Trying to catch up with some Irish authors before a big vacation....I have read quotes by W.B. Yeats but never read any of his poetry collections. This one is supposed to be just like when it was released in 1928 but with some notes included. I am glad those notes were included. He seemed very intrigued by gods and goddesses, so the notes helped a bit there. I preferred the shorter poems, especially "The Hero, the Girl and the Fool." The longer one favored, once I got into it a bit, "The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid." I have a harder time with rhyming verse and then where the breaks are influence how I read them, so I have to let them sink a bit or re-read them several times until I can get the right flow. I can now say I have read some W.B. Yeats poetry. ( )

I read this collection because my high school junior has begun learning "Secrets of the Old," the only poem of Yeats's that Samuel Barber set to music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MORVsHMmAP4

"Secrets of the Old" is one of the few poems in the collection that can be mistaken for upbeat, or at very least nostalgic--and yet these more happy interpretations of this poem are incorrect, I think. While "Secrets" is not a lament, it's utterly sad. The speaker expresses the solitude of age--everyone has died except three old women, one of whom has lost her mind. Everything that once seemed vital--especially old loves--are gone and forgotten by all but these three women. Says the speaker: "we three make up a solitude," a feeling I often wonder about when I see old people together, especially after they have just heard that another old friend has died.

Reading the entire anthology left me with the same deep sadness that I felt from the last book of the Iliad/the sadness of Priam meeting with Achilles, both of them in mourning, both of them knowing they are soon going to die themselves. I just complained in a recent review of the utter bleakness of Cheever's Falconer, but I feel so differently about this collection, because the sadness it evokes rests on the premise that life is good; humans are good; so even though I'm weepy and thinking about the sadness of aging and death, it feels like in these poems I've read the best kind of literature. ( )

I will never be able to sufficiently thank the highschool english teacher who introduced me to Yeats. I bought this edition days ago simply because it was so beautiful. 1.28.07 ( )

E-Bay with Uncut pages