William Butler Yeats - Articles - Zimbio

The Snow Moon

Thu, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

posted by Pandan
One of the old names for this full moon is the Snow Moon. Look at how clear and cold the night sky is. Feel the winter really coming on now. It has not snowed yet, but you can feel that it may soon. It is a perfect time to reflect with an evening walk and later a relaxing time in front of the fire.

I feel very inclined right now just to relax with a good book. I am reading some poetry by Yeats, and he is one whose verse can stir the soul and seem very fitting for this time of year.

THESE ARE THE CLOUDS
by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)
THESE are the clouds about the fallen sun,
The majesty that shuts his burning eye:
The weak lay hand on what the strong has done,
Till that be tumbled that was lifted high
And discord follow upon unison,
And all things at one common level lie.
And therefore, friend, if your great race were run
And these things came, so much the more thereby
Have you made greatness your companion,
Although it be for children that you sigh:
These are the clouds about the fallen sun,
The majesty that shuts his burning eye.

HE REMEMBERS FORGOTTEN BEAUTY
by: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
WHEN my arms wrap you round I press
My heart upon the loveliness
That has long faded from the world;
The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled
In shadowy pools, when armies fled;
The love-tales wrought with silken thread
By dreaming ladies upon cloth
That has made fat the murderous moth;
The roses that of old time were
Woven by ladies in their hair,
The dew-cold lilies ladies bore
Through many a sacred corridor
Where such grey clouds of incense rose
That only God's eyes did not close:
For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,
A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew,
But flame on flame, and deep on deep,
Throne over throne where in half sleep,
Their swords upon their iron knees,
Brood her high lonely mysteries.

THE CAT AND THE MOON
by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)
THE cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

Great poetry has power to ignite our imagination, our heart, our soul. A fitting companion to an evening and a fire. Poetry lingers on the palate, the words as potent as red wine.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Was Yeats Right?

Mon, 16 Sep 2008 15:00:11 GMT

posted by acgboston

William Butler Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming, contains these famous chilling lines:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

It ends with the question:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

As I sit and reflect on the events of the weekend and the apparent unwinding of our financial markets, Yeats’ vision of a modern world that has lost its center seems a rather prescient view. Market greed and the “passionate intensity” in which it was applied surely trumped the “lack of conviction” by those who should have controlled the risk: management, internal risk professionals, financial institution boards, the rating agencies, the myriad regulators. Any tepid reservations were outshouted by the desire for higher leverage in the name of higher returns.

From our perch today as market spectators we can only hope that there is sufficient courage to be mustered to meet this unprecedented challenge. Candidates for “rough beast” abound… credit default swap systemic failure, panic in the repo markets, a credit ice age. Can we survive what we have wrought?

Let’s hope we can save us from ourselves and that this time, this time, we do learn a lesson.

An End to Remorse

Sun, 11 Aug 2008 13:06:00 GMT

posted by PeaceCorso
William Butler Yeats was a mystical poet. His words below surprised me because I’d only seen the last three lines before. It was on a Mary Engelbreit page-a-day calendar. Typical affirmative fodder. But the verse is so much more powerful with its first two lines intact.

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

According to the OED, a wordsmith’s favorite book, remorse means a feeling of deep regret or repentance. It comes from Latin roots meaning biting, as in painful. The key to casting out remorse, and following Poet Yeats’ wise instructions, is revealed in its etymology.

Think of the practice of biting into, say, a brilliant, orange carrot. A happy thing at lunchtime for you; perhaps not so happy for the carrot—I couldn’t say.

Same with remorse. What we do when we indulge in remorse is bite off a memory of an event, or behavior, or choice, or word, or deed that we now wish we’d done differently. Check out the tiny syllable at the beginning of the word: re-. It means again. So not only do we chew on the memory, but we chow down on it, biting again and again and again.

To cast out remorse, beloved, quit biting into it! And letting it bite into you!

As yourself some questions about the experience:

Did I do the best I could with what I knew at the moment?
Could I have done better? Then?
What can I learn from this experience for the future?

Then CAST OUT REMORSE. Let it go. Relax, and let the sweetness of life flow into you.

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has wishes that things had gone differently. So?

So, cast out remorse, let sweetness arise, then laugh, sing and let the blessings of everything make you blest.FindBlogs.com Directory of Spirituality Blogs

“The Cap and Bells” - William Butler Yeats

Sun, 12 May 2008 14:25:17 GMT

posted by briel

Posted by: Cary Briel, Skaneateles Design

“The Cap and Bells” - William Butler Yeats

The jester walked in the garden:
The garden had fallen still;
He bade his soul rise upward
And stand on her window-sill.

It rose in a straight blue garment,
When owls began to call:
It had grown wise-tongued by thinking
Of a quiet and light footfall;

But the young queen would not listen;
She rose in her pale night-gown;
She drew in the heavy casement
And pushed the latches down.

He bade his heart go to her,
When the owls called out no more;
In a red and quivering garment
It sang to her through the door.

It had grown sweet-tongued by dreaming
Of a flutter of flower-like hair;
But she took up her fan from the table
And waved it off on the air.

‘I have cap and bells,’ he pondered,
‘I will send them to her and die’;
And when the morning whitened
He left them where she went by.

She laid them upon her bosom,
Under a cloud of her hair,
And her red lips sang them a love-song
Till stars grew out of the air.

She opened her door and her window,
And the heart and the soul came through,
To her right hand came the red one,
To her left hand came the blue.

They set up a noise like crickets,
A chattering wise and sweet,
And her hair was a folded flower
And the quiet of love in her feet.

“The Second Coming” - William Butler Yeats

Thu, 2 May 2008 18:15:57 GMT

posted by briel

Posted by: Cary Briel, Skaneateles Design

“The Second Coming” - William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?