"An Old Song Resung," by William Butler Yeats

A bit longer than most of my poetry vids: 40+ seconds.

link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5Q2L3S872E

Outside the Norseman Pub with Time

Outside the Norseman Pub in Dublin,
Time heard me thinking of  dates
& events in one of its pasts. "What are you
thinking about those for?" asked Time.

"You need to move on."

Three Irish women walked by.
Their lilting, lovely conversation
played in the air like aural butterflies.
(I don't think Yeats would have liked

that comparison.) "See," I said
to Time, "I can do the present,
too, so leave me alone." Highlights
in the women's hair shone. 


hans ostrom 2019

A Sultan at Sunset

Thirty feet up, the hummingbird hovered,
looking at sunset behind blue, wrinkled
Olympic Mountains. After a long day
of nectar-hauling, why not? Sitting facing

East, I watched the bird watch. I then
saw it trace with its body an enormous
precise circle in air.  Wondering what
or if this circle signified was a gift

grand enough for a sultan.  The invisible,
unforgettable shape suggested geometric
graffiti, avian ritual, or a secret signal
to the sun.  I almost applauded.

The whirring bird zipped off to close
the astounding performance: what a pro.
As Sultan, I decree my hummingbird
equal to Whitman's eagle, Poe's raven,

the crows of Ted Hughes and Al
Hitchcock, Shelley's and Mercer's
skylark, and Bukowski's murdered
mockingbird. (I refuse to discuss

Yeats's rapist Zeus-goose.) The effect of
this decree, the Sultan does not know.


hans ostrom 2017

"To a Child Dancing in the Wind," by W.B. Yeats

"He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven," by W.B. Yeats

"On Being Asked for a War Poem," by W.B. Yeats

"Brown Penny," by William Butler Yeats

Poem by Paul Valéry

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I've been enjoying re-reading the anthology, French Symbolist Poetry, translated by C.F. MacIntyre and published by U.C. (Berkeley) Press. It features poems by Nerval, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Corbiere, Mallarme, Rimbaud, LaForgue, and Valéry. These poets were original in their own right but also influenced poetry in English, including that of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound.

One by Paul Valéry caught my eye--titled simply "Caesar." It starts this way:

Caesar, serene Caesar, your foot on all,
hard fists in your beard, and your gloomy eyes
pregnant with eagles and battles of foreseen fall,
your heart swells, feeling itself the omnipotent cause.

It ends this way:

The spacious world, beyond the immense horizon,
the Empire awaits the torch, the order, the lightning
that will turn the evening to a furious dawn.

Happily out on the water, and cradled in hazard,
a lazy fisherman is drifting and singing,
not knowing what thunder collects in the center of Caesar.


What makes this a "symbolist" poem as opposed to just a regular old poem? The striking juxtaposition of images, I think--so striking that they begin to generate surrealism without generating confusion: "hard fists in your beard," for example--this isn't a logical, "realistic" image, but it makes emotional sense. The same goes for "thunder collects at the center of Caesar." Here Caesar becomes an institution or a phenomenon, or both--but not just a leader, dictator, or man.

Arthur Symons' Poem On June

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Arthur Symons (1865-1945) may be best known for his short but influential book, The Symbolist Movement In Literature, which affected the work of Yeats and Eliot, among others. He was a poet as well as a critic, however. And he obviously knew a thing or two about hats.

Here is a poem from his book, Silhouettes (1892). Obviously, it's romantic, perhaps too sweet for some, and not surprisingly, it's been set to music; and yes, it rhymes "June" with "moon." Nice ending, though.

In The Fountain Court

The fountain murmuring of sleep,
A drowsy tune;
The flickering green of leaves that keep
The light of June.
Peace, through a slumbering afternoon,
The peace of June,
A waiting ghost, in the blue sky,
The white curved moon;
June, hushed and breathless, waits, and I
Wait too, with June.
Come, through the lingering afternoon,
Soon, love, come soon.


by Arthur Symons

Yeats Tosses One Back

In one class this term, I asked students to choose an extra volume of poetry (by one author--not an anthology, that is) to read and to discuss with me. One of the students chose an edition of William Butler Yeats's Selected Poems and Plays. He'd studied Yeats's poetry in another class, and he was familiar with the well known poems like "The Second Coming" and "Easter 1916." He said he enjoyed reading this volume because he was able to discover much less well known poems that were enjoyable in their own right. We did end up discussing the well known "A Prayer for My Daughter," which includes the intriguing reference to Apollo and Daphne; the speaker of the poem wants his daughter to be like the shrub, Daphne, and remain rooted in one place--Ireland, presumably. But we also discussed a slighter poem that is nonetheless enjoyable. Here it is:

Drinking Song

By W. B. Yeats

WINE comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the ear.
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

The half-rhyme mouth/truth is vintage (so to speak) Yeats.

I wonder if someone has, in fact, set this lyric to music; probably so. However, the poem might work better as a simple toast than a song. If a person were to sing it, he or she would have to select the appropriate saloon, pub, or cocktail lounge; it may not work in every venue. In any event, I agreed with my student's idea that one advantage of reading a poet's selected or collected works is that you get to discover the poems that are not anthologized often or at all but that are nonetheless memorable. You get to take your own angle on the poet's opus. I'm in favor of rummaging through such books, as opposed to hitting the familiar high spots or reading systematically.

I also like to think of Yeats's "Drinking Song" in connection with Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," partly because the pronunciations of Yeats and Keats constitute something of a running joke, but also because the poems disagree on what we know "in the final analysis." Keats says we know that beauty is truth and truth, beauty. Yeats says we know only that wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the ear. Maybe the claims aren't as far apart as they seem to be at first glance.

The Orthodoxy of Imagery

Once the Imagist movement, free verse, and Modernism hit Poetry a hundred years ago (or so), the image became the defining element of poetry. If you're writing a poem, the one thing you have to have in there is imagery--words that create images in the readers' minds; that's the conventional wisdom. It's also pretty good wisdom--"No ideas but in things," as W.C. Williams put it. Or, when in doubt, write something that will make a picture.

At the same time, poets should resist orthodoxy, even if the orthodoxy is good advice 90% of the time. There's no need to fear abstract language as if it were a disease, for example; and sometimes poetry is made good and even great by language that doesn't convey imagery. So, yes, the Imagists, et al., were on the right track, but there's never only one track in poetry.

Here are some favorite image-free lines from poems that have endured:

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" --from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, the opening line. What a great way to open a poem! Yo, Shake, well done! The line is "spoken" to someone, a "thee," but it also sets a task for the poet. Now, we readers might associate "summer's day" with imagery of our own, but the line itself contains no imagery. But what a great line of poetry. It is image-free but rhetorically interesting.

"The world is too much with us/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." --Wordsworth's famous poem, of which the first line is the title. No image here, but splendid lines of poetry.

More lines from Wordsworth, these from "Resolution and Independence," stanza 6:

My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought,
As if life's business were a summer mood;
As if all needful things would come unsought
To genial faith, still rich in genial good;
But how can He expect that others should
Build for him, so for him, and at his call
Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?

Nice stanza! The speaker is confessing to having been something of a privileged, passive optimist, and he follows the confession with a great rhetorical question.

And the famous lines from Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty./ That is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know." A droll reader might respond that he or she also needs to know how to use public transit, a toothbrush, and--these days--an ATM, but that droll reader would also be a smart-aleck. Anyway, Keats's lines will last longer than that urn did!

from Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," stanza 3:

My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

"Smothering weight" is close to being an image, but it isn't an image. It's general--but it nonetheless conveys a feeling we often have when we are dejected. And there's something fine about the direct observation, "My genial spirits fail." I prefer that to an image Coleridge might have reached for. And I sure like his use of iambic meter here.

from Thomas Hardy, "Hap," the first stanza:

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing.
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

Hardy's writing a theological poem of sorts, and this stanza expresses a preference for a vengeful god over no god at all. The sense, the rhythm, the phrasing, and the rhyme carry the lines--without imagery. But what a great presence of "voice" these lines have, and the lines set up Hardy's theological "problem" well.

Here are some lines of despair from a poet who most certainly did believe in God, Gerard Manley Hopkins:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

The idea, the voice, and Hopkins's great sense of sound carry these lines. The lines do not, strictly speaking, convey images, but they're nonetheless specific--and riveting.

Some famous image-less lines from Yeats's "The Second Coming":

The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."

To be fair to Yeats and the orthodoxy of imagery, the poem does famously end with a sphinx-like beast that "Slouches toward Bethlehem to be be born[.]" Now that is quite an image.

And a poem from Langston Hughes, called "Motto":

I play it cool and dig all jive.
That's the reason I stay alive.
My motto, as I live and learn,
Is Dig, and be Dug, in return.

These lines are funny, warm, and generous; a voice you want to hear speaks through them; and they're rhythmic. --No imagery, per se, but what a terrific poem.

So the question for poets and readers of poets is not "Imagery or abstraction?" Poets may use both, and a more pressing question is this: "Is the language--whether it conveys an image or not--interesting--does it engage the reader?" Poets would do well to lean on imagery early and often, but they would also do well to follow their instincts, even if their instincts tell them just to "say something." The something may not have an image, but it may still work, for a variety of reasons. If it doesn't work, 0ne can always rewrite it (even after it's published, as W.H. Auden famously did, much to the objection of scholars and critics), and maybe an image in its place will indeed be better.

Why Do I Like Crows?

My sense of things is that crows are not popular. They're large, loud, and insistent--and these traits are supposed to be exclusively human, aren't they? There are a lot of crows in a lot of places, and if your residence or place of work is next to tall trees, there may well be crow- families in your neighborhood. The nests are huge. The perch on top of schooners and whalers wasn't called the crow's nest for nothing. Crows don't sing or do acrobatics in the air. They're very clear about the fact that they're not here for our entertainment. They seem to eat anything, as do seagulls (are both considered carrion-birds?), but most people think seagulls have some counter-balancing positive attributes.

I like crows, even when they dive at me as I walk across campus in Spring. I don't know exactly why I like them. As with cats, their selfishness doesn't seem personal; it's just business. That may appeal to me. --Although I doubt if either crows or cats would enjoy the comparison.

Once Ted Hughes published his book-length collection of crow-poetry, aptly named Crow, the rest of us were left to pick up scraps, rather like crows. I guess the same might be said of Hopkins and his falcon-poem, "The Windhover," although Yeats, at least, managed to write an equally famous poem that included falcon-imagery (in the service of his idiosyncratic "gyre" theory of history): "The Second Coming." And Robinson Jeffers went ahead and wrote his hawk poems. This business about someone's having written "the last word" on a subject can't be taken literally by poets, after all. One must press on. So here's a crow-poem, but it's really more about why on earth I'm partial to crows:

Annual Interrogative

Crows in soupy light stomp
around broad lawns, pick at buffets
of bugs, shake sandwich-wrappers.
Perturbation is part of
the ravenous package of traits crows
have hauled with them over eons.
These birds have something to say
as they lift themselves and climb
the wind clumsily. They complain,
harangue, object, savage, and smart-off;
they pronounce CAW in several dialects,
are more menacing when they’re
silent, hopping sideways, holding
a grudge with an open beak, fixing
you with a stare, filing away your
coordinates for later air-attacks.
They’re miffed, moody, pessimistic, and
heavy-footed. Why I like them
more than more charming birds
is an annual interrogative I caw—
why?!—to myself.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

More Pressing Poetic Questions Posed to Presidential Aspirants

Here are some more questions that I wish moderators (many of whom seem immoderate) would ask the presidential aspirants as the aspirants stand on stage in full makeup under lights and behind podiums (or is it podia?):

1. An aphorism attributed to the famous Irish poet William Butler Yeats goes as follows: "Of our arguments with others, we make rhetoric; of our arguments with ourselves, we make poetry."


Politics is largely about arguments with others, and of course many of these arguments are staged or gratuitous; they are as much theater as rhetoric: that's the way politics works. What is one important argument you have had or continue to have with yourself? Of course, you might begin you answer with a quip, but after that, please describe a serious argument you have had or continue to have with yourself.

2. In the poem "Harlem" and in other works, American poet Langston Hughes wrote of "the dream deferred," referring perhaps to the aspirations of many African Americans, many working-poor families, and other groups. In your opinion, for whom is the American dream, so to speak, still deferred, why, and what have you done about it in your career as a politician?

3. American leader and orator Malcom X once observed, rather poetically, that "We [African Americans] didn't land on Plymouth Rock; it landed on us." What is your reaction to this observation?

4. What is your favorite poem about war, and why is it your favorite poem about war?

5. What is your favorite poem about peace, and why is it your favorite poem about peace?

6. In "Sunday Papers," the new poet laureate Charles Simic writes, "The butchery of the innocent/Never stops. That's about all/We can ever be sure of, love,/Even more sure than the roast/You are bringing out of the oven." To what extent has the United States been involved in the butchery of the innocent?

7. In "Fire and Ice," Robert Frost speculates about whether the world will end in fire or ice. What is your view? Will the world end in fire or in ice?

8. In the poem, "Motto," Langston Hughes writes, "I play it cool/And dig all jive./That's the reason/I stay alive./My motto,/As I live and learn,/is/Dig and Be Dug/In Return." What is your motto--0r at least one motto, by which you live as you learn?

9. In the widely anthologized poem, "This Be The Verse," British poet Philip Larkin writes, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." [The moderator may have to say "eff" or be willing to be "bleeped".] In what ways did your mum and/or your dad "eff you up," and how have you dealt with this circumstance? By the way, on his Actor's Studio show, James Lipton likes to ask guests what their favorite curse-word is. What is your favorite curse-word? Do you tend to use the f-word in private conversation, or not?

10. In the poem "God's Grandeur," poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, "Glory be to God for dappled things. . . ." Assuming for the sake of argument that you believe in God, what would you praise God for creating? Please don't say "the United States"; everyone will see that one coming. Instead, try to think of some particular thing or set of things, as Hopkins does. The more specific, the better. Thank you!

11. Poet Adrienne Rich writes about "The Phenomenology of Anger," a title of one of her poems. Will you please identify one feature of American society that has made you espeically angry in your adult life. Why has this feature made you so angry?