Poems

Abstract

Down by the Salley Gardens Down by the Salley Gardens, my love and I did meet. She passed the Salley Gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

To Never See Death: Yeats, Reincarnation, and Resolving the Antinomies of the Body-Soul Dilemma

“…Yeats series: (Yeats 1983). wiped out with the thunderbolt-because the honors and sacrifices they received from human beings would disappear-nor yet could they allow them to act so outrageously. After thinking about it very hard indeed, Zeus said, "I believe I've got a device by which men may continue to exist and yet stop their intemperance, namely, by becoming weaker.…”

Yeats and Modernism

“…My wall is loosening; 18 This is a somewhat unfair example, since Yeats instantly proceeds to take the scenery as a metaphor for his spiritual state, and the stanza concludes with a prayer:…”

“…Aerial warfare especially haunts him, from the symbolical "brazen hawks" whose "innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon" to the quite explicit evocation, "Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out, / Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in." 29 with the last gyre must come a desire to be ruled or rather, seeing that desire is all but dead, an adoration of force spiritual or physical, and society as mechanical force be complete at last. 32 Technology may be Moloch, a general smashing or petrifying of things, but it does not lack poetic interest.…”

“…33 Yeats discovers the gynoid not only in the spinning-jenny but also in The Waste Land's typist, whose verse-movement seems to him as mechanical as the gramophone she plays "with automatic hand": "in The Waste Land there is much monotony of accent." 34 I once heard Sir William Crookes tell half a dozen people that he had seen a flower carried in broad daylight slowly across the room by what seemed an invisible hand.…”

“…44 Breton sought what he called convulsive beauty; and Yeats's poems often record both images of terrible beauty and the processes of imaginative convulsion that bring them into being.…”