From: Natalie@yabbs
To: pixy@yabbs
Subject: re: Bloom re Yeats
Date: Thu May 26 14:10:10 1994
2 can play that game

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Come near; I would, before my time to go,
Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.

Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last being but a broken man
I must be satisified with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot.
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.
* * * * * 
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till.  Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Genius.  Pure genius.  Yeats speaks to y 'foul rag and bone shop of the 
heart' in a way Eliot never could.  I am inspired by Yeats to write.  I 
can hear the music of his words.  There is no music for me in Eliot.

Natalie