mike,
I'm wondering what you think of the contrast between Yeat's position in
"Among School Children", where he seems to accept in some way mortality and
aging, the transient joy of mother in the babe that will grow old, the
apparent renouncing of the platonic ideal realm, with the position taken in
"Sailing to Byzantium" where he wrote:
"Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling."
This really struck me, especially since the images given earlier in this
poem clearly resemble those of "Among School Children" as in:
"An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence."
There is an interesting annotation to "Among School Children" from a
collection of English literature i got at a garage sale ($0.50/volume) that
adds to this issue of mortal v. timeless pleasures:
Begin quote
"yeats has explained in a note that the phrase 'honey of generation' was
taken from Porphyry's essay on "The Cave of the Nymphs" but he adds, " [I]
find no warrant in Porphyry for consideriing it the 'drug' that destroys the
'recollection of prenatal freedom' . . ." In his essay on "Shelley's
Poetry" (Essays by W.B. Yeats, especially p. 102) Yeats explains that for
Porphyry, as for other of the ancients, "honey was the symbol . . for
'pleasure arising from generation,' the pleasure which had betrayed the
infant on her lap from the pre-natal world of non-existence to the world of
life."
End quote
Paul H. Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Cole <mcole@weber.ucsd.edu>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Sunday, August 13, 2000 4:28 PM
Subject: yeats again
>
> thanks very much Jay and Randi. your readings each helped me different
> ways.
>
> Jay got me thinking about myself in relation to aging and interacting
> with people. Moving from middle to old age is a process no less confusing
> than entering adolescence or going to school for the first time. Kundera
> put it beautifully:
>
> we leave chilhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without
> knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age,
> we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent
> children of their old age. In that sense, human's world is a planet
> of inexperience.
>
> Its wierd being treated as old. But more about that and Randi's reading
> of Among Children later..... guests at the door (better than this
> morning when it was, literally, a coyote at the door!)
> mike
>
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