Happy Birthday William Butler Yeats

He's 152 years old today. And he's still one of the world's most read poets. Post a Yeats poem of your liking in this thread (or as many as you want). If you don't read him, well you should because he is really *that* good. Yeats doesn't need a cake or flowers. He has immortality--or as close to it as a poet will ever get.

The Cat and the Moon (1919)

The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon
The creeping cat looked up.

Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For wander and wail as he would
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.

Minnaloushe runs in the grass,
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet

What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.

Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

The Magi (1916)

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 depth 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.

And we will pluck 'til time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.

Tio_Narratore said:

And we will pluck 'til time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.

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Beautiful.

This is my favorite part from Among Schoolchildren (1933)

"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?"

The Seond Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

greenmountaineer said:

The Seond Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre....

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Thank you for posting that GM. I think it is one of his best poems, one of the best poems I've ever read and very timely. I've been thinking about this poem a lot lately. I guess the very best ones are always applicable to the current state of affairs. It sure feels like "the centre cannot hold" these days (to me).

When I was a teenager I memorized The Lake Isle of Innisfree because it seemed to express everything I wanted. And then I found this beautiful recording of it set to music by Judy Collins.

greenmountaineer said:

The Seond Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
.......
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Angeline said:

Thank you for posting that GM. I think it is one of his best poems, one of the best poems I've ever read and very timely. I've been thinking about this poem a lot lately. I guess the very best ones are always applicable to the current state of affairs. It sure feels like "the centre cannot hold" these days (to me).

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It does seem that way sometimes, and I think there may be more than one beast slouching towards Bethlehem.

I first read this poem in 1973, as a junior in college; it was one of the assigned texts in an honors course on Irish literature. It is very young Yeats (he was 34 when it was published, probably even younger when he wrote it, and likely even then pining about Maud Gonne) and it almost perfectly expresses the kind of hang-dog longing for love that I felt at the time, my (relatively) long-term girlfriend having dumped me the year before and having since then gone through a brief and unsatisfying relationship with some poor girl who was the follow-on to my previous relationship.

The title is sometimes rendered as "Hanrahan Reproves the Curlew," but this is how I first read it:It is still one of the few poems I have memorized, though that memorization was not deliberate--I just read the poem enough that I remembered it.

My continued affection for the poem is perhaps due to how it so strongly evokes my sense of loneliness as a college student. It still really takes me back to how I felt at the time.

It also reminds me how much better things are since I met the woman who became my wife.



First published in The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899.

Tzara said:

I first read this poem in 1973, as a junior in college; it was one of the assigned texts in an honors course on Irish literature. It is very young Yeats (he was 34 when it was published, probably even younger when he wrote it, and likely even then pining about Maud Gonne) and it almost perfectly expresses the kind of hang-dog longing for love that I felt at the time, my (relatively) long-term girlfriend having dumped me the year before and having since then gone through a brief and unsatisfying relationship with some poor girl who was the follow-on to my previous relationship.

The title is sometimes rendered as "Hanrahan Reproves the Curlew," but this is how I first read it:

He Reproves the Curlew

O, curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the waters in the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of wind.​

It is still one of the few poems I have memorized, though that memorization was not deliberate--I just read the poem enough that I remembered it.

My continued affection for the poem is perhaps due to how it so strongly evokes my sense of loneliness as a college student. It still really takes me back to how I felt at the time.

It also reminds me how much better things are since I met the woman who became my wife.



First published in The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899.

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It's lovely. I don't think any poet makes me sigh as much as Yeats does. There's a quality of yearning in his poetry that just gets to me.

I always think (of course) of eagleyez when I read When You Are Old, another early poem (published in The Rose, 1893) and certainly written for Maud Gonne. Maybe Yeats wrote it in anger and frustration, but all that comes across to me is the beauty of it. Sunday will be three years since EE died. It's a lot easier for me now though I still miss him every day. My long view is that the years we did have were a blessing. I got to know what it's like to be so completely loved. I don't think I ever did before, not really. Not that way.

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

One of Yeats's most famous poems, and one of my favorites, is "Leda and the Swan," first published in The Tower in 1928:I first read this poem when I was in high school, though not in class, but rather in the pages of Philip Roth's succès de scandale, the novel Portnoy's Complaint (1969).

In the book, Alexander Portnoy, a high-achieving Jewish boy from Jersey, becomes involved with an uneducated supermodel from Appalachia known as The Monkey, and the two have frequent and exuberant sexual encounters. In one of these, The Monkey has Portnoy pull over to the side of the road while driving through picturesque Vermont and gives him a blowjob. After she finishes (or, more properly, he finishes), Portnoy rather incongruously recites a poem to her--"Leda and the Swan." He explains a bit about the poem, then recites it again at her request, which leads to this passage:One of the more colorful introductions to a great poem in my personal experience.

Tzara said:

One of Yeats's most famous poems,....

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My Bubbe always said "Those shiksas are meshuggah."

I first encountered Leda and the Swan in college (we weren't reading about any Greek gods, disguised or no, raping someone, not when I was in my rather unenlightened high school, not even in AP English). My college, however, was a cradle of feminism (like, Bella Abzug U. and I am not exaggerating), so I read it as an anti-woman screed of Western male-centric culture in an English lit survey class. But I also read it in Portnoy in a Satire class. Not that I think the poem is either screed or satire (Yeats is more nuanced than that imho), but it was fascinating to read it two different ways at about the same time. On a side note at least half of the young women in most of my classes came from places like Short Hills. And now here I am in Appalachia. How ironic.

Another of my favorites I also encountered in college is Sailing to Byzantium (another from The Tower, 1928). It is one that (like you did) I read so many times I memorized it...well a lot of it anyway lol. At the time I was struck by Yeats' mysticism, so it was not until recently that I had this aha moment where I realized it must have been inspired by Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. (Maybe this is a thing, but I thought of it on my own). I like the idea that, like all poets, Yeats uses an idea of a famous poem to find a way into his own poem.



Sailing to Byzantium

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.

Angeline said:

My Bubbe always said "Those shiksas are meshuggah."

I first encountered Leda and the Swan in college (we weren't reading about any Greek gods, disguised or no, raping someone, not when I was in my rather unenlightened high school, not even in AP English). My college, however, was a cradle of feminism (like, Bella Abzug U. and I am not exaggerating), so I read it as an anti-woman screed of Western male-centric culture in an English lit survey class. But I also read it in Portnoy in a Satire class. Not that I think the poem is either screed or satire (Yeats is more nuanced than that imho), but it was fascinating to read it two different ways at about the same time. On a side note at least half of the young women in most of my classes came from places like Short Hills. And now here I am in Appalachia. How ironic.

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One of the things I love about the poem is how Yeats goes from the description of the rape of Leda to the volta at line nine, where the moment of ejaculation leads to a sudden, brief vision of the future consequences of the assault:as, of course, Leda will shortly give birth to Helen of Troy (fathered by Zeus) and Clytemnestra (fathered by her husband, Tyndareus) as one of two sets of twins (the others being Castor and Pollux). This brief flash of narrative (the remainder of the poem leaves it in question as to whether Leda herself foresees the coming tragedies) shows how Zeus's violation of Leda starts a chain of far-reaching events.

Another of my favorite Yeats poems (there are a lot of them) also name-checks the Trojan War via metaphor. "No Second Troy" dates from 1916 and the collection Responsibilities and Other Poems and is rather curious in that it finds Willie in a petulant funk over his muse/ideal woman Maud Gonne, whom he would propose marriage to over and over again:This was a time of particular agitation in Ireland--the failed Easter Rebellion took place in 1916, though presumably the poem was written some time before the rebellion itself.

Here's another poem I first read as a junior in college in my Irish literature class and one like "He Reproves the Curlew," particularly engaged my lovelorn twenty-one-year-old self:Those last three lines are almost mawkish in their sensibility, but boy howdy do they describe how fragile a very young man feels (or, in my case, felt) about the emotional chaos that is someone trying and wanting to be in love.

The poem is sometimes called "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" (perhaps it was titled this way in the original edition?). A casual search for "Aedh" doesn't seem to return anything other than Yeats's poem, so I don't know what that name means or implies.

The poem is sappy, but effectual.

WB Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore's Nobel

Angeline said:

Thank you for posting that GM. I think it is one of his best poems, one of the best poems I've ever read and very timely. I've been thinking about this poem a lot lately. I guess the very best ones are always applicable to the current state of affairs. It sure feels like "the centre cannot hold" these days (to me).

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Angie, India is grateful to Yeats for a different reason than his poetic genius: Painter Sir William Rothenstein and WB Yeats were both charmed by Indisn Poet Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali snd they jointly inroduced him to the western Intelligentsia which later resulted in Tagore being awarded a Nobel in Literature( the First Asian Nobel) in 1913.
If you permit and it does'nt hurt the flow of poetry here i could post the article on the friendship between the Indian and Irish Poets here
---ash

Tzara said:

Here's another poem I first read as a junior in college in my Irish literature class and one like "He Reproves the Curlew," particularly engaged my lovelorn twenty-one-year-old self:

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Source: The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)​

Those last three lines are almost mawkish in their sensibility, but boy howdy do they describe how fragile a very young man feels (or, in my case, felt) about the emotional chaos that is someone trying and wanting to be in love.

The poem is sometimes called "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" (perhaps it was titled this way in the original edition?). A casual search for "Aedh" doesn't seem to return anything other than Yeats's poem, so I don't know what that name means or implies.

The poem is sappy, but effectual.

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Aodh

"Gaelic name regarded as a version of Hugh. Although this is not strictly true as Hugh is a Germanic name meaning heart and mind."

http://www.ourbabynames.co.uk/gaelicboy.php?pg=2

Aedh might be a variant of Aodh, meaning “Fire."

Ashesh9 said:

Angie, India is grateful to Yeats for a different reason than his poetic genius: Painter Sir William Rothenstein and WB Yeats were both charmed by Indisn Poet Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali snd they jointly inroduced him to the western Intelligentsia which later resulted in Tagore being awarded a Nobel in Literature( the First Asian Nobel) in 1913.
If you permit and it does'nt hurt the flow of poetry here i could post the article on the friendship between the Indian and Irish Poets here
---ash

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Sure Ash. I'm easy about these threads. Sorry I didn't respond sooner but I haven't been online much the past few days.

greenmountaineer said:

Aodh

"Gaelic name regarded as a version of Hugh. Although this is not strictly true as Hugh is a Germanic name meaning heart and mind."

http://www.ourbabynames.co.uk/gaelicboy.php?pg=2

Aedh might be a variant of Aodh, meaning “Fire."

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Aedh or Aodh sounds eerily like Ayodhya the birthplace of our Lord Rama

Literature: Mythologising a ‘mystic’:W.B. Yeats on the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore
Published in 20th-century / Contemporary History, Features, Issue 4 (July/August 2010), Volume 18

Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1921—with his flowing beard and sweeping robe he seemed the epitome of all stereotypes oriental.

Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1921—with his flowing beard and sweeping robe he seemed the epitome of all stereotypes oriental.

On his third visit to Britain, in 1912, Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore met with a variety of literary figures, such as Ezra Pound and Thomas Sturge Moore. None would prove as beneficial as his meeting with W.B. Yeats on 7 July 1912. Tagore had initially shown his poems to the English painter William Rothenstein. Overwhelmed by the rhetorical simplicity and philosophical gravity of Tagore’s work, Rothenstein eagerly passed them on to Yeats. The Irish poet reportedly burst into a torrent of praise on reading the manuscript: ‘if someone were to say he could improve this piece of writing, that person did not understand literature’.

Oriental stereotype
Yeats agreed to write an introduction to Tagore’s collection (103 short poems translated into English from the original Bengali by the author), which, despite its hyperbolic praise, fired the imagination of the western world. Published by the India Society in 1912, it would be reprinted more than a dozen times within a year. Yeats was by then well established in the London cultural scene and, as his biographer notes, he ‘relentlessly pressed [Tagore’s] case in the circles where he wielded influence’. Tagore, meanwhile, travelled to America to deliver a series of scintillating lectures at Harvard. By the time he returned to Britain he had been transformed from a relative unknown in Europe to the latest epitome of all stereotypes oriental. Readers, stimulated by Yeats’s stamp of approval, found in Tagore’s poetry sustenance to satiate their thirst for Eastern spiritual guidance. Newspapers reported on ‘an Indian mystic’ and spoke of a ‘poet and saint’. Tagore’s flowing beard, matched by the sweeping robe he donned, did little to discourage his audience’s apprentice-like devotion.

The Tagore–Yeats relationship is iconic of Indo–Irish connections, and the Irish poet’s introductory remarks in Gitanjali are among the most-cited in academic treatises on the subject. There is good reason for this. Although, like a teenage love affair, Yeats’s fascination with Tagore was intense but short-lived, it is not only a commentary on cross-cultural encounters within the British colonial world but also exemplary of western conceptions of the Orient. What struck Yeats, like other western readers of Tagore, was the religious and devotional nature of the poetry, and its ability to read beyond national and class distinctions a human condition. Yeats wrote in his introduction that:

‘I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics . . . display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my live [sic] long . . . a tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing.’

Let me not force my flagging spirit into a poor preparation for thy worship.

It is thou who drawest the veil of night upon the tired eyes of the day
to renew its sight in a fresher gladness of awakening.

Tagore was well aware of this important dissimilarity; sometimes he admonished himself for his feeble grasp of English, and on other occasions he blamed the vagaries of translation. He was also aware, however, of his western audience’s orientalist expectation from an Indian poet. In a letter to Sturge Moore, written in 1935, Tagore repented, saying:

‘I ought never to have intruded into your [western] realm of glory with my offerings hastily giving them a foreign shine and certain assumed gestures familiar to you. I have done thereby injustice to myself and the shrine of Muse which proudly claims flowers from its own climate and culture.’

Yeats’s gushing admiration in his introduction reads much like a novice’s initial amazement at his master’s spontaneous wisdom, which nonetheless is well honed because it is artfully planned. There was subversion in Tagore’s effective rewriting of his poems. By assuming the role of the eastern sage, Tagore outplayed at their own game the narrow-minded orientalists who viewed, like the colonisers, real places in the world as ephemeral locations in which to play out one’s fantasies. India, sieved through Tagore’s poetry, appeared to Yeats as everything that he had expected it to be: enamoured of the mystical, and supporting a tradition where poetry and religion were the same thing. Yeats was not wholly naïve either. He knew that if Tagore were awarded the Nobel Prize it would soften anti-colonial sentiments in India. The prize, he said, would be ‘a piece of wise imperialism from the English point of view’.

The programmatic nature of Yeats and Tagore’s relationship, however, gives rise to more compelling and sustained arguments. If Yeats wanted to create an art that would be universal in effect, although national or personal at its moment of initiation, Tagore’s poetry similarly tried to cross political boundaries. Much like other cultural and political protagonists in India and Ireland, both poets highlighted similarities between the two colonies rather than demarcating their differences. Such an internationalist perspective not only immediately challenged imperialism’s grammar of ‘divide and rule’ but also allowed for the growth of a supremely subversive anti-colonial ethics of world-humanism, which overtly challenged the colonial hierarchy of master and slave. For Yeats, Tagore’s Bengal and the west of Ireland shared an affinity that counterpointed the materialistic modernity of imperialism. He compared Tagore’s work to Douglas Hyde’s Love Songs of Connaught:

‘I was to stand at his [Hyde’s] side and listen to Galway mowers singing his Gaelic words without their knowing whose words they sang. It is so in India, where peasants sing the words of the great poet of Bengal without knowing whose words they sing, and it must often be so where the old imaginative folk-life is un-disturbed . . .’

Rural Ireland equated to Bengal
Rural Ireland is here equated to Bengal and rurality is seen as being shielded from the modernising and materialistic forces of colonialism. Interestingly, in Literature in Ireland Thomas MacDonagh would comment on the similarity of Tagore’s poetry to that of the Gaelic bards, and their ability to reach a national audience not constrained by bookish learning on the art of literary appreciation. MacDonagh proposed that Irish literature could not be read using the parameters one would utilise to read French or British literature. Its oral and folk qualities could only be compared to the poetry of Tagore or the work of Romanian folklorists.
Particularities between the circumstances of India and Ireland could be levelled out using this global vision of a shared humanity. For Yeats, much of Irish tradition and culture that had been prey to the forces of imperialism could be resuscitated by a return to rurality. Connected with this was the catalyst of the mystical, which suggested to him an effective means of circumventing the empirical rationality of colonial modernity. Hindu philosophy often proved to be, in Yeats’s scheme of things, the medium that expressed such ideologies most succinctly. To turn to the east, moreover, was not to lose oneself in foreignness but rather to see the reflection of one’s own past: ‘our genuflections discover in that East something ancestral in ourselves’. In his later years Yeats co-translated the Upanishads with the Indian mystic Shree Purohit Swami and pointed out the universal applicability of the teachings of these Hindu scriptures.

Rather than the amorphous language of mysticism, Yeats was intrigued by the artistic and imaginative quality of the Upanishads. No matter how hurriedly and scantily learnt, Indian philosophy figured in Yeats’s symbolic vocabulary throughout his life. In reviewing his sources of inspiration he said that ‘when we look backward upon our lives [we] see the coming of a young Brahmin [Mohini Mohun Chatterjee] into Ireland [that gave] our vague thoughts a shape’.

Surprisingly, Yeats would admonish Tagore years later for the very religiosity that he had initially found admirable. ‘He speaks too much about God’, Yeats said, and further clarified that ‘My mind resents the vagueness of such references . . . I have fed upon the philosophy of the Upanishads all my life, but there is an aspect of Tagore’s mysticism that I dislike. I find absence of tragedy in Indian poetry.’ Yeats probably realised that Tagore was only half the mystic he had originally thought him to be. There is ample truth in this because Tagore’s English translations very rarely capture the secular nature of his ideology. The Tagores of Bengal, a landowning and influential family, were well known for their liberal and reformist views. Rabindranath came from a family that had often been outspokenly critical of puritanical caste traditions in India. He also challenged the political stalwart Mahatma Gandhi’s religious orthodoxy and problematic intermingling of religion with politics.

Nobel medal—Rabindranath Tagore won his in Literature in 1913 on the basis, more or less, of a single collection of poems, Gitanjali: Song Offerings.

Tagore an intellectual polymath not a misled mystic
Nobel medal—Rabindranath Tagore won his in Literature in 1913 on the basis, more or less, of a single collection of poems, Gitanjali: Song Offerings.

Nobel medal—Rabindranath Tagore won his in Literature in 1913 on the basis, more or less, of a single collection of poems, Gitanjali: Song Offerings.

Tagore was far from being a misled mystic but was rather an intellectual polymath whose artistic output covers the whole gamut of lyrics, poems, plays, novels, paintings and astute political and cultural criticism. He is the only author to have written two national anthems: one for India and the other for Bangladesh. And he was not always eager for western appreciation, promptly returning his knighthood after the infamous Jallianwallah Bagh (Amritsar) massacre in 1919. Yeats’s reassessment of Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry is therefore quite limited in its understanding of the poet and, indeed, of what Yeats uncritically categorises as ‘Indian poetry’. Tagore’s later works are today easily compared to the vanguard traditions of modernist English and French literature. His paintings offer a visually disturbing and disquieting reality rather than replicating the bucolic landscape of rural Bengal.

Yeats’s misunderstanding of Tagore’s writing is in itself a commentary on western attitudes towards the east. The Irish poet identified India, as did other orientalists, as a spiritual storehouse whose ambiguity-laden philosophy would, in the end, be amenable to the strictures of western pragmatism. Thus he found in the Upanishads not spiritual revelation but rather the possibility of artistic inspiration. Tagore’s translated Gitanjali originally may have captured in text what in essence was spiritually felt but it was not a true depiction of Tagore’s oeuvre by any means. Yeats’s criticism of Tagore is perhaps also a commentary on his shrewd understanding of being misled by false promises—even if they were self-created. In a poignant essay Yeats negotiated this disconnect between his geographical location in the western world and his self-delusional universe of oriental mysticism:

‘Then I remind myself that . . . all my family names are English and that I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak and write, that everything I love has come to me through English; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate. I am like the Tibetan monk who dreams at his initiation that he is eaten by a wild beast and learns on waking that he himself is eater and eaten.’

It is to Yeats’s credit that he referred to the London meeting with Tagore as ‘one of the great events of my artistic life’, for surely Tagore was as adept at creating and destroying the idealised image of the oriental saint as was Yeats himself. Tagore would go on to visit more than 30 countries in his lifetime and was rightfully given the sobriquet of Visvakabi or ‘World Poet’, among others. He is still widely read in South America and Asia, and venerated in Bengal.
Tagore, an accomplished modernist painter, often turned his scribbles into arty doodles.

Tagore, an accomplished modernist painter, often turned his scribbles into arty doodles.

In hindsight it is easy to understand why Yeats would be fascinated by Tagore. The Irish poet often spoke of the possibility of a shared cultural memory that brought distant civilisations together, and Tagore would echo such idealistic universalism in his writings. Both poets, products of different forms of British colonialism, evoked in their writings an internationalism that corresponded to the subversive conception of an international identity formulated by other protagonists of Indo–Irish connections. Like Yeats, Tagore too was a trenchant critic of modern materialism. And both poets left behind artistic legacies that would both encourage and infuriate successive generations of younger writers.

Tagore was well aware that his reputation following the publication of Gitanjali was on shaky ground. But he was also bemused by the effect the mystical verses had on his audience. He wrote to his friend in Bengal: ‘My impression is that when a place from which nothing is expected somehow produces something, even an ordinary thing, people are amazed—that is the state of mind here’. It is ironically fitting, therefore, that Tagore’s original Nobel medal was stolen in 2004, because, although well deserved, it was perhaps not awarded for the right reason. The Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy sent a replica of the award, which is now displayed at Santiniketan, the place where Tagore formed his university. HI

Tagore, an accomplished modernist painter, often turned his scribbles into arty doodles.

Malcolm Sen teaches English at NUI, Galway.

Further reading:
K. Dutta and A. Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: the myriad-minded man (New York, 1995).
K. Dutta and A. Robinson (eds), Selected letters of Rabindranath Tagore (Cambridge, 1997).
R. Tagore, Collected poems and plays of Rabindranath Tagore (London, 1977).

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Ash thank you for posting that. It is quite a seminar on what I know the author sees as cultural appropriation and I guess it was. Yeats was a product of his time and culture and was inculcated with the notion of colonialism, even though he may have disliked the idea. On the other hand, as a writer I'm sure Yeats read Tagore and loved it so he found a way to work what interested him into his poetry. I think we must all do that when we write.

Mohini Chatterjee

I asked if I should pray.
But the Brahmin said,
'pray for nothing, say
Every night in bed,
'I have been a king,
I have been a slave,
Nor is there anything.
Fool, rascal, knave,
That I have not been,
And yet upon my breast
A myriad heads have lain.
That he might Set at rest
A boy's turbulent days

Mohini Chatterjee
Spoke these, or words like these,
I add in commentary,
'Old lovers yet may have
All that time denied --
Grave is heaped on grave
That they be satisfied --
Over the blackened earth
The old troops parade,
Birth is heaped on Birth
That such cannonade
May thunder time away,
Birth-hour and death-hour meet,
Or, as great sages say,
Men dance on deathless feet.

thank you , Angie!

Angeline said:

Ash thank you for posting that. It is quite a seminar on what I know the author sees as cultural appropriation and I guess it was. Yeats was a product of his time and culture and was inculcated with the notion of colonialism, even though he may have disliked the idea. On the other hand, as a writer I'm sure Yeats read Tagore and loved it so he found a way to work what interested him into his poetry. I think we must all do that when we write.

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thank you for your sharp analysis : I dare not analyze either Keats or Tagore but I admire the courage of those who attempt to do so ......but times they were so different even in those dark days of colonialism that a White man and an Asian Brown poet were able to find a deep friendship and admiration for each other's works !!!
today in times of brexit and Trumpism I quote from Tagore :----
'Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high......
where the world is not fragmented
behind narrow domestic walls
......into that Heaven O Father
let my Nation awake!!"

My reaction to cultural piracy....

Angeline said:

Ash thank you for posting that. It is quite a seminar on what I know the author sees as cultural appropriation and I guess it was. Yeats was a product of his time and culture and was inculcated with the notion of colonialism, even though he may have disliked the idea. On the other hand, as a writer I'm sure Yeats read Tagore and loved it so he found a way to work what interested him into his poetry. I think we must all do that when we write.

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Having ' culturally misappropriated ' the so called English Vice or Vice Anglaise myself , i have no objctions to others doing their own bit of cultural piracy but maybe Tagore had reservations......

Ashesh9 said:

Having ' culturally misappropriated ' the so called English Vice or Vice Anglaise myself , i have no objctions to others doing their own bit of cultural piracy but maybe Tagore had reservations......

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Maybe. I just think people appropriate each other's styles (and not just in writing) when cultures come together--whether that coming together happens in a good way or not!