W.B.Yeats: News for the Delphic Oracle (1)

This is from Yeats' last poems. As he got older he, like so many of us, found that the restraints of his youth and middle age fell from him. 'Why should not old men be mad?' he asked in one of these late poems. And in another:

You think it horrible that lust and rage
should dance attention upon my old age;
they were not such a plague when I was young;
what else have I to spur me into song?

'News for the Delphic Oracle' is a melange of all his old favourite themes: Irish mythology, Greek myth and philosophy, dolphins and lust. And a wonderful poem it is especially if one reads it (as Yeats would surely have wished) with due attention to metre, rhythm and rhyme. Then it is very nearly song. I made two versions of this poem, because on Windows Movie Maker it is impossible to narrate timeline while audio-vision is playing: you can have my voice with accompanying music and pictures, but you cannot hear and see me and listen to music and watch pictures at the same time. So: I present both versions for your delight. If you have a preference, please tell me! (Perhaps Microsoft will issue a new improved program so that one can hear and see everything at once!!)

The music is by Ravel, the Daphnis and Chloe Suite.

News for the Delphic Oracle

There all the golden codgers lay,
there the silver dew,
and the great water sighed for love,
and the wind sighed too.
Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed
by Oisin on the grass;
there sighed amid his choir of love
tall Pythagoras.
Plotinus came and looked about,
the salt-flakes on his breast,
and having stretched and yawned awhile
lay sighing like the rest.

Straddling each a dolphin's back
and steadied by a fin,
those Innocents re-live their death,
their wounds open again.
The ecstatic waters laugh because
their cries are sweet and strange,
through their ancestral patterns dance,
and the brute dolphins plunge
until, in some cliff-sheltered bay
where wades the choir of love
proffering its sacred laurel crowns,
they pitch their burdens off.

Slim adolescence that a nymph has stripped,
Peleus on Thetis stares.
Her limbs are delicate as an eyelid,
Love has blinded him with tears;
but Thetis belly listens.
Down the mountain walls
from where Pan's cavern is
intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
belly shoulder, bum,
flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
copulate in the foam.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• w.b.yeats
• news
• delphic
• oracle
• irish
• poetry
• charles
• bryant
• ravel
• spoken
• word

[megansspark]

This is wonderful too, of the two I think I prefer the other w/the music. Its interesting to compare and contrast them. As with the art you catch different nuances each time. Loved the Klimt.

[brychar66]

that makes two of you. my nearest & dearest prefers the other one too! I can actually have music with my reading and pics if I play it on a music centre while recording audio - but it's tricky! personally, I'd rather not see my old mug superimposed all the time!

[tHEnOOSEsWINGS]

Hello Chas. Thank you for your longhands-you put a lot of effort into presentation and performance that you always seem to get it right. I like Yeats' use and choice of metaphors. It reminds me of when I was a child, looking at adults and wondering what they were thinking. Of course I cannot remember what I thought of then-but now I do know how confusing it is to reflect on what once was and now is not by choice but of the mechanism one cannot control.

[brychar66]

thank you. it's great fun to do. serious fun - but great! Chas.

[zigsauer]

konx om panx

[megansspark]

Haha, oh its a nice mug. And tell your friend that I like Tennyson, and he's very easy to read... hint-hint