Randy and Paul-- Your messages taken together with a reading of Sailing to
Byzantium up against "Among School Children" and "Leda and the Swan" and
out previous discussion has my head spinning. We have an old paperback copy
of selected poems, and reading in this section of the book, selections
from *The Tower* indicates so many cross-cutting and complementary-or-
competing images.
Randy's reading of Among Schoolchildren really helped me a lot with the
issue of time, the blending of past/present/future from the perspective
of a 60 year old public man. I did not know about the nobel prize. I
only knew a little of Yeat's liasons. I did not know the reference to
Plato's yolk/egg and how it fit with Leda's progeny. The interpretation
of the last paragraph seems, indeed, to fall into place, and the idea
of the different phases of the oak as part of the dance was fascinating
to me.
Yeats seems transfixed by the possibiliity of monuments of unageing
intellect. He knows better, but years to be one. In Among Schoolchildren
he tries to console himself, but here he flees to the realm of the ideal.
I don't know enough to know how platonic he is being, Paul. The ideals he
picks are not saints on alters as eternal/ideal icons as in the prior
poem (AS), but they are not NATURAL things he wants to model his bodily
form on, but cultural ideals, hammered out of manufactured metal.
I get a strong feeling from this small sample, that a broader reading of
Yeats would provide a lot of interesting ideas about development. I was
not so sure reading just AS (and not understanding the last stanza!) but
reading more of the poems and seeing the way that aging is dealt with from
some many angles makes me think that a week or two spent looking at just
the developmental aspects of yeat's ideas, the way he thinks about the
material and the ideal, and about time, would be well spent. (Its probably
all been done, ever since! In which case, where so I can read it).
Units of analysis are twirling around too. but they will have to twirl
non-computer mediatedly for now.
I love getting back into poetry this way.
Has anyone got some Wallace Stevens to offer?
Rilke anyone?
mike
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