Per Amica Silentia Lunae E-Book

W.b.yeats

• Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In "Per Amica Silentia Lunae," W. B. Yeats navigates the intricate interplay between the personal and the mystical, delving into themes of love, loss, and the transcendental. The collection is rife with rich symbolism and allusions to the esoteric traditions that captivated Yeats throughout his life. His lyrical style, characterized by vivid imagery and musicality, invites readers into a contemplative space where the boundaries between the earthly and the ethereal blur. This work is an essential piece within the context of late 19th and early 20th-century literature, reflecting the Symbolist movement's influence and foreshadowing modernist developments in poetry. Yeats, a pivotal figure in the Irish literary renaissance, was deeply engaged with spirituality, folklore, and the occult. His involvement in the Golden Dawn, a mystical society, infused his poetry with a unique perspective on the supernatural and the subconscious. The personal experiences and philosophical inquiries that Yeats undertook shaped his artistic output, making "Per Amica Silentia Lunae" not just a collection of poems, but a significant exploration of the relationship between humanity and the cosmos. This captivating collection is recommended to readers seeking to explore the depths of human experience through the lens of mystical thought. Yeats' profound reflections and evocative language make this book a timeless journey into the soul's quest for understanding and connection.

Leseprobe

W. B. Yeats

Per Amica Silentia Lunae

Published by Good Press, 2022

[email protected]

EAN 4057664652638

Table of Contents

ANIMA HOMINIS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

ANIMA MUNDI

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

EPILOGUE

ANIMA HOMINIS

Table of Contents

I

Table of Contents

When I come home after meeting men who are strange to me, and sometimes even after talking to women, I go over all I have said in gloom and disappointment. Perhaps I have overstated everything from a desire to vex or startle, from hostility that is but fear; or all my natural thoughts have been drowned by an undisciplined sympathy. My fellow-diners have hardly seemed of mixed humanity, and how should I keep my head among images of good and evil, crude allegories.

But when I shut my door and light the candle, I invite a Marmorean Muse, an art, where no thought or emotion has come to mind because another man has thought or felt something different, for now there must be no reaction, action only, and the world must move my heart but to the heart’s discovery of itself, and I begin to dream of eyelids that do not quiver before the bayonet: all my thoughts have ease and joy, I am all virtue and confidence. When I come to put in rhyme what I have found it will be a hard toil, but for a moment I believe I have found myself and not my anti-self. It is only the shrinking from toil perhaps that convinces me that I have been no more myself than is the cat the medicinal grass it is eating in the garden.

How could I have mistaken for myself an heroic condition that from early boyhood has made me superstitious? That which comes as complete, as minutely organised, as are those elaborate, brightly lighted buildings and sceneries appearing in a moment, as I lie between sleeping and waking, must come from above me and beyond me. At times I remember that place in Dante where he sees in his chamber the “Lord of Terrible Aspect,” and how, seeming “to rejoice inwardly that it was a marvel to see, speaking, he said, many things among the which I could understand but few, and of these this: ego dominus tuus”; or should the conditions come, not as it were in a gesture—as the image of a man—but in some fine landscape, it is of Boehme, maybe, that I think, and of that country where we “eternally solace ourselves in the excellent beautiful flourishing of all manner of flowers and forms, both trees and plants, and all kinds of fruit.”

II

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When I consider the minds of my friends, among artists and emotional writers, I discover a like contrast. I have sometimes told one close friend that her only fault is a habit of harsh judgment with those who have not her sympathy, and she has written comedies where the wickedest people seem but bold children. She does not know why she has created that world where no one is ever judged, a high celebration of indulgence, but to me it seems that her ideal of beauty is the compensating dream of a nature wearied out by over-much judgment. I know a famous actress who in private life is like the captain of some buccaneer ship holding his crew to good behaviour at the mouth of a blunderbuss, and upon the stage she excels in the representation of women who stir to pity and to desire because they need our protection, and is most adorable as one of those young queens imagined by Maeterlinck who have so little will, so little self, that they are like shadows sighing at the edge of the world. When I last saw her in her own house she lived in a torrent of words and movements, she could not listen, and all about her upon the walls were women drawn by Burne-Jones in his latest period. She had invited me in the hope that I would defend those women, who were always listening, and are as necessary to her as a contemplative Buddha to a Japanese Samurai, against a French critic who would persuade her to take into her heart in their stead a Post-Impressionist picture of a fat, ruddy, nude woman lying upon a Turkey carpet.

There are indeed certain men whose art is less an opposing virtue than a compensation for some accident of health or circumstance. During the riots over the first production of the Playboy of the Western World Synge was confused, without clear thought, and was soon ill—indeed the strain of that week may perhaps have hastened his death—and he was, as is usual with gentle and silent men, scrupulously accurate in all his statements. In his art he made, to delight his ear and his mind’s eye, voluble daredevils who “go romancing through a romping lifetime ... to the dawning of the Judgment Day.” At other moments this man, condemned to the life of a monk by bad health, takes an amused pleasure in “great queens ... making themselves matches from the start to the end.” Indeed, in all his imagination he delights in fine physical life, in life where the moon pulls up the tide. The last act of Deirdre of the Sorrows, where his art is at its noblest, was written upon his death-bed. He was not sure of any world to come, he was leaving his betrothed and his unwritten play—“Oh, what a waste of time,” he said to me; he hated to die, and in the last speeches of Deirdre and in the middle act he accepted death and dismissed life with a gracious gesture. He gave to Deirdre the emotion that seemed to him most desirable, most difficult, most fitting, and maybe saw in those delighted seven years, now dwindling from her, the fulfilment of his own life.

III

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When I think of any great poetical writer of the past (a realist is an historian and obscures the cleavage by the record of his eyes) I comprehend, if I know the lineaments of his life, that the work is the man’s flight from his entire horoscope, his blind struggle in the network of the stars. William Morris, a happy, busy, most irascible man, described dim colour and pensive emotion, following, beyond any man of his time, an indolent muse; while Savage Landor topped us all in calm nobility when the pen was in his hand, as in the daily violence of his passion when he had laid it down. He had in his Imaginary Conversations reminded us, as it were, that the Venus de Milo is a stone, and yet he wrote when the copies did not come from the printer as soon as he expected: “I have ... had the resolution to tear in pieces all my sketches and projects and to forswear all future undertakings. I have tried to sleep away my time and pass two-thirds of the twenty-four hours in bed. I may speak of myself as a dead man.” I imagine Keats to have been born with that thirst for luxury common to many at the outsetting of the Romantic Movement, and not able, like wealthy Beckford, to slake it with beautiful and strange objects. It drove him to imaginary delights; ignorant, poor, and in poor health, and not perfectly well-bred, he knew himself driven from tangible luxury; meeting Shelley, he was resentful and suspicious because he, as Leigh Hunt recalls, “being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man of birth his natural enemy.”

IV

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Some thirty years ago I read a prose allegory by Simeon Solomon, long out of print and unprocurable, and remember or seem to remember a sentence, “a hollow image of fulfilled desire.” All happy art seems to me that hollow image, but when its lineaments express also the poverty or the exasperation that set its maker to the work, we call it tragic art. Keats but gave us his dream of luxury; but while reading Dante we never long escape the conflict, partly because the verses are at moments a mirror of his history, and yet more because that history is so clear and simple that it has the quality of art. I am no Dante scholar, and I but read him in Shadwell or in Dante Rossetti, but I am always persuaded that he celebrated the most pure lady poet ever sung and the Divine Justice, not merely because death took that lady and Florence banished her singer, but because he had to struggle in his own heart with his unjust anger and his lust; while unlike those of the great poets, who are at peace with the world and at war with themselves, he fought a double war. “Always,” says Boccaccio, “both in youth and maturity he found room among his virtues for lechery”; or as Matthew Arnold preferred to change the phrase, “his conduct was exceeding irregular.” Guido Cavalcanti, as Rossetti translates him, finds “too much baseness” in his friend:

“And still thy speech of me, heartfelt and kind, Hath made me treasure up thy poetry; But now I dare not, for thy abject life, Make manifest that I approve thy rhymes.”