The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #28744   Message #361219
Posted By: Peter K (Fionn)
21-Dec-00 - 02:21 PM
Thread Name: William Butler Yeats - poetry and biography
Subject: RE: Help: Yeats
The collected works in an edition edited by someone called Jeffares (Norman Jeffares?) has one of the most authoritative assessments of the poems, and the various forms in which they were published. Can't remember the title.

The text of A Prayer for My Daughter provided (word-perfect I think) by Amos, reminds me of what always struck me as a strange quirk in Yeats: he always made "wind" rhyme with "blind," even where he was referring to the stuff that blows.

I am afraid that LL's offering falls well short of Amos's faithfulness to the original. Apart from confusing cloths with clothes, it should be "I have" rather than "I will" and the third line is badly garbled. (From memory it should be something like: "The blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half light"

There is at least one album of people reciting Yeats that includes Yeats himself, reciting the LAke Isle of Inisfree and something else. He introduces himself by smaking no apology for honouring the rhythm in his reciting: "It took me a devil of a job to put the words together that way in the first place," he explained, or words to that effect.