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

[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