Looking for some William Butler Yeats poetry today brought me around to singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, with a reminder of how powerful writers from the past seed the future.
Mitchell’s rich lyrical legacy is her own, of course. But for one song, she recast Yeats’ poem Second Coming and put it to haunting music. I didn’t know the Yeats poem until coming upon it today and the first two lines stopped me cold: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
I knew those lines well from Mitchell’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem on her Night Ride Home album. If I were a more careful reader of liner notes, I’d have seen the credit she gave the Irish poet and not been so surprised when I stumbled upon Second Coming.
Neither the poem nor the song give up their meaning easily. It’s not like reading Mary Oliver, whose work I love for its clarity and simplicity. Reading Yeats, who received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1923, feels more to me like watching waves crashing against headlands, powerful and complicated.
I’m intrigued by “spiritus mundi,” a phrase in Second Coming referring to a kind of universal muse for poets and writers.
Of all the poets available to ponder, I don’t know why Yeats beckoned today. Besides the sheer enjoyment of reading poetry, I feel like my own writing benefits from seeing how poets play with words. Going forward with this new phrase for the muse feels like a good omen for the coming year.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 