April is National Poetry Month! William Butler Yeats: "The Cat and the Moon"

[cerusee]

Yeah, today it's some Yeats. Just so you know, it wasn't all Irish politics and the downfall of civilization and women/beautiful women/women who aren't beautiful anymore, which is so tragic for them because, fuck, I dunno, Yeats seems to have some serious tunnel vision with regards to women and their inner lives; I think the canon of his poetry would fail the Bechdel test. I really have a hell of a time finding Yeats poems about women that don't make me wince a little. It's a problem.

But look! A KITTY!


The Cat and the Moon

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 up 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.


I dig Minnaloushe, but I dig Kipling's seal poetry even more. I mean, c'mon:

You mustn't swim till you're six weeks old,
Or your head will be sunk by your heels;
And summer gales and Killer Whales
Are bad for baby seals.

That's badass. It's up there with Robert Burns' poems about his dead pet sheep.

Comments

[octopedingenue]

Damn, I was gonna post Easter 1916 for, y'know, Easter!

Oh, Yeats. I do not regret flinging myself on your grave in the rain.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

It's not too late! Sunday the 19th is Orthodox Easter!

Despite my issues with Yeats' poems about women, I would not pass up the opportunity to fling myself on his grave in the rain! If I got antsy, I could just think of the Cranberries' song.

[octopedingenue]

Your plan is intriguing. I will write a Post-It to remind myself!

I had not heard of the Cranberries' song before and I am now stupidly happy it exists. Flinging oneself on his grave in the rain fits perfectly with both his awesomeness and his melodramallama. For all his technical brilliance I am glad he did write about subjects other than women, because as you say stuff like this is just...LOLN00B

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

That's it in a nutshell. It's mostly women on pedestals or women who fell off of pedestals, but every now and again, he takes a crack at a woman's actual inner life, and it's something as damned silly as that. I love Yeats, but I want to shake him and smack him a little bit, and dare him to write about women without bringing up her physical attractiveness to men, or her lack therefore.

I do like this one--"To A Young Girl":

My dear, my dear, I know
More than another
What makes your heart beat so;
Not even your own mother
Can know it as I know,
Who broke my heart for her
When the wild thought,
That she denies
And has forgot,
Set all her blood astir
And glittered in her eyes.

--because it conveys the passionate feeling of attraction, without reference to the superficial. Is she pretty? Is she plain? Is she ugly? We don't know, and we don't care. It doesn't matter, any more than her perception of the narrator's physical appearance matters to us: this is just a short, vivid impression of the passion the girl felt that the narrator perceived in her, the passion which was presumably reflected in him. It's all about the mystery of the internal, how that is reflected in the external--the experience, the sensation, not the object that triggered it.

"To A Young Girl" still all about him, but goes about it in a way that appeals to me a lot more aesthetically than "When You Are Old," which tries to get at a woman's internal experience of love-related stuff and is just...as you said, LOLN00B. It's just not profound.

I wish he'd written more poems like "To A Young Girl"--I think it's the only love/sex-themed poem I've read by Yeats that has ever hit me in the way that so many of Millay's love/sex-themed poems hit me. Millay's all about the internal life. It's not that she's all vague, abstract feelings, or doesn't reference the body and concrete details, but her ability to convey the complex inner life, particularly as it related to love and sex, is part of what makes her so addictively appealing to me.

[octopedingenue]

Mmmm. I get and like what you mean about the description of the physicality of desire, without a physical description of the person who is desiring.*

Millay's ability present the contradictory tangles of love/sex/desire in measured and orderly rhymed verse, like they're something that make sense, continues to floor me. In comparing her with Yeats, they were both very keen on the self-cannibalizing writer-introspection, "Ah, my heart is broken and you're terrible to me, this will be great poem material later!" But as they're thinking about themselves reflected in somebody else, Millay will turn that thought over too, look for the beetles underneath. Yeats too often is content to play "I will be Yeats, a solid role, over here, and you will be What I Think You Symbolize, also a solid role, over there." "Easter 1916" in large part compels me because for once he notices/admits what he's doing and also does it, in the same breath and same words: "I didn't really know you, but I'm using you in this poem, and by its end you will have changed through its force into something you weren't." Abracadabra, ladies and gentlemen, keep your eyes on the top hat.


*(And would appreciate it so much more as a piece of verse if I didn't have in my head Yeats getting shot down by Maud one last time only to to turn immediately and propose to her daughter. DO NOT WANT.)

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Oh, and that song was the REASON why I bought a book of Yeats poetry to read, lo, those many years ago! The vocalist's recitation of "No Second Troy" in the middle of the song floored me. I can't even bring myself to mock Yeats a la Williem Steig with Rejected Lovers, because of the haunting sound of Dolores Riordan repeating, "...had they but courage equal to desire."