It’s only 9 AM, but my first day of attempted methodicality isn’t working out very well. I have an idea for the exhibition, a page indicating why I think multiplication is neat, and long division arithmetic’s cleverest and best mechanism, but wasn’t able to build up the zip needed to sketch the illustrations required in Paint Shop. I spent a while with my Shakespeare chapter but only managed slightly to revise a few pages written long ago. I stopped when I got Very Confused about an important brain mechanism I hypothesize concerned with the Urceptual Self. I need to think about that.

In the meantime, though, I grabbed a poem Mark Weiss posted at New-Poetry for use here:

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

by: W.B. Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

“A great poem,” I said in a comment about it (which I’ve revised in the unnervingly many places it was needed), “not least for its being metrically the same throughout. At least to my generalizing sort of ear; anti-reductionists will find each line ever-so-gloriously-different from all the rest metrically–not that I am deaf to that, but I ignore it as aesthetically irrelevant. (Nice to see he starts almost as great a percentage of his lines with ‘And’ as I sometimes do.)”

Later note: I’m wrong about the meter: it is broken by “flickering,” “glimmering,” “brightening” and “wandering.”  All of which are perfect where they are for other reasons.

 

.

It’s only 9 AM, but my first day of attempted methodicality isn’t working out very well. I have an idea for the exhibition, a page indicating why I think multiplication is neat, and long division arithmetic’s cleverest and best mechanism, but wasn’t able to build up the zip needed to sketch the illustrations required in Paint Shop. I spent a while with my Shakespeare chapter but only managed slightly to revise a few pages written long ago. I stopped when I got Very Confused about an important brain mechanism I hypothesize concerned with the Urceptual Self. I need to think about that.

In the meantime, though, I grabbed a poem Mark Weiss posted at New-Poetry for use here:

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

by: W.B. Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

“A great poem,” I said in a comment about it (which I’ve revised in the unnervingly many places it was needed), “not least for its being metrically the same throughout. At least to my generalizing sort of ear; anti-reductionists will find each line ever-so-gloriously-different from all the rest metrically–not that I am deaf to that, but I ignore it as aesthetically irrelevant. (Nice to see he starts almost as great a percentage of his lines with ‘And’ as I sometimes do.)”

Later note: I’m wrong about the meter: it is broken by “flickering,” “glimmering,” “brightening” and “wandering.”  All of which are perfect where they are for other reasons.

 

.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 13th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Linguexpressive Poetry, W. B. Yeats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.