sing whatever is well made

In reading this last collection of Yeats’s poems I have begun to focus on how he connects music with the poet and how that relationship is often times burdened. Burdened either by an audience or the sense of a certain responsibility. This responsibility is evidenced in ‘Under Ben Bulben’ when Yeats writes, “Irish poets learn your trade Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.” In this particular section the voice of the poem is telling poets to write of past greatness and “cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.”

In ‘Lapis Lazuli’ Yeats opens with, “I have heard that hysterical women say they are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, of poets that are always gay.” There seems to be something ineffectual about the poet especially in times of turbulent Irish history; poets are no longer lauded for their art (like Homer) but seen as superfluous. Throughout the course of this poem, as Yeats reflects on the carving, there is a longing in its tone to be one of those three Chinese men who, in the end, are immortalized in the stone with their easy made “glittering” and “gay” by “mournful melodies.”

Images of music and singing are prevalent in ‘Sailing to Byzantium.” In this poem music (poetry) enlivens the past but the ancient monuments themselves served as the genesis for the poem. Yeats evokes the sages like the muse and says, “O sages standing in God’s holy fire as in the gold mosaic of the wall, come from the holy fire, perne in gyre, and be the singing masters of my soul.” He begs them to take him from the earth so that he may reborn not in the “form of any natural thing” but to be “set upon a golden bough to sing to the lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past, passing, or to come.”