William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
As we read in the Anthology headnotes, Yeats’s brilliance is most bright when he straddles sides of himself. His seemingly objective view of his own feelings and goals allows him to be truly romantic in this, what I would label as a foe-sonnet, titled The Fascination of What’s Difficult. Yeats stresses first the hardship that comes with playwriting and the theater business. This craft has “Dried the sap out of [his] veins,” and ruined that common joy that comes from the mundane. Yeats goes on to depict this pain in the image of a galloping colt that can’t break free from the road metal it drags.
His curse is to love what is difficult. For him it comes in the form of making the perfect plays “That have to be set up in Fifty ways.” As I tried to say in class, the bolt that he promises to remove represents the creative block any artist faces. The bolt of “knaves and dolts,” the bolt of perfection, the bolt of the people you work with (“Management of men”), and there are certainly many more.
In my imitation poem I tried to stay pretty consistent with Yeats’s rhyme meter and dialect. I wanted to keep the theological/mythological imaginative comparison because anything creative mimics all the various forms of a supreme CREATOR. However, I referenced the monotheistic faiths because I thought it might seem more approachable, or more readily understood, by my audience. I also changed the image of a galloping colt to a swimming voice in the sea because for me, my creation is artistic/stylistic surfing. In the same way Yeats is the Colt who has to remove the bolt, I have to remove the mask that blocks my voice from telling me to charge that wave.
Don’t go gentle into that good night- Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas’s Poem matches the idea to battle for life and creativity
It’s not perfect, but I’m stoked on it!
The battle for Creative joy
Creation’s joy
Has removed me from my innocent place of peace, and drown
The habitual notion of what it means to be
Away from my reflection. Yet that sound that scratches the searched silence,
Portrayed as if it were the spirit himself
Looking to splits the seas of red waters
Echoes in the depths, reach, wish, and long
As if it was muffled by a gnarled mask. My oath to art
That goes on no-matter the dark,
On the nights fight with each the naïve and ignorant,
Creation, the essence of life.
I vow until the day rise returns
I’ll swim to the depths and breath life into the mask.
Very interesting imitation here, though I was confused by the Dylan Thomas stuff… is that part of the poem? Also, when imitating a sonnet, it is interesting to try to capture not just the rhyme but the meter as well–in the sonnet’s case, that would be iambic pentameter. In terms of formatting, you can use the soft return (shift+return) so you don’t have an extra space between lines.
I understand your reading of the poem as one of overcoming a creative block, of loosening the dreary bounds of art and just letting go. That’s certainly an important part of the poem as Yeats reflects on his role in an often petty theater business, with its “managed” art and men. In that sense, your poem’s effort to remove a mental block is an apt analogy–something needs to be freed.
I do wonder how Yeats viewed this as a national poem–as a poem about “our” Irish colt in comparison to, one would guess, the British. As Ireland was not a free state, but under British rule at this time, there must be something to that.