Review: Selected Poems

Selected Poems by W.B. Yeats
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In the introduction to the collection, Timothy Webb writes that ' Yeats maintained that poetry should be a revelation of hidden life' (and not a criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold felt).

There is certainly a lot of revelation. Yeats wipes the layers of dust off mythology and Irish history and opens a box hidden in plain sight.

I started the collection after a journey from Dublin to Belfast, and slowly dipped into its pages over a couple of months. Some of the poems remain a mystery, with references to names and places familiar to the poet, but not to the reader, and others echo history that is painful to many after more than four centuries in Ireland.

My absolute favourite is 'Stolen Child', but the haunting verses were already imprinted on my memory. In 1998, at the university halls of residence (Derwent D Block), Rachel, Neil, James, Ray, and I would cook Sunday lunch in a Baby Belling oven, listening to the Waterboys sing it beautifully in the epic Fisherman's Blues album.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than you can understand

There are powerful moments, such as in 'Blood and the Moon':

'Swift beating on his breast in sibyllyine frenzy blind
Because the heart in his blood-sodden breast had
dragged him down into mankind,
Goldsmith deliberately sipping at the honey-pot of his mind.'

Then there are the reminders of residual contempt for how the Protestant English Parliament sought to impose their will on predominantly Catholic Ireland, such as in 'The curse of Cromwell':

'You ask what I have found, and far and wide I go:
Nothing but Cromwell’s house and Cromwell’s murderous crew,
The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay,
And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen, where are they?

Finally, in 'Under Beb Bulben' - one of his last poems - he offers advice to other Irish poets:

‘Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.'

It was a mixed bag, and to be honest, some of the poems left me cold. I gave the collection Three Stars, which is probably unfair. I will dip back into the cool waters again, someday.





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