National Poetry Month #2: Those Dancing Days Are Gone
Those Dancing Days Are Gone
William Butler Yeats
Come, let me sing into your ear;
Those dancing days are gone,
All that silk and satin gear;
Crouch upon a stone,
Wrapping that foul body up
In as foul a rag:
I carry the sun in a golden cup.
The moon in a silver bag.
Curse as you may I sing it through;
What matter if the knave
That the most could pleasure you,
The children that he gave,
Are somewhere sleeping like a top
Under a marble flag?
I carry the sun in a golden cup.
The moon in a silver bag.
I thought it out this very day.
Noon upon the clock,
A man may put pretence away
Who leans upon a stick,
May sing, and sing until he drop,
Whether to maid or hag:
I carry the sun in a golden cup,
The moon in a silver bag.
It's Yeats Week in my Modernist seminar, so I've had to have a rather abrupt and overwhelming introduction to his entire corpus. W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), Anglo-Irish Protestant poet and playwright, is one of the key writers of the early 20th century and became the first Irishman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. This is a minor poem I found in the back of my Collected Yeats, a mere whimsy next to heavyweights like 'The Second Coming' or 'Easter 1916', but I think it pretty. It has been covered by the First Lady of France, Carla Bruni, on her album No Promises, in which she sings often very sad poems by late Victorian/early Modernist writers far too happily.
William Butler Yeats
Come, let me sing into your ear;
Those dancing days are gone,
All that silk and satin gear;
Crouch upon a stone,
Wrapping that foul body up
In as foul a rag:
I carry the sun in a golden cup.
The moon in a silver bag.
Curse as you may I sing it through;
What matter if the knave
That the most could pleasure you,
The children that he gave,
Are somewhere sleeping like a top
Under a marble flag?
I carry the sun in a golden cup.
The moon in a silver bag.
I thought it out this very day.
Noon upon the clock,
A man may put pretence away
Who leans upon a stick,
May sing, and sing until he drop,
Whether to maid or hag:
I carry the sun in a golden cup,
The moon in a silver bag.
It's Yeats Week in my Modernist seminar, so I've had to have a rather abrupt and overwhelming introduction to his entire corpus. W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), Anglo-Irish Protestant poet and playwright, is one of the key writers of the early 20th century and became the first Irishman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. This is a minor poem I found in the back of my Collected Yeats, a mere whimsy next to heavyweights like 'The Second Coming' or 'Easter 1916', but I think it pretty. It has been covered by the First Lady of France, Carla Bruni, on her album No Promises, in which she sings often very sad poems by late Victorian/early Modernist writers far too happily.