I thought I liked the poetry of Yeats but when I looked through my grand Folio Society ‘complete works of’ I couldn’t find anything that sparked for me today. Probably tomorrow things will be different. What I did read, in his ‘General Introduction,’ was the following:

“A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria. Even when the poet seems most himself he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.” 

 later: “.....we adore him because nature has grown intelligible, and by doing so a part of our creative power.”  

Also: “We know everything because we are everything.”

It’s thoughts like these that make me adore Yeats!

I’ve also been re-reading Lessing’s ‘The Four-Gated City’ looking for something different to the last read-through, the generated thoughts rather than the story-line. There’s a moment when Martha Quest, watching the young teenage son of her employer, realises he is in that brief flash of beauty that boys pass through somewhere in adolescence, the moment before they become solid, crystalised, set into their moulds. The moment when choir boys look like angels and rather take ones breath away.Young girls see Francis simply as a handsome boy; ‘To see the rest one had to be a conspirant with time. That’s what age brings, new insights, new perspectives.’