Darkly amused

[redbird]

[Background: there's a long-running campaign of posting poetry, ancient through contemporary, on the subways. I think it started on the London Underground.]

On the train home today, I was out of book, so I glanced up, and saw some very familiar poetry. Eight lines of Yeats: from "Turning and turning in the widening gyre" through "and the worst are full of passionate intensity."

I don't know if whoever chooses poems decided the Republican convention delegates could use that poem--or that the rest of us who are going to have to put up with the damned thing would be comforted, cheered, or otherwise aided by it--or if the timing is sheer coincidence, but it seems fitting somehow.

Comments

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Yeats is good stuff. Robert Parker, one of my favorite detective novelists, quotes him freqquently. In fact, he used "The Widening Gyre" as one of his book titles.

[pameladean]

He used "Ceremony" for another, and intended a reference to the same poem ("the ceremony of innocence is drowned").

I first discovered Yeats because Damon Knight wrote a short story called "What Rough Beast."

Pamela

[kightp.livejournal.com]

I was taught poetry in college by a slight, bearded and not-quite-doddering Brit named Peter Thomas who'd once met Auden. He never let us forget it. But I still love that poem. The line, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;" has been coming back to me again and again lately ...

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I first discovered Yeats because Damon Knight wrote a short story called "What Rough Beast."

That is similar to my first discovering Housman because Roger Zelazny wrote a short story called "For a Breath I Tarry."

Science Fiction is Educational!

[pameladean]

Indeed it is. Even pretty tawdry science fiction.

I first became interested in Shakespeare because a quite bad episode of the original "Star Trek" series featured a production of Macbeth.

Pamela

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

And what rough hewn beast, its time come round again, slouchers towards NYC to be nominated?

[minkboylove.livejournal.com]

[Background: there's a long-running campaign of posting poetry, ancient through contemporary, on the subways. I think it started on the London Underground.]

Yep. I think it did. Poems on the Underground - verses of Ted Hughes and Carol Anne Duffy placed at strap-hanging level so that you could think about something other than how bloody long it was going to take you to get to Charing Cross this morning. (I used to commute on the Northern Line, aptly nicknamed The Misery Line.) Poems, suicides, mice and looooong delays are my most enduring memories of the London Underground.

Scarily accurate poem though, The Second Coming, and one of my all time favourites.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"Background: there's a long-running campaign of posting poetry, ancient through contemporary, on the subways. I think it started on the London Underground."

Was it in London before New York? I first remember seeing poems in the Subways in New York, but it was after I moved away and it may just be an artifact of my travel schedule.

B

[wouldyoueva.livejournal.com]

The mass transit system in Philly (SEPTA) had a campaign in the early 70s to have poems, short-short stories and the like scattered in among the ads. However, the one I remember the best were step by step instructions for making grilled cheese sandwiches on your ironing board with your iron and aluminum foil. I never had the nerve to try it but it seemed useful enough to remember.

I will be staying in a hotel room with ironing boards next week. Maybe I'll do it for my picky eater as a snack.