TOP1-DES1
This Old Poem #1:
William Butler Yeats’ Into The Twilight
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 6/13/02
With this
essay I am inaugurating a new essay series. Those familiar with the long-running
PBS tv series This Old House may be able to discern where I am going with
this series of essays. Basically, I seek to rehabilitate (by rewriting)
well-known poems by published (& often famous) poets. My contention is that
even the biggest names in poetry wrote & (worse) published bad to very bad
poems, solely on their prior reputations. These poems’ badness range from
clichéfests to unmusicked & torturous-sounding poems, & occasionally a
combination of the 2. I will also take on some pretty good poems & show how
they could have been made even better. No poet will be spared by virtue of race,
age, sex, reputation, nationality, date of composition, etc. I will deal with
the end result I, as a reader, have read. In effect, I will be treating these
poems as I would any poem put before my eyes at the Uptown Poetry Group
I run, to give readers a slice of how good, honest, technical criticism can help
improve all but the greatest poems written- & even they can be subject to
legitimate disputes of taste- as long as 1 maturely recognizes the dispute is of
taste, not execution.
1st
up is a poem I skimmed over in an earlier essay when I addressed Self-Aware Doggerelists & seamlessly melded from the
poetry of American poetaster Joyce Kilmer to Irish immortal W.B.Yeats. The poem
is from WBY’s most famous early book The Wind Among The Reeds (1899).
Let’s hit the poem, critique its strengths & weaknesses, do a critically
annotated version, suggest solutions, & give you a revised version.
Into The Twilight
Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;
And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
O.K.,
the title is bland & generic. The actual poem does nothing to play off of,
nor play with, it. Worse, given its date of composition, the poem has nothing
that shows any desire of the poem nor poet to rise above what it sets out to do.
Stanza
1: Line 1’s opening we’ve seen before- both in phrasing & sentiment.
Line 2 gives a nice re-visioning of a familiar theme. Line 3 is terrible. The
admonition is trite, as well the ‘again’, & ‘grey twilight’ is
odious. Ditto for the similar features of line 4. Add the brisk attempt at
tetrameter, which gives way to leaden pentameter, & the fairy tale abab
rhyme scheme, & this 1st stanza could have been penned by any
hack. While the music is generally good its very nature does nothing to provide
tension or novelty against the poem’s theme. There is nothing worth reading
here that a scan of Victorian poetry anthologies could not provide.
Stanza 2: The invocation of the eternally young
motherland- ugh. Line 2 repeats the imagistic & symbolic sins of stanza 1,
except with slight inversions. Line 3 gives 2 trite actions. Line 4: cliché
& familiar posturing- ah, slander!
Stanza
3: Too many ‘ands’- this is when you know a poet is filling space better
served by really active words. The whole idea of invoking the heart is old, but
especially so against the poem’s familiar milieu. This poem is almost an
unwitting self-satire.
Stanza
4: Says absolutely nothing, as line 1 needlessly invokes a deity whereas the 1st
3 stanzas had gotten us into a spiritual (not religious) mood; that the deity is
lonely- another triteness. Again with the ‘ands’, & the ending
melancholy is even worse than stated because we feel blue that so many clichés
have been heaped upon us.
Flat
out, this is a very bad poem, yet it is 1 of the more well-known poems from The
Wind Among The Reeds. Let’s see it annotated:
Into
The Twilight
Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;
And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
14
clichés in 16 lines (not including the title) is terrible for an amateur, much
less a Master like WBY. Here now is a re-written version. Read it, then we’ll
analyze the changes & improvements- see what is retained- & why, &
discarded- & why.
Out From The Twilight
Outgrown part, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh there, again, in the grey’s delight,
Sigh then, again, with a dew not the morn’s.
Your mother Eire was never young,
Dew never shining in twilit day;
Though it fall into no love’s delay,
Turning such fires into slanderous tongue.
Come, here, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For then fantastical brotherhoods
Of sun, moon, hollow (but never wood),
River, and stream will work out still;
As who stands winding a lonely horn,
As time and its world are ever aflight:
A love less kind than the eye’s insight,
Or hope less dear than what was the morn?
Let
us attack this reworked- & quite improved- version. I make no claims that
this poem is a great 1, but it is a hell of an improvement from the dreck I
started with! The title inverts the
whole idea of giving things up. The poem’s speaker is now more ‘alert’ for
something headed toward it.
Stanza
1: With something now headed toward the reader, the nebulous ‘outgrown part’
makes the thing something exterior that is being rejected by nature, rather than
yet another lovelorn heart. Line 2’s ethical directive makes more sense, since
we are dealing with an X-Factor. Line 3’s ‘grey’ then becomes more than
just an adjective, but a reminder of the unknown, & the laughter is borne of
the unknown thing. Line 4 then starts the poem’s negation of the trite more
explicitly.
Stanza
2: Line 1 continues the negation theme, as does line 2, & the more nebulous
‘it’ can be stanza 1’s nebulous thing or Eire, or the dew or day! That the
speaker does not delay affection is an added bonus. Line 4 transmutes the
‘fires’ from a cliché into a reference to the twilight 2 lines prior, or
into a verb. This version, thus far, is much more original & active. It also
retains the solid music of the original poem.
Stanza
3: The change from ‘heart’ to ‘here’ in line 1 helps remove the
triteness of the original, & maintain the eeriness of the reworked poem.
Line 2’s ‘fantastical’ is more expansive than ‘mystical’- especially
in a nature poem. The removal of the excess ‘ands’ allows for further
negation in line 3 (why not ‘wood’?- more mystery), & line 4 then lets
us ponder what is needing to be worked out. ‘Still’ also takes the poem into
duplicity (in all its meanings). This poem is far more mysterious in its
presentation than the original was in its attempt to invoke such with its
time-dulled clichés.
Stanza
4: The removal of ‘God’ from line 1 invokes far deeper thought as to the
guiding force behind the poem. Line 2’s ‘aflight’ is more daring- yet more
apt- than the original ‘in flight’. Line 3 allows us to meander back to the
thrust of twilight toward the speaker, as dictated in the amended title.
‘Insight’ also takes on more meaning as that literally ‘in the sight’ of
the eye. Line 4 ends the poem by placing this action all in a past time. You,
therefore, invoke the far away feel without having to use trite themes that hit
you over the head with it. Also, you don’t get the dulling shift from
tetrameter to pentameter which subliminally bogs the reader down, & dulls
the thought. The query ending is also ‘classical’- but a nice way to
continue the ‘unknown’ aspect which pervades the poem. Also, by letting
‘love’ & ‘hope’ be at odds you end the poem with an unresolved
tension.
Also,
you cleanse the poem of some awfully trite & generic images & make the
poem more specific. The original version was a horror show (Sorry, Billy Boy!)
but the improved version is quite a good poem- nowhere near great but a might
sight better than the original. & that’s what this essay series is about!
Final Score (0-100):
W.B. Yeats’ Into The Twilight: 55
TOP’s Out From The Twilight: 87
**********
Addendum:
The scoring for poems throughout the TOP series is as follows (loosely based on the
American grade school century system of grading) + the percentage of poems
(published & not published) that occupy that level:
100:
Absolute Perfection (a virtual impossibility) 0% (0)
95-99:
Great Poems (many All-Time Classics are here- their memorability the evidence of
their greatness- abounds with elemental greatness) .001% (1 in 100,000)
90-94:
Near-Great Poems (you can reasonably argue for greatness but 1 or 2 elements are
missing- often that ineffable something, yet many great elements
are there) .009% (9 in 100,000)
85-89-
Excellent Poems (high technical skills are manifest; perhaps 1 or 2 hints of
greatness) .09% (9 in 10,000)
80-84:
Very Good Poems (high technical skills &/or memorable idea/technique) .9%
(9 in 1000)
75-79:
Good Poems (very sound technically- pluses outweigh minuses) 1% (1 in 100)
70-74:
Mediocre Poems (good & bad are within, but since it’s more difficult to
get a good element, they have more weight- i.e.- 2 pluses might outweigh 4
minuses) 3% (3 in 100)
65-69:
Barely Passable Poems (slightly more to recommend than damn!) 5% (1 in 20)
64-0:
Bad to Terrible to Doggerel to Atrocities (self-explanatory- plain old shit!) 90%
(9 in 10)
The #s also progress geometrically, not
arithmetically. Therefore the 5 point difference between poems scored a 92 &
97 is far greater than between poems scored a 72 & 77. While 1 can argue
jumps of a digit or 2, to argue jumps between whole levels is very difficult.
Personally, I’d not consider posting any poems under 75, & few under 80.
Too bad I am alone in this standard!
Return to TOP
