Poems I Like: The Fascination of What's Difficult by W.B. Yeats

I gave a library tour today and a student (actually a prospective student) asked me my favourite poet. Nobody ever asks me great questions like this. People ask me the same kind of questions they ask you, I'm sure: how long does it take you to get into work, what did you do at the weekend, do you have any holidays booked, etc? I hadn't even mentioned poetry. (Incidentally, the student told me his own favourite poet was Rudyard Kipling, a choice I wholeheartedly praised.)

Anyway, there is only one answer for me: W.B. YEATS.

Yeats seems to me to be so much the greatest English language poet that I wonder why everyone doesn't agree with me. Nearly everything he wrote was brilliant.

"The Fascination of What's Difficult" is one of his lesser poems, but it's still a great poem. Presumably we've all experienced this fascination; doing something the hard way rather than the easy way, just for the sake of it. And feeling no choice in the matter!

There's something about Yeats poems that I can best describe by the term "contour". I have this notion that you could replace the words of a Yeats poem with almost any other words, as long as you preserved the sentence structure and rhyme scheme, and you'd still have a good poem-- the "bones" are that strong. (I've even thought of doing this myself). Very often he had a long, sinuous, tentative line followed by a short, punchy line. But that's just one example in his box of tricks.

The Fascination of What's Difficult

The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

"Give Me Just Sixty Seconds..."

Does someone believe that beginning a YouTube ad like this is really going to get me to listen? It makes me even likelier to skip them. (Oh, and telling me not to skip is guaranteeing that I will skip.)

Honestly, I don't see why ads can't evolve to get their essential message into five seconds.

And I wonder why they don't just have someone tell a joke. I'd probably stay for the punchline.

I'm sure they know their business, though.

Me, Frank and Stan

 

Some Lines on Corpus Christi by John Bradburne

I encountered them in an email from the John Bradburne Society today.

If you don't know about John Bradburne, I encourage you to make his acquaintance. Apparently he is the most prolific poet in English

I wouldn't call any of his poetry great, although of course, I've only read a tiny fraction of his huge outpout. He has an unfortunate tendency towards incongruity and bathos. However, I really like these four lines:

Jesus of Nazareth is in each tent
Where rests with us The Blessed Sacrament:
Worship the God of nature and do well,
Do better and adore Emmanuel.

Is Modern Life Banal, or Is It Just Me?

That's the question I keep asking myself, especially recently.

Don't people who consider themselves "sensitive", "soulful", "deep", "poetic", etc. etc. say this about every era?

Wasn't Wordsworth lambasting England in 1802 because "plain living and high thinking are no more"?

Didn't G.K. Chesterton deride his era of "frock-coats" and "stovepipe hats" (both of which now seem impossibly elegant to us), though he also complained about a "dwarfish contempt for the present?"

Didn't William Morris thunder against the utilitarianism and ugliness of his era?

And Thomas Carlyle?

And John Ruskin?

And W.B. Yeats?

And everybody?

And yet...I can't help it. I feel crushed under the banality of the twenty-first century all the time-- the supermarkets, the office blocks, the identikit suburbs, the moronic patter on the radio, the omnipresent political correctness, the all-pervasive irony and "self-awareness", the general lack of seriousness and solemnity and sublimity.

Well, maybe I don't feel like this all the time. But a lot of the time. I have a positive craving for "re-enchantment", whatever that means, and feel an urgent duty to be an agent of this however I can.

And yet, I can't help feeling that someone who wandered into the twenty-first century from the Middle Ages, or perhaps even any other time, might consider it a paradise beyond imagining, and want to kick me for my ingratitude.

Did You Ever Want to Read a Blog Post on the Scripture Knowledge of P.G. Wodehouse?

Well, here it is! Courtesy of the Gospel Coalition, who seem like a spiffing bunch of coves.

Mention of P.G. Wodehouse and the Bible inevitably reminds me of the legendary prize-giving scene in Right-Ho Jeeves, when a completely hammered Gussie Fink-Nottle distributes prizes to schoolboys-- not realizing that three different people have spiked his orange juice with whiskey, in an effort to give him some Dutch courage. His examination of one of the prize-winners is hilarious:

"Well, G.G. Simmons."

"Sir, yes, sir."

"What do you mean--sir, yes, sir? Dashed silly thing to say. So you've won the Scripture-knowledge prize, have you?"

"Sir, yes, sir."

"Yes," said Gussie, "you look just the sort of little tick who would. And yet," he said, pausing and eyeing the child keenly, "how are we to know that this has all been open and above board? Let me test you, G.G. Simmons. What was What's-His-Name--the chap who begat Thingummy? Can you answer me that, Simmons?"

"Sir, no, sir."

Gussie turned to the bearded bloke.

"Fishy," he said. "Very fishy. This boy appears to be totally lacking in Scripture knowledge."

The bearded bloke passed a hand across his forehead.

"I can assure you, Mr. Fink-Nottle, that every care was taken to ensure a correct marking and that Simmons outdistanced his competitors by a wide margin."

"Well, if you say so," said Gussie doubtfully. "All right, G.G. Simmons, take your prize."

(This scene is sometimes described as the funniest in all English literature, and I can't think of one which deserves that title better. Of course, there's a lot more to it than just the passage above.)

Poems I Like: "The Woman of Three Cows" by James Clarence Mangan

Some lines from this poem came into my head just now, so I've decided to include it in my series.

James Clarence Mangan is fairly well-known in Ireland, but I would be surprised if anybody (other than people interested in Ireland) know him abroad. He died in 1849. He was the archetypal romantic poet, known for his cloak, poverty, doomed love affair, and addictions.

Mangan wrote some very moving and lyrical poems, but this isn't one of them. This is a sparkling piece of satire or social commentary, translated from an Irish original.

The main thing I love about this poem is simply its virtuosity. It hops, skips, leaps, and jumps. Mangan is in complete command of the format. He comes up with rhyme after rhyme for the refrain "woman of three cows", with an impression of sheer effortlessness. Its emphatic metre is a pleasure in itself.

I also like the gusto of the poem. Somehow I imagine Mangan greatly enjoyed writing it. He was truly a Byronic figure in both senses; he had Byron's romantic melancholy, but also Byron's mordant comic glee, when the mood took him.

The Woman of Three Cows is the sort of person who, until recently, had a stock description in the Irish vernacular: "Tuppence-ha'penny looking down on tuppence."

Mangan was an Irish nationalist, and it's wonderful how he's stitched allusions to Irish history through the whole length of the poem. You'd expect this in a patriotic lyric, but somehow it's even more powerful in a piece of invective like this, where the Irish historical references (many of which are lost on me) simply form the background, the world of the poem. I'm constantly sad and ashamed that Irish writers just dropped the Gaelic Revival, or the Celtic Dawn, or whatever you want to call it, a few decades after independence. It had room for infinite variation.

I've said above that this isn't a moving and lyrical poem. That's not quite true. Although it's basically a satire, there are some loftier strains in it, such as this one:

O, think of Donnell of the Ships, the Chief whom nothing daunted --
See how he fell in distant Spain, unchronicled, unchanted!

It had never occurred to me before, but this poem is quite reminiscent of Tennyson's "Lady Clara Vere de Vere" (the poem from which the film Kind Hearts and Coronets takes its title), although Tennyson's poem is not comical.

Mangan throws Irish dialect words in liberally enough. "Agraw" means "my dear"; "Movrone" means "alas!", and "inagh"...to be honest, I don't know what that one means.

Trigger warning: the last verse contains an endorsement of violence towards women. We must remember Mangan never attended a sensitivity training course.

The Woman of Three Cows by James Clarence Mangan

O, Woman of Three Cows, agraw, don't let your tongue thus rattle!
O, don't be saucy, don't be stiff, because you may have cattle.
I've seen -- and, here's my hand to you, I only say what's true --
A many a one with twice your stock not half so proud as you.

Good luck to you, don't scorn the poor, and don't be their despiser,
For worldly wealth soon melts away, and cheats the very miser,
And Death soon strips the proudest wreath from haughty human brows;
Then don't be stiff, and don't be proud, good Woman of Three Cows!

See where Momonia's heroes lie, proud Owen More's descendants,
'Tis they that won the glorious name, and had the grand attendants!
If they were forced to bow to Fate, as every mortal bows,
Can you be proud, can you be stiff, my Woman of Three Cows!

The brave sons of the Lord of Clare, they left the land to mourning;
Movrone! for they were banished, with no hope of their returning --
Who knows in what abodes of want those youths were driven to house?
Yet you can give yourself these airs, O, Woman of Three Cows!

O, think of Donnell of the Ships, the Chief whom nothing daunted --
See how he fell in distant Spain, unchronicled, unchanted!
He sleeps, the great O'Sullivan, where thunder cannot rouse --
Then, ask yourself, should you be proud, good Woman of Three Cows!

O'Ruark, Maguire, those souls of fire, whose names are shrined in story --
Think how their high achievements once made Erin's greatest glory--
Yet now their bones lie mouldering under weeds and cypress boughs,
And so, for all your pride, will yours, O, Woman of Three Cows!

The O'Carrolls also, famed when Fame was only for the boldest,
Rest in forgotten sepulchres with Erin's best and oldest;
Yet who so great as they of yore in battle or carouse?
Just think of that, and hide your head, good Woman of Three Cows!

Your neighbour's poor, and you, it seems, are big with vain ideas,
Because, inagh! you've got three cows, one more, I see, than she has.
That tongue of yours wags more at times than Charity allows,
But, if you're strong, be merciful, great Woman of Three Cows!

Now, there you go! You still, of course, keep up your scornful bearing,
And I'm too poor to hinder you; but, by the cloak I'm wearing,
If I had but four cows myself, even though you were my spouse,
I'd thwack you well to cure your pride, my Woman of Three Cows!