A Bronze Head Poem by William Butler Yeats
A Bronze Head
HERE at right of the entrance this bronze head,
Human, superhuman, a bird's round eye,
Everything else withered and mummy-dead.
What great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky
(Something may linger there though all else die;)
And finds there nothing to make its tetror less
i{Hysterica passio} of its own emptiness?
No dark tomb-haunter once; her form all full
As though with magnanimity of light,
Yet a most gentle woman; who can tell
Which of her forms has shown her substance right?
Or maybe substance can be composite,
profound McTaggart thought so, and in a breath
A mouthful held the extreme of life and death.
But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,
I saw the wildness in her and I thought
A vision of terror that it must live through
Had shattered her soul. Propinquity had brought
Imagiation to that pitch where it casts out
All that is not itself: I had grown wild
And wandered murmuring everywhere, 'My child, my
child! '
Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall;
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave,
And wondered what was left for massacre to save.
brilliance burns in metaphors........what was left for massacre to save.....
............great imagery....so vividly the bronze head can be pictured.....
A vision of terror that it must live through Had shattered her soul. Propinquity had brought Imagiation to that pitch where it casts out great write great 10++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
These great poets never wrote poems in their thousands like we churn out prose poems. Each one well thought out and chiseled meticulously. Nature takes thousands of years to make diamond from coal.
A very nice poem to read, as we usually know from Yeats, his fantasy runs off with him, it has become a wonderful story with a contemporary packaging! Really fantastic poem.
Yeats and Keats, my most favourite Classic poets! 5 Stars for this fascinating poem!
" Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave' And wondered what was left for massacre to save" Great composition penned by a master craftsman.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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4/16/2024 1:55:26 PM # 1.0.0.1119
One of Yeats weaker poems in my opinion.