'Among the Deepening Shades'

I was surprised to learn how much of Yeats I have retained and can recite without much hemming and hawing. In the hospital and rehab, where I had no access to his poems, I entertained myself recalling his verses. I discovered him early and somehow had the good sense to mostly avoid the early work, the “Celtic Twilight” business, and concentrate on the post-Green Helmet (1910) poems. At his best he is hugely seductive, almost made for singing. That, and his silliness (women, the occult), eventually turned me against him – a common progression among my bookish enthusiasms, especially those I first acquired when young. Returning to once-spurned loves is also typical.

Memorability is a useful measure of poetic quality. Try memorizing Charles Olson or some other cloddish non-poet. In his chapter devoted to Gianfranco Contini in Culture Amnesia (2007), Clive James writes: “The only thing I have to say against modern poetry is that so much of it avoids all verse conventions without rising to the level of decent prose.” Not Yeats. Here is the final stanza of “The Tower,” which I recited to myself before falling asleep one night in the hospital:

“Now shall I make my soul,

Compelling it to study

In a learned school

Till the wreck of body,

Slow decay of blood,

Testy delirium

Or dull decrepitude,

Or what worse evil come –

The death of friends, or death

Of every brilliant eye

That made a catch in the breath –

Seem but the clouds of the sky

When the horizon fades;

Or a bird's sleepy cry

Among the deepening shades.”