DWill wrote:Have you actually read "A Vision," Robert? I think not even the prof. I had for a Yeats/Joyce class had. Yeats was really into the esoteric stuff, though, that's certain. While I think some of it was bunk, it did give him poetic ideas and language that he used to good effect in his work.

I've been looking at my copy of A Vision again over the last week. Most of it makes no sense, with Yeats asserting that imaginary spirits inspire him to automatic writing. The chapter on The Great Year of the Ancients is the only bit that I really like, with scholarly discussion of Plato, Cicero, Virgil, Anaximander, Empedocles, Caesar, Proclus, Christ, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Plotinus, Vico, Dante, Frobenius, Spengler, Goethe, the Upanishads, and Croce. He says "When the automatic script began, neither I nor my wife knew, or knew that we knew, that any man had tried to explain history philosophically. I, at any rate, would have said that all written upon the subject was a paragraph in my own Per Amica Silentia Lunae." I'm not sure what paragraph he means as an explanation of history by philosophy. I wonder if anyone here has noticed my interest in the friendly silent moon? Yeats makes a number of comments in his discussion of the Great Year, which explain his thinking in The Second Coming, which he uses to conclude the chapter. The division of the Age into the 28 days of the moon does not make much sense to me, although the broad symbolic theme of continual rise and fall measuring the ages against the cycle of the moon has a certain ethereal beauty.

DWill wrote:

Saffron wrote:

DWill wrote: You like the poem's tie-in with the Hesperides, I'm sure.

I admit ignorance. Can you explain the Hesperides connection?

Well, I cadged this from Wiki:" The Garden of the Hesperides is Hera's orchard in the west, where either a single tree or a grove of immortality-giving golden apples grew. The apples were planted from the fruited branches that Gaia gave to her as a wedding gift when Hera accepted Zeus. The Hesperides were given the task of tending to the grove, but occasionally plucked from it themselves. Not trusting them, Hera also placed in the garden a never-sleeping, hundred-headed dragon named Ladon as an additional safeguard."

No idea about the silver apples, though.

You almost didn't give enough information for me to figure this out. I had to read the poem a few times to connect the apples at the end of the poem to Hera's apples and the tree of life.

Saffron wrote: You almost didn't give enough information for me to figure this out. I had to read the poem a few times to connect the apples at the end of the poem to Hera's apples and the tree of life.

Oh, I'm not a big one for thinking that we need to bring in the whole train of associations that we can find in sources, when a writer makes an allusion. Maybe Yeats just liked reworking the Greek/Roman classical reference into the Irish myth.

DWill wrote:

Saffron wrote: You almost didn't give enough information for me to figure this out. I had to read the poem a few times to connect the apples at the end of the poem to Hera's apples and the tree of life.

Oh, I'm not a big one for thinking that we need to bring in the whole train of associations that we can find in sources, when a writer makes an allusion. Maybe Yeats just liked reworking the Greek/Roman classical reference into the Irish myth.

No, me either. I just wanted to understand the comment in your post to Robert.