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utterly random blogging about W. B. Yeats
Dec. 6th, 2006 08:47 pm(I accidentally typed "W.B. Yeast," so y'all can laugh at me now.)
I finally got a chance to tell the professor who taught me to appreciate Yeats that this had been the case, and he took it as the very great compliment it was. After reading![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
angevin2's entries of late, I've realized how important it is to tell your advisor, mentors, and miscellaneous influential people this stuff while they're still alive, so I've been going out of my way to talk to the folks who were near retirement when I started grad school. In this particular case, the Yeats / Joyce seminar was one of the first classes I took at the University of Basketball -- I'm not sure why I took it, since I was absolutely convinced I hated both authors, although I think it may have been for the Irish culture and history component.
Kick-ass class, anyway. I've actually forgotten most of the Irish history, but the poetry sticks with you, and mellows with you as you grow older. (This is also one of the things I feel utterly foolish about saying to a seventy-year-old professor when I'm thirty, but it is true -- you get stuff you didn't get when you were twenty-two, even though there is a huge gap between being twenty-one and twenty-two, and no one has ever articulated this fact better than A. E. Housman.) Anyway, I've found myself thinking of "The Wild Swans at Coole" every autumn since then, and it's one of those poems that just gets better every autumn, and I'd like to post it here because it's just that good and because I don't know exactly where I'll be next fall.
( Poetry beneath the cut )
This is one of those poems that makes you think of far too many things at once, but mostly about how the places you love will still be there after you leave them -- and after the seventy or eighty or ninety autumns you pass on earth, there will still be more autumns and more springs. I don't know whether this makes me happy or unhappy -- it's just one of those things where you know it is, and you hope you pass on something of use to the generations after you. Which is why we teach, I guess.
I finally got a chance to tell the professor who taught me to appreciate Yeats that this had been the case, and he took it as the very great compliment it was. After reading
angevin2's entries of late, I've realized how important it is to tell your advisor, mentors, and miscellaneous influential people this stuff while they're still alive, so I've been going out of my way to talk to the folks who were near retirement when I started grad school. In this particular case, the Yeats / Joyce seminar was one of the first classes I took at the University of Basketball -- I'm not sure why I took it, since I was absolutely convinced I hated both authors, although I think it may have been for the Irish culture and history component.Kick-ass class, anyway. I've actually forgotten most of the Irish history, but the poetry sticks with you, and mellows with you as you grow older. (This is also one of the things I feel utterly foolish about saying to a seventy-year-old professor when I'm thirty, but it is true -- you get stuff you didn't get when you were twenty-two, even though there is a huge gap between being twenty-one and twenty-two, and no one has ever articulated this fact better than A. E. Housman.) Anyway, I've found myself thinking of "The Wild Swans at Coole" every autumn since then, and it's one of those poems that just gets better every autumn, and I'd like to post it here because it's just that good and because I don't know exactly where I'll be next fall.
( Poetry beneath the cut )
This is one of those poems that makes you think of far too many things at once, but mostly about how the places you love will still be there after you leave them -- and after the seventy or eighty or ninety autumns you pass on earth, there will still be more autumns and more springs. I don't know whether this makes me happy or unhappy -- it's just one of those things where you know it is, and you hope you pass on something of use to the generations after you. Which is why we teach, I guess.
