Willliam Butler Yeats tweet poetry

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) has an uncanny gift for prophecy. This Irish poet, politician and playwright dabbled in the occult and automatic writing (of which more later perhaps).

poetandgeek poetandgeek.com 

And what rough beast its hour come round at last Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born

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The full poem is here.


The second 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: a waste of desert sand;
    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
    Wind 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?

If you want to know something more about gyres, the theory of cycles that influenced Yeats, you can find it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem).

Yeats' life as a woman

Yeats' Crazy Jane avatar appears in poems ranging from the late 1920s until his very last collected work. She is literally a descent. Naughty (what's the difference between a solid man and a coxcomb?), sexy and maybe mad; and he puts her through it.

She can says things he can't say.

Crazy Jane talks with the Bishop

I met the Bishop on the road

And much said he and I.

'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,

Those veins must soon be dry;

Live in a heavenly mansion,

Not in some foul sty.'

'Fair and foul are near of kin,

And fair needs foul,' I cried.

'My friends are gone, but that's a truth

Nor grave nor bed denied,

Learned in bodily lowliness

And in the heart's pride.

'A woman can be proud and stiff

When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.' 

Poetic avatars

Avatar or voice? It takes a long time for a poet to find his or her voice.

Sometimes it never happens.

Sometimes poets take on personas - like computer avatars. And assume that personality for individual poems (Browning springs to mind with My last duchess et al.) or a series of poems or some poets even return to that character again and again like Yeat's Crazy Jane.

Usually a poet's voice is a character too. How they come across in poetry is not how they are in real life - thank goodness. However later when the poet is dead, the two can conflate. Now some think of Sylvia Plath for example as neurotic or even mad thanks to her later poems and the Bell Jar; when she most often appeared as driven and organised to her peers.

If you are struggling to find your voice, assuming an avatar can help - just as it frees one up in gameplay. The avatar or characters you assume will probably be the building blocks of your ultimate voice.

So it is worth exploring. And you may find that you encounter these characters again and again just like WBY.

*

btw avatar as a word has a lovely origin in Hindu religion where it means a deliberate descent of a deity to earth, more literally translated as incarnation or appearance.