Fascinating story, Max. Especially for us aging poets?
Or those like patrick & I, with our lack of belief...? Think Ill go
reread those poems, though....
Doug
On 20-Nov-06, at 5:53 PM, Max Richards wrote:
> The late poems of Yeats are sharp cries in the struggle to hold on to
> the
> pleasures of the body when the body fails. "The Wild Old Wicked Man"
> (1938)
> brags that he has what no young man can have: "Words I have that can
> pierce the
> heart, / But what can he do but touch?" Settling in to compensatory
> pleasures,
> he can say with bravura that, while religion can burn out suffering
> eternally,
> "I choose the second-best, / I forget it all awhile / Upon a woman's
> breast."
>
> Yeats ultimately chose the body over the soul, in late life embracing
> the
> Tantric belief in sex as the path to divinity, but sex without
> consummation, a
> philosophy that must have been all the more appealing to a
> post-Steinach Yeats
>
Douglas Barbour
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You may allow me moments
not monuments, I being
content. It is little,
but it is little enough.
John Newlove
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