The Magi by W.B. Yeats

W.B. Yeats's supremacy as a poet seems so clear to me that I'm baffled other people don't agree. Even his third-tier or fourth-tier poems are magnificent. No praise is high enough.

This one came into my head today, since it's Advent, and since I found myself re-reading "Journey of the Magi" by T.S. Eliot, which is also brilliant. Yeat's poem predates Eliot's by more than a decade. It's hard to believe it wasn't an influence.

I wouldn't call it one of my favourite poems or even one of my favourite Yeats poems, but it's still brilliant.

The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,

In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones

Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky

With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,

And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,

And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,

Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

I think this is an example of a techinique Yeats liked to use; a long, sinuous, contemplative sentence, finishing with a bold, startling statement.

Here is another example, though it has nothing to do with Christmas:

The Living Beauty

I bade, because the wick and oil are spent
And frozen are the channels of the blood,
My discontented heart to draw content
From beauty that is cast out of a mould
In bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,
Appears, but when we have gone is gone again,
Being more indifferent to our solitude
Than 'twere an apparition. O heart, we are old;
The living beauty is for younger men:
We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.