Here are two poems I particularly admire. The first speaks to my sense of tradition, of antiquities and visions of the past, though with a wonderfully skewed perspective. With the second, well, I used to think I had found a wonderful table of poetic development, a sequence of aesthetic wonder and, perhaps, blunder (not on the part of Montague, but on the part of the naive poet-figure, Oneself); and perhaps I still think that way. Maybe something else is going on for me, now, as a more mature reader.
In each, I can see echoes and rejections or revisions of Yeats. Joyce, Synge, Lady Gregory, and even Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I'll reread the poems with you. Go ahead, and aloud, please.
OLD MYTHOLOGIES
And now, at last, all proud deeds done,
Mouths dust-stopped, dark they embrace
Suitably disposed, as urns, underground.
Cattle munching soft spring grass
--Epicures of shamrock and the four-leaved clover--
Hear a whimper of ancient weapons,
As a whole dormitory of heroes turn over,
Regretting their butcher's days.
This valley cradles their archaic madness
As once, on an impossibly epic morning,
It upheld their savage stride:
To bagpiped battle marching,
Wolfhounds, lean as models,
At their urgent heels.
THE TRUE SONG
The first temptation is to descend
Into beauty, those lonely waters
Where the swan weeps, and the lady
Waits, a nacreous skeleton.
The second is to watch over
Oneself, a detached god
Whose artifice reflects
The gentle smile in the mirror.
The third, and the hardest,
Is to see the body brought in
From the street, and know
The hand surge towards blessing.
For somewhere in all this
Stands the true self, seeking
To speak, who is at once
Swan
lady
stricken one.
