Dish with the Fish' and 'The Flirt with the Skirt'.  And Oscar Wilde, who sits on a large granite boulder in Merrion Square, has of course become 'The Queer with the Leer' or 'The Fag on the Crag'.)

I think it's good these literary figures have been brought down to earth and humanised in this way. And a very Irish thing, I venture. Here in England we tend to worship our artistic gods and goddesses, putting them on pedestals, talking about them in hushed tones, freezing with awe and admiration whenever they enter the room. But in Ireland it would be expected, and indeed entirely natural, to share the craic with Seamus Heaney or Paul Muldoon or Roddy Doyle or Patrick McCabe if we found ourselves  rubbing shoulders with them at the bar.  

Three views of Trinity College, Dublin.

A Henry Moore sculpture on Front Square, Trinity College, Dublin.

The Ha'penny Bridge over the river Liffey. By now you won't be surprised to learn that a nearby statue of two women gossiping on a bench with their shopping is known as 'The Hags with the Bags'.

And, incidentally, the new, needle-like 'Spire of Dublin' - erected at the hub of the city in 2003 - is not generally called by its official name, 'The Monument of Light'. No, it's known colloquially as 'The Spike', 'The Nail in the Pale', 'The Pin in the Bin', 'The Rod to God', 'The Stiletto in the Ghetto', 'The Stiffy at the Liffey', 'The Erection in the Intersection' and 'The Binge Syringe'. But I didn't need to tell you that, did I?

(By the way, we saw drug dealing going on quite openly in shop doorways in O'Connell Street.)

Drumcliffe: Passing By

St Columba's church, Drumcliffe, lies a few miles north of Sligo, in the shadow of Ben Bulben mountain, and next to a busy main road. WB Yeats's grandfather, John Yeats, was Rector here in the early years of the nineteenth century.

Two carved swans are fixed to the west door of the church. The swan was an imortant symbol for Yeats, signifying the permanence of art and the notion of the ideal - contrasted with the impermanence and the imperfection of life. In his poem The Wild Swans At Coole Yeats reflects upon a constant preoccupation of both writer and artist - the potential, indeed inevitable death of the creative imagination: 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 that they have flown away?

In the churchyard you will find this fine old Celtic cross.



Yeats was buried at Drumcliffe, and here is his tombstone, inscribed with that famously enigmatic epitaph: Cast a cold Eye / On Life, on Death. / Horseman, pass by.

What does Yeats have to say to me, then, regarding what lies beyond life and death? I find that he stoically bids me cast a cold eye on both. I do not think he is saying 'Don't engage with life' but rather 'don't look for answers.' I think he is saying 'If you are looking for answers as to what lies beyond life and death, I can't help you. You must look somewhere else. Horseman, pass by.' DERICK BINGHAM The Eye Of The Heart 

In the Yeats Tavern, Drumcliffe, we found a series of affectionately tongue-in-cheek prints about WBY, which amused us at the time. 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 dropping slow ... WB YEATS The Lake Isle Of Innisfree

Behind the Yeats Lodge B&B, a mist-capped and mystical Ben Bulben crouches in the background, while two satellite dishes and other modern paraphernalia dominate the foreground.

Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.

WB YEATS Under Ben Bulben

Sligo And Yeats Country

It was somewhere near Matt Molloy's Bar in Westport that I encountered 'Poppy' ...

... and later Seamus Heaney - well his photo - in Hargadon's Bar and Restaurant, Sligo Town ...

Hargadon's has a fine, authentically restored interior ...

After all these heady sensual and intellectual delights, it was a relief to stroll round the wonderfully ordinary, untouristy town of Sligo. Most visitors fail to stop at Sligo in their rush from Galway to Donegal. Which is a pity, as there's much to see. Such as the Yeats Memorial Building, home of the Yeats Society. We spent a very interesting couple of hours in this delightfully old-fashioned place. Upstairs were a few paintings by Yeats's incredibly talented brother, Jack. But most of the time we just walked about, admiring the old bridge ...

... the river Garavogue ...

... the Yeats statue near the Ulster Bank ...

... and the river Garavogue again ...

Not sure about the Glasshouse Hotel, though this is an award winning design ...

Many of Yeats's poems were inspired by features in the Sligo landscape - such as the iconic mountain of Ben Bulben just north of town, and Lough Gill to the south with its Isle of Innisfree ...

Half Revealing, Half Concealing

The sonorous, melancholy style of the 18th century poet Thomas Gray has brought to mind another poet, but a much greater one; one whose life spanned the subsequent century of the Victorian era: Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Can I make a plea for Tennyson? He's little read nowadays, I know. He's come to represent the royalty-loving, reactionary poet of literary convention, penning as Poet Laureate (he succeeded Wordworth to this post in 1850 and kept it till his death in 1892) swathes of verse on popular classical and mythological themes. Yet Tennyson deserves to be considered a little more deeply.

He was born quite near here in Somersby, Lincolnshire - a rector's son and the 4th of 12 children. His life was shattered when a close friend and fellow poet, Arthur Henry Hallam, died suddenly of a brain haemorrage in 1833. Also that same year his second volume of published verse had been critically savaged. He didn't write again for 10 years. But all this resulted in his greatest poem, the long and moving elegy In Memoriam A. H. H., which contains these wonderful 3 stanzas from Section V:

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

Tennyson is talking here about the inadequacy of words. This is a very modern preoccupation. As is Tennyson's obsession with dreams and trance-like states, found in poem after poem. On the surface not very Victorian at all - perhaps a precursor of all that came afterwards in Freud and Jung, Woolf and Lawrence - and just about everything in serious 20th century literature. The Unconscious was there all the time. It just needed to be discovered. Or rediscovered.

Many years ago, in my school days, there were 2 English teachers who held diametrically opposed views about Tennyson. The one loved him, and forced us to learn off by heart The Lotus-Eaters and Ulysses - which I still think are 2 of his finest poems. The other found in him all music and no meaning, all sound and no content. I disagree with this. As I've hinted above, if you read between the lines Tennyson's foot was tentatively and unconsciously wedging open the door into the 20th century (the word 'tentative' is not one you'd normally associate with Victorian poets!)

His religious doubts were also strikingly modern - he tended towards a kind of Pantheism - and he wrote that There lives more faith in honest doubt,/ Believe me, than in half the creeds (In Memoriam).

Yes, Tennyson (in common with most poets of any era) was occasionally pompous and sentimental, that's undoubtedly true. But we must be careful not to judge him out of context, from the standpoint of the cultural mores of our own vastly different times.

These are a few lines from the stirring Ulysses. This is the older Ulysses, made weak by time and fate, but still strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. I identify with the following lines completely:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone...

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Do these sentiments remind anybody of the older Yeats, the Yeats who wrote An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick (Sailing To Byzantium) but who also wrote Why should not old men be mad? (Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?) But I am not content (Are You Content?) and A foolish, passionate man (A Prayer For Old Age)?

I'll end with a quotation from the druggy, dreamy, hypnotic The Lotus-Eaters:

There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.
Here are cool mosses deep,
And thro' the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,
And from the craggy edge the poppy hangs in sleep.

Ambushed By Beauty

My mother-in-law was staying with us all last week and on Saturday we drove her back to her home in the Lake District. We followed the A1 up to Scotch Corner, turned west along the A66 as far as Brough, then took the A685 to Tebay and Kendal. From Scotch Corner onwards this is a fine route with great views of the Pennines. We picnicked in the Howgills on open grassland close to the village of Newbiggin-on-Lune.

After arriving mid-afternoon at her little rented cottage in Kendal, I perused her bookshelves and suddenly recalled that it was here I'd seen the phrase "ambushed by beauty" which, as some bloggers know, I've been trying to trace. I soon found the poetic source - in Moya Cannon's book of poems The Parchment Boat (1997) published in Ireland by The Gallery Press of County Meath.

My mother-in-law had met the author, heard her read, and bought a signed copy of her book at the Sligo Yeats Festival in 2003. I flipped the pages and soon came to the poem Mountain. As you can see, I'd misremembered slightly:

Mountain

Beauty can ambush us, even through a car window.

This green galleon sails eternally through Sligo,

dragging our hearts in its wake.

One singer was found by hunters on these green flanks

and another chose them as a deep cradle for his bones

but neither the Fianna's chroniclers nor Yeats

did more than pay their respects

to what was already here -

a mountain

which had already

shaken off glaciers,

carried a human cargo,

known grace in stone.

It might have been the same February light

on these tender slopes

which drew the first people from the coast

to set their fires on this plateau,

to build on this great limestone boat

whose boards are made of fishbones,

whose water is green time.

Moya had explained during her reading that she'd suddenly had a dramatic view from her car of Ben Bulben, the flat-topped limestone and shale mountain that overlooks Sligo town on Ireland's west coast, and this unforeseen satori moment had been the seed from which the poem grew.

The ghost of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) haunts this whole area. One of his poems is actually titled Under Ben Bulben; and Yeats himself lies buried in Drumcliff Churchyard near the mountain's foot. His tombstone famously reads: Cast a cold Eye/On Life, on Death/Horseman pass by!

There's a big and fascinating theme waiting to be explored on 'sacred' mountains like Ben Bulben, mountains with literary, mythological and spiritual associations - such as Mt Rainier in Washington State's Cascade Range, Canigou in the French Pyrenees and Cadair Idris in Snowdonia, North Wales. I've touched briefly on this theme once before.

The Fianna were warrior bands in Irish mythology found in the stories of the Fenian Cycle.

Peace Comes Dropping Slow

I hadn't realized it till just now, but yesterday was National Poetry Day. To mark this here's the poem that first turned me on, as a teenager, to poetry and the outdoors. I know it's an anthology piece and full of adolescent yearning. But I still love it and always will.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

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
dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the
cricket sings;
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.

W. B. YEATS

There's a hypnotic beauty, a still magic to this poem that I find indescribably moving.