poetry texts, poem archive at plagiarist.com

Goose bump city.
I've sung great choral works like Moz Req and the Mozart Grand Mass (C minor). I know what it is like to put the voice to singing. This passage is music. It must be the rhythmic pattern which never repeats but changes progressivelyi in a living way.

The horse that comes from the road.The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the streamChanges minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:The stone's in the midst of all.

I heard an awesome lecture by Helen Vendler at the Yeats Summer School, and she pointed out that the poem has the date for Easter 1916 embedded within its structure. The rhythm is tetrameter, so 4 feet per line. The first stanza has 16 lines, the second 24, the third 16, the fourth 24--altogether, the entire poem makes up the date 4/24/16. So cool!

Courtny cannot be serious in suggesting that Yeats in 1916 was consciously using the daft American system of dating where the month precedes the day which precedes the year! (And anyway, it's not tetrameter! It's stressed verse of three stresses per line!

This poem is about a major political event in Yeats' life and he was probably expected to write a poem about it and take a stand. So he *does* write a poem about it, but it seems to me that he is unable to take sides, or make a definite statement about either of the parties involved, instead he is just meditating on the event, using a long, pointless string of generic images. Overall, it's very disappointing.