Welcome to the Fray discussion -- and my apologies for the silly term "chitchat" in the tagline. Writers don't control headlines and such. (I suggest we ignore that, and proceed to this poem, and poetry.)

RP

Talking about Yeats sometimes makes me sound like those friends of mine who can't enjoy a baseball game without listing Ground-Ball Fly Ratios and Defense Independent Component ERAs.

In short, I'm obsessed. Maybe I can at least give some interesting background about Yeats's turn toward common idiom, which RP points out in the unfolding poem.

This poem is from 1904, when Yeats was very conscious of this very aspect of idiom. He was trying to get more of the world to rub through the page. He wrote to his friend Katharine Tynan on his earlier poetry: “It is almost all a flight into fairyland from the real world, and a summons to that flight. It is not a poetry of insight and Knowledge, but of longing and complaint—the cry of the heart against necessity.” In 1903 he wrote to his patroness Lady Gregory, “My work has gotten more and more masculine. It has more salt in it.” And in 1905 to a friend named John Quinn: “I believe more strongly every day that the element of strength in poetic language is common idiom, just as the element of strength in construction is common passion.”

If these quotes show how conscious Yeats was of using common idiom, they also leave some questions, especially about "Adam's Curse." For one thing, the image and language of the ending ("weary-hearted," "hollow moon") still seems Victorian or Pre-Raphaelite. It's almost as if the common idiom throughout has "earned" Yeats the kind of language he used more liberally earlier in his writing life. And if he told Katherine Tynan that his work was becoming more "masculine," here he's comparing it to woman's work.

Maybe it's contradictions like these that make Yeats so fascinating. He himself famously wrote in 1916 in Per Amica Silentia Lunae “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of with quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

Well, I'll muzzle my quoting and dating, at least until Game 6 of the World Series. But I'm curious to hear how others respond to these contradictions about idiom and gender.

If these quotes show how conscious Yeats was of using common idiom, they also leave some questions, especially about "Adam's Curse." For one thing, the image and language of the ending ("weary-hearted," "hollow moon") still seems Victorian or Pre-Raphaelite. It's almost as if the common idiom throughout has "earned" Yeats the kind of language he used more liberally earlier in his writing life.

Peter, don't you think the Victorian language is of a piece with the speaker's comment that he "strove / To love you in the old high way of love"?

Exactly. I couldn't have said it better, Mary Ann.

And that "high old way of love" connects too with the sly comedy RP alludes to in the line "Precedents out of beautiful old books."

And yet the seemingly Victorian language in the last line seems sincere and (at least to me) very beautiful.

Peter, Well it should be compelling,to say the least, watching Petitte and Pdreo in Game 6, so I'm with you there, but while we wait do feel free to say more of what you know of Yeats and his poem .

Why does the curse become the fall, in the poem? Does Yeats talk about that, anywhere, and is it simply labor that he is talking about? Or does he conflate labor with his longing for the mild beautiful one?

I am so far amazed that women haven't entered the fray here, as Yeats might be called to the carpet for the words the mild one speaks: that women labor to be beautiful .. . .By the time of Courtney Love that becomes 'pretty on the inside . . . '

While not an exeprt, I believe Yeats does anticpate, to some degree, the 20th century's fascination with idiom and vulgarity and the shock of newness in speech and image. Does he, after Adam's Curse, pursue the idiomatic? Does his vision of the heaven's also pursue this use of the vernacular, or is that more academic and free writing?

mgerard. Rachel de Woskin and Mary Ann have posted here already-- no amazement called for!

In relation to the "Victorian" element you and Peter and Mary Ann have observed: as I gradually, without willing it, got this poem by heart, I noticed that the passage with embers of twilight and trembling blue-green and so forth was the last part I could do properly. Maybe that passage represents Yeats including, and using, the more pre-modern, Celtic Twilight part of his own sensibility. The softest, most nostalgic moment triggering the most intimate and direct moment, that follows it?

Yes, MGerard, WBY's work does grow more idiomatic, at least as I read it. And yet it might be too easy to draw a straight line of development. Some of the late poems are laden with symbols and high language, and some of the earlier poems have beguilingly direct moments.

The lines you mention, RP, might be difficult to remember because of the metrics too. As the language gets more old-fashioned, the scansion actually gets less traditional.

We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell

The first of these is pretty strange in its meter, despite being conventional in its diction. Anyone not familiar with the fancy Greek terms for scansion can still recognize this simply from saying it aloud. Then there's a normative iambic pentameter line--though with the relative stress pushing against the metrical pattern at "blue-green." And then more weird metrics (x//x/xx/x/)-- as if Yeats were wearing the iambic line itself down to its bones.

This is a good point, Peter. It's true that the meter relaxes at exactly the most late-19th-century, early-Yeats-ish language and material-- almost as though he's making the phrase "Celtic Twilight" a literal, rather than literary phrase!-- and that relaxing doubtless is part of my distinct memory of finding that I had all of the poem by memory except for these lines.

I'm not sure what to make of what you point out. But it is interesting. (And incidentally, convincing detective work on your part.)

I can stand chitchat. I wish there was some way to get rid of the ubiquitous question marks.

To speak in several tones, in phrases from from different emotional postures, and eras--that's the expanded 'word hoard' of the conversation poem, right? It steps outside the more unified presence of the monologe? Robert Browning's Duke didn't tolerate other talkers too well. But in a conversation, we sound different to others (even if we don't let them talk much). Yeats's terrific metaphor, of the moon and time, that simultaneously follows the moon and stars path, the tides' work, and the cycles of days and years, offers a wonderful three-way conversation.

Falcon, on those headline tags-- I'm with you . . . I guess someone at Slate thinks that the how-to interrogative is cool, or urgent, or stylish, or something. Imagine writing these little introductions, then waiting to see what the headline will be.

David Gewanter, yes thanks for this distinction between the monologue and the conversation poem . . . and an account of all that is going on with that hollow-shell-moon.

What's curious to me is the fray is talking -- or writing -- about the techniques of writing, or the ins and outs of rhyme and conversation. We don't discuss the artwork in any historical or interpretive way . . . This is not a complaint, though I wonder if this accent on techniques limits the disucssion in any crucial or compelling way . . . When I read now, I am always trying to place a work -- historically, philosophically, to see it as part of the 'evolution of consciousness' and art as it presses forward. . . For example, if you think of Yeats' poems The Second Coming or Sailing to Byzantium, would we talk more of meanings than making? What the pros and cons of talk of making -- the dance rather than the dancer?