Yeats thread/Poetry thread

[Anonymous No.21357689]

I’m not particularly found of Yeats, but I recognize that some of his poems are perfect masterpieces (Leda and the Swan, for example).

I was reading Byzantium again, and was impressed by some of the verses, verses that I count among the greatest ever written. I will greentext my favorites. The last verse of the poem is one of the most beautiful I know. It even makes me sad I can’t do the same thing with adjectives in my native Portuguese.

Here’s Byzantium:

The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
>A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
>All that man is,
>All mere complexities,
>The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
>A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
>Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
>That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea

[Anonymous No.21357708]

>>21357689
yeats is a great poet. haven't actually carefully read sailing to byzantium all the way through yet desu so i will refrain from commenting on it for now, may come back to discuss other poems of his later. Agree about leda and the swan, though.

>verses
not that it matters, but in english we call what you are calling 'verses' lines
we do say 'verses', but we mean by it stanzas or groups of lines
>>21357689
>I can’t do the same thing with adjectives in my native Portuguese
do you mean you can't grammatically? why not? idk portuguese but i know some other romance languages a little and i am always interested in these niceties of language and poetry.

btw lots of yeats appreciation going on over in >>21333832 if you're interested.

[Anonymous No.21357776]

>>21357708

OP here.

In Portuguese compound adjectives exist and can be created, however they are much rarer than in English. Nouns can also be compounded, and many are already part of the common language. For example: umbrella, in Portuguese, is guarda-chuva, literally "guarda (da ou contra)/guards (against/from)” + "chuva /rain”

Yeats' verse could be translated as:

>Aquele golfinho-rasgado, aquele gongo-atormentado mar

But such a translation, though possible, would sound unnatural to many ears. Of course, you can do this whenever you like, the language is free, but there is always the possibility that readers and critics will think that you are forcing the language to be what it is not. In English, adjectives like this cause no major surprise to the reader, as they are just another example (in this case, quite well thought out) of something that occurs many times in everyday language. In Portuguese, the reader will stop for a moment and feel that that word has something strange about it, as if he were a piano tuner feeling an error in the tone of one of the keys.

In summary: Portuguese can do this, but it is not something natural in the language. If you do this to often you might run the risk of being called pretentious.

I love my language. I love the way it sounds (some of the Brazilian accents are, to my years, the most beautiful of all the heirs of Latin), I love the fact that we have, in Brazil, a whole avalanche of terms of African, indigenous, and even Arabic origin (in Portugal they also have this Arabian influence). But I envy languages like Greek, English and German because of their greater malleability and flexibility.

[Anonymous No.21357805]

>>21357776
The compound adjective thing makes sense, for some reason i thought you were referring to the way he splits the phrase into two with two 'that's.
Thankyou for graciously explaining and for sharing your love of your tongue, my friend.

[Anonymous No.21357815]

>>21357805
No problem, my friend :)
Thank you for your politeness.

[Anonymous No.21358409]

>>21357689
One of my favourite Yeats poems is A Drinking Song, which goes like this:

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

There's a beautifully melancholic sense of impermanence, of ephemeral joy and love. It's so short, and yet it still feels like it has been cut off.

>Wine comes in at the mouth
>And love comes in at the eye

Notice the emphasis on the mouth and eye, two of the main ways we sense the world. Wine and love are, depending on what one believes, two joys of life.

>That's all we shall know for truth
>Before we grow old and die.

This is the climax of the poem, of Yeats's emphasising that life is fleeting and there is only so much we can experience, let alone know that we are truly experiencing with happiness.

>I lift the glass to my mouth,
>I look at you, and I sigh.

This denouement, so to speak, repeats the first two lines of the poem, being wine in the glass, and the speaker's love. The sigh is evident of the speaker's love, but it's up to interpretation why the speaker sighs. Perhaps a sigh of contentment? A sigh of melancholy, knowing that even the deepest of loves are impermanent?

Such a good poem.