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04/19/2012 10:26:33 PM · #1 |
Sailing to Byzantium: Make a photograph inspired by William Butler Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium".
Advanced Editing.
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Sailing To Byzantium
William Butler Yeats
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
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;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
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
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
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04/19/2012 10:28:16 PM · #2 |
| Poetic challenge. Inspirational and motivational. +100 |
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04/19/2012 10:34:03 PM · #3 |
I love the first line. I'm a huge Cormac McCarthy fan, and just as big of a Coen Bros. fan.
My favorite lines in the history of fiction are “He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
But, back to your suggestion; I like it. I suggested a challenge for the Dylan song "A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall", it kind of reminds me of this.
Message edited by author 2012-04-19 22:34:21. |
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04/19/2012 10:49:27 PM · #4 |
Wow, I haven't read that one since I was sailing on the mackerel-crowded seas, it reads a bit differently now that I am more in the tattered coat upon a stick crowd. Thanks for the reminder to rage against the dying of the light, but perhaps that is another challenge.
I would love a poetic challenge theme every few months |
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04/19/2012 11:06:22 PM · #5 |
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04/19/2012 11:13:41 PM · #6 |
| you sure you don't want a clark coolidge? |
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04/19/2012 11:19:49 PM · #7 |
Originally posted by skewsme:
you sure you don't want a clark coolidge? |
I took this as more of a Henry David Thoreau.
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." |
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04/19/2012 11:54:03 PM · #8 |
"into the artifice of eternity"
we are indeed
a-gathering,
gyrefully
and unbeknownst.
(footnotes to Yeats by moki) |
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04/20/2012 12:42:18 AM · #9 |
| No arguments here. Bring it on it would be fun to participate and watch. |
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04/20/2012 03:09:12 AM · #10 |
| Could be very inspirational. I'd be in. +1 |
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04/20/2012 07:35:40 AM · #11 |
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04/20/2012 07:39:29 AM · #12 |
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04/20/2012 09:54:43 AM · #13 |
| I'll take any poem you got. Bring it on! |
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04/20/2012 10:07:51 AM · #14 |
Originally posted by posthumous:
I'll take any poem you got. Bring it on! |
'And I'm like
Baby, baby, baby oooh
Like baby, baby, baby nooo
Like baby, baby, baby oooh
(Yeah Yeah Yeah, Yeah Yeah Yeah)'
'Baby' by Justin Bieber. (part of the Baby series- a postmodern deconstruction of the romantic sonnet - 2010) |
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04/20/2012 10:14:39 AM · #15 |
| I read 'Sailing to Byzantium' not so much as a physical journey, but mostly as one through time both to the past, the heyday of Byzantium, and to the future, when the poet is dead and his spirit is free of his body. |
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04/20/2012 03:35:46 PM · #16 |
| Amen, Spork. WBY had a very specific (and not terribly accurate) vision of a glorious Byzantium of yore. |
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04/20/2012 08:15:52 PM · #17 |
Originally posted by rooum:
Originally posted by posthumous:
I'll take any poem you got. Bring it on! |
'And I'm like
Baby, baby, baby oooh
Like baby, baby, baby nooo
Like baby, baby, baby oooh
(Yeah Yeah Yeah, Yeah Yeah Yeah)'
'Baby' by Justin Bieber. (part of the Baby series- a postmodern deconstruction of the romantic sonnet - 2010) |
Who knew... Justin Bieber a Poet.
Personally, I would much rather have the pleasure of reading some of the writings by people in this venue such as  Posthumous or Bear_Music ... at least they have talent.
Ray |
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04/20/2012 09:17:38 PM · #18 |
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04/20/2012 09:30:22 PM · #19 |
Originally posted by RayEthier:
Originally posted by rooum:
Originally posted by posthumous:
I'll take any poem you got. Bring it on! |
'And I'm like
Baby, baby, baby oooh
Like baby, baby, baby nooo
Like baby, baby, baby oooh
(Yeah Yeah Yeah, Yeah Yeah Yeah)'
'Baby' by Justin Bieber. (part of the Baby series- a postmodern deconstruction of the romantic sonnet - 2010) |
Who knew... Justin Bieber a Poet.
Personally, I would much rather have the pleasure of reading some of the writings by people in this venue such as Posthumous or Bear_Music ... at least they have talent.
Ray |
I think Bieber is perhaps, like may a tortured poet, quite misunderstood.
But anyway, i'm facetiously throwing this thread offtrack and i don't want to do that as it's a great idea and thread.
I like what Yeats i've read although that isn't a huge amount. I've read a lot about him though, mainly through my interest in the Golden Dawn. Sailing to Byzantium is, indeed, a wonderful poem and i'll definitely attempt to illustrate it. Badly i guess. As Arthur Machen, one of Yeat's Golden Dawn, and literary, contemporaries, said, 'I dream in fire but work in clay.' |
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04/20/2012 10:00:58 PM · #20 |
Another great Yeats poem, also from his later years:
Among School Children
I
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way - the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
II
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire. a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy -
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age -
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage -
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.
IV
Her present image floats into the mind -
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once - enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts - O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise -
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;
VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
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