Like much of Yeats, this little poem slips into the memory fairly effortlessly, and the play on the word ‘form’, used here as the correct precise term for a hare’s nest as well in the general sense, is nice. But I do have problems with it, in that the image of the hare’s form, though a charming one, doesn’t really work for me. Clearly it is meant to convey the idea that one particular woman (presumably Maud Gonne) had made such an impression on the poet’s mind that it could never fade or she be replaced. But hares are light, and grass is springy stuff and grows quickly. How long does the mark a hare leaves in grass actually last? I give it a week or two at best – not much of a tribute to poor Maud.

Maybe I am wrong to worry about this sort of thing, yet it seems to me that a poem should not only be neat and sound good, but should stand up to practical scrutiny at every level. Of course, I may be wrong and hares, those creatures of magic and fable, may make more of a lasting impression on the landscape than I imagine. Any leporine experts out there?

Memory

One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

W.B.Yeats

This is another one from the more populist end of W.B.Yeats’s wide-ranging oeuvre, being akin to other such early pieces as ‘The Ballad of Father Gilligan’ and ‘The Host of the Air’ with their cast of priests and angels and fairy pipers, poems infused with a religiose sentimentality that certainly forms no part of my own agnostic sensibility. And yet I like it, even while remaining doubtful of its assertions. Are the truly good always the merry? I would have thought they were more likely to exist in a state of permanent frazzlement, as part of that cadre Keats defines as ‘those to whom the miseries of the world/Are misery, and will not let them rest’. And yet it may be that they do carry within them some fount of secret joy that only awaits its time to find expression, and that such a time, as in this poem, may best be provided by music.

Yeats comments: ‘A couple of miles from Innisfree, no four or five miles from Innisfree, there’s a great rock called Dooney Rock where I had often picnicked when a child. And when in my 24th year I made up a poem about a merry fiddler I called him ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ in commemoration of that rock and of all those picnics. The places mentioned in the poem are all places near Sligo.’

The Fiddler Of Dooney

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney.
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Mocharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle,
And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.

W.B.Yeats

This poem, which appeared in the 1910 collection ‘The Green Helmet’, was written in memory of Maud Gonne, for whom Yeats had a lifelong passion, after she had finally rejected the poet’s fourth proposal of marriage in favour of another man, John MacBride. It may be viewed as a companion piece to ‘The Folly Of Being Comforted’ (see week 49). Here, though, there is more of a bitterness, an acknowledgment of the destructive power that beauty can wield, encapsulated in the last line’s allusion to Helen of Troy.

Like many of Yeats’s poems, it seems to me a triumph of style over substance. I think it is possible to look askance at the way Yeats constantly bigs up his friends, and to question his contempt for the ‘little streets’ of democracy, but at the same time fully grant him the power of his supple, incisive language. I think of Auden’s line in his fine elegy for Yeats where he comments how Time: ‘Pardons him for writing well’. Clearly he thought Yeats needed to be pardoned, and you can see what he meant: Yeats adulated the patrician class, romanticised the peasant class, and had little time for the mass of humanity between; also he had a dubious fascination with the occult. Yet it is clear that Time does, and will continue to, pardon Yeats for writing well.

No Second Troy

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

W.B.Yeats

I celebrated my eightieth birthday this week, and yesterday ran a carefully measured road mile in 8 minutes 37 seconds, which in age-adjusted terms is not that bad but in absolute terms is pathetic. I am an absolutist.

So this week’s choice was an easy one. It’s not entirely apposite. I never had, nor am ever likely to have, a chair nearest to the fire – I see myself more as a presence in the outer dark, quietly listening – but the general sentiment will do for me.

The Lamentation Of The Old Pensioner

Although I shelter from the rain
Under a broken tree,
My chair was nearest to the fire
In every company
That talked of love or politics,
Ere Time transfigured me.

Though lads are making pikes again
For some conspiracy,
And crazy rascals rage their fill
At human tyranny,
My contemplations are of Time
That has transfigured me.

There’s not a woman turns her face
Upon a broken tree,
And yet the beauties that I loved
Are in my memory;
I spit into the face of Time
That has transfigured me.

W.B.Yeats

This is one of W.B.Yeats’s lighter pieces. I think it has a characteristic charm, though I confess I have never looked at it in quite the same way since reading Anne Gregory’s own recollections of the poem, which according to your point of view are either very funny or rather sad. Evidently the young Anne, the granddaughter of Yeats’s friend Lady Gregory, was summoned before the great man by her grandma with the words ‘Mr Yeats has written a poem for you and is going to recite it to you’. ‘I was petrified. I had no idea he was going to write a poem for me. I was in agony. I was nearly in tears for fear of doing something silly.’ She dutifully listened as Yeats delivered the poem in his weird singsong way, then stuttered ‘Wonderful, thank you so much, I must go and wash my hair’ and made her escape. She added afterwards that she had never liked the colour of her hair anyway.

I feel for you, William. I remember one of my children coming home complaining that they had had to read in class one of my own poems from a school anthology and it was like, you know, totally embarrassing…

For Anne Gregory

‘Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’

‘But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.’

‘I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’

W.B.Yeats

This may seem a strange little poem, though memorable by virtue of being suffused with the inimitable Yeats music. What’s all this about making a hole in the collar-bone of a hare? I believe that here Yeats is using, or adapting, a folktale motif: there are old Highland stories in which finding a stone with a hole in it and looking through it grants the finder the ability to pierce any disguise and see things as they truly are. And I think the poem is inspired by Yeats’s longing for an older, different order of things, for the Ireland of legend or, as he puts in his preface to Lady Gregory’s ‘Cuchulain of Muirthemne’, for ‘that Cruachan of the enchantments that lay behind those long, blue, ragged hills’.

The Collar-bone of a Hare

Would I could cast a sail on the water
Where many a king has gone
And many a king’s daughter,
And alight at the comely trees and the lawn,
The playing upon pipes and the dancing,
And learn that the best thing is
To change my loves while dancing
And pay but a kiss for a kiss.
I would find by the edge of that water

The collar-bone of a hare
Worn thin by the lapping of water,
And pierce it through with a gimlet and stare
At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,
And laugh over the untroubled water
At all who marry in churches,
Through the white thin bone of a hare.

W.B.Yeats

I confess to having a soft spot for this week’s cheerfully disreputable piece. OK, I’m not sure that the Irish Catholic Church would have approved of John Kinsella’s somewhat cavalier attitude towards familial ties, and I suppose I shouldn’t either, but it’s good fun, and it does show Yeats’s unusual range as a poet – it’s a long way from this sort of thing to poems like ‘Easter 1916’.

John Kinsella’s Lament For Mrs Mary Moore

A bloody and a sudden end,
Gunshot or a noose,
For Death who takes what man would keep,
Leaves what man would lose.
He might have had my sister,
My cousins by the score,
But nothing satisfied the fool
But my dear Mary Moore,
None other knows what pleasures man
At table or in bed.
What shall I do for pretty girls
Now my old bawd is dead?

Though stiff to strike a bargain,
Like an old Jew man,
Her bargain struck we laughed and talked
And emptied many a can;
And O! but she had stories,
Though not for the priest’s ear,
To keep the soul of man alive,
Banish age and care,
And being old she put a skin
On everything she said.
What shall I do for pretty girls
Now my old bawd is dead?

The priests have got a book that says
But for Adam’s sin
Eden’s Garden would be there
And I there within.
No expectation fails there,
No pleasing habit ends,
No man grows old, no girl grows cold
But friends walk by friends.
Who quarrels over halfpennies
That plucks the trees for bread?
What shall I do for pretty girls
Now my old bawd is dead? 

W.B.Yeats

This is one of the first poems I ever possessed, or was possessed by, copying it out longhand from some school anthology into my private poetry notebook. I would have been thirteen. Now, over sixty years on, I find its magic not much diminished, just tinged with a wistfulness for that first unrepeatable awakening to poetry, that is bound up for me with the memory of long ago sunsets and running barefoot on summer grass in the wild exuberance of youth.

The Song Of 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 aflame,
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 lads 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.

W.B.Yeats

The Yeatsian rhetoric and Yeatsian rhythms are very seductive, so seductive that it may be some time before one begins to look askance at what is actually being said. This poem is a case in point, expressing the poet’s nostalgia for an unchanging, hierarchical society that comprises an aristocratic elite, a sturdy but deferential peasantry, and a few well-rewarded poets between. ‘His fathers served their fathers before Christ was crucified’. Not, you note, the other way round, and one may reflect that it is much easier to be in favour of an unchanging social order when others are doing the serving and you’re the one being served. And yet, whatever my egalitarian reservations, I find the poem compellingly memorable.

The Curse Of Cromwell

You ask what I have found, and far and wide I go:
Nothing but Cromwell’s house and Cromwell’s murderous crew,
The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay,
And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen, where are they?
And there is an old beggar wandering in his pride –
His fathers served their fathers before Christ was crucified.
O what of that, O what of that,
What is there left to say?

All neighbourly content and easy talk are gone,
But there’s no good complaining, for money’s rant is on.
He that’s mounting up must on his neighbour mount,
And we and all the Muses are things of no account.
They have schooling of their own, but I pass their schooling by,
What can they know that we know that know the time to die?
O what of that, O what of that,
What is there left to say?

But there’s another knowledge that my heart destroys,
As the fox in the old fable destroyed the Spartan boy’s
Because it proves that things both can and cannot be;
That the swordsmen and the ladies can still keep company,
Can pay the poet for a verse and hear the fiddle sound,
That I am still their servant though all are underground.
O what of that, O what of that,
What is there left to say?

I came on a great house in the middle of the night,
Its open lighted doorway and its windows all alight,
And all my friends were there and made me welcome too;
But I woke in an old ruin that the winds howled through;
And when I pay attention I must out and walk
Among the dogs and horses that understand my talk.
O what of that, O what of that,
What is there left to say?

W.B.Yeats

As a young man I was a bit disconcerted on meeting Robert Graves to discover that he had no regard at all for W.B.Yeats, either as man or poet. Given my admirations at the time, it was a bit like getting to heaven and finding that Michael couldn’t stand Gabriel. I can see now that Yeats might be a poet from whom one withholds some degree of trust, but I find it impossible to withhold admiration, especially for what seem to be truly heartfelt lyrics like the following…

The Folly Of Being Comforted

One that is ever kind said yesterday:
‘Your well-belovèd’s hair has threads of grey,
And little shadows come about her eyes;
Time can but make it easier to be wise
Though now it seems impossible, and so
All that you need is patience.’
Heart cries, ‘No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild Summer was in her gaze.’

O heart! O heart! if she’d but turn her head,
You’d know the folly of being comforted.

W.B.Yeats