Yeats had the tremendous ability of manipulating space and time in his poems. He can maintain tension even while focusing on a single image over two stanzas:
Not much is happening here: the speaker, an old woman, decides to cut her finger, she cuts her finger, she holds her cut finger up and sees blood coming down her hand, and then light comes to illuminate her blood; this goes on for 7 or 8 lines, across a stanza break. But Yeats manages to make this moment seem cinematic and significant, an incredible close-up using rhyme, enjambment, and repetition.
At the other end, Yeats can compress, sweep history or scope into a few lines. His "Mount Meru" sonnet is a great example. It happens also here, in the poem that closes the same sequence:
To use Harold Bloom's words, Yeats had a very cunning temperament indeed.
...Imagining that I could A greater with a lesser pang assuage Or but to find if withered vein ran blood, I tore my body that its wine might cover Whatever could recall the lip of lover. And after that I held my fingers up, Stared at the wine-dark nail, or dark that ran Down every withered finger from the top; But the dark changed to red, and torches shone, And deafening music shook the leaves;...
Not much is happening here: the speaker, an old woman, decides to cut her finger, she cuts her finger, she holds her cut finger up and sees blood coming down her hand, and then light comes to illuminate her blood; this goes on for 7 or 8 lines, across a stanza break. But Yeats manages to make this moment seem cinematic and significant, an incredible close-up using rhyme, enjambment, and repetition.
At the other end, Yeats can compress, sweep history or scope into a few lines. His "Mount Meru" sonnet is a great example. It happens also here, in the poem that closes the same sequence:
After the zoom-in on the "soft cheek of a girl," we're given a vision of society and economy ("rich man"), a sweeping view of the landscape and geography ("fields"), generations of men in all trades ("Mariners, rough harvesters"); this expands even further to the cosmic ("Gods upon Parnassus" and "the Empyrean" - parallel views used, I think, to keep the flow across the stanza break). From that vantage, even our largest conurbations are miniscule. Verbally, this is done by reducing them to simple nouns: "City and city may contend."OVERCOME -- O bitter sweetness, Inhabitant of the soft cheek of a girl -- The rich man and his affairs, The fat flocks and the fields' fatness, Mariners, rough harvesters; Overcome Gods upon Parnassus; Overcome the Empyrean; hurl Heaven and Earth out of their places, That in the Same calamity Brother and brother, friend and friend, Family and family, City and city may contend, By that great glory driven wild. Pray I will and sing I must, And yet I weep -- Oedipus' child Descends into the loveless dust.
To use Harold Bloom's words, Yeats had a very cunning temperament indeed.
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