Recently I was teaching a poem by Yeats that has always reminded me of a stretched sonnet. 'In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz' has an octave of 20 lines and a sestet of 12 lines, but as Yeats was not interested in the sonnet form (he wrote only one sonnet), the comparison is probably subjective. The poem begins:

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Eight lines later, Yeats gives a reprise of the opening:

Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
'That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Immediately after this, at the beginning of the elongated second section of the poem, Yeats writes:

Dear Shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.

That line 'Dear shadows, now you know it all,' I have always found almost unbearably emotional, and standing in front of a class of undergraduates I again wondered why this was. Very early the next morning I woke with the answer: the line reproduces in a slightly different pattern the o sounds in windows/open/south in the second line. The two young women are shadows now, but in saying so Yeats brings back his earlier line which blazed its light behind their silky young bodies. Then in the very last line of the poem - 'Bid me strike a match and blow' - he softens its angry, cornered, very Protestant destructiveness by concluding the poem with a final o sound that takes us back to the heaven of that opening quatrain. It's like watching someone turn from blowing vigorously into a fire in order to breathe gently against a dandelion clock. Realising the subtlety of Yeats's music, I began to imagine a critical account of his or any poet's work which would jettison all earnest explication of the text - meaning, paraphrasable content, social and historical situation - and concentrate entirely on sound, cadence, metre, rhyme, form. A critical study that would be true to Yeats's dictum 'Words alone are certain good.' And then I began to wonder where I could find such a book.

LRB 22 January 1998 | PDF Download