Here’s why Yeats is great: He can make you a better kisser.
This is what I told some creative writing students who were writing poems with me last summer, and I’m holding my ground. Try these lines out:
Who will go drive with Fergus now,
and pierce the deep wood’s woven shade
The active ingredient isn’t Fergus, it is that bottleneck run of vowels in the second line, and the reason I love reading and re-reading Yeats. If you look at yourself in the mirror when reading those lines, it looks like you are trying to swallow a cloud. Reading that line takes some physical effort.
Dramatics aside, what a lovely gesture, too–the shade of the woods so thick it seems woven, difficult to navigate, a fabric of shadow, a quilted other that we enter only with points and edges, that kernel of violence tucked in the wash of the vowel sounds…
Or how about these lines, from the same poem:
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars.
Sure, there’s cumulative torque from the stack of parallel phrases that shoot you to the closing gesture of the poem. But the real cumulative power is in the vowel sounds piling up on top of the meter. ‘For Fergus’ toys–the switched sounds inside the same construction startle–and makes your mouth move like it is trying to get out of the way of something. The same happens (though more subdued, over more space) with “white breast” and “dim sea”: the long ‘i’ in the first, the short ‘i’ in the second–a similar but different move that draws attention to itself. Less attending to vowels, and Yeats would have a flatter crescendo at the end of his poem–it would be formal verse for form’s sake (and though honorable, I suppose–not really noteworthy.)
Check out again what that last line does–it’s a sneak:
And all disheveled wandering stars.
That repeated ‘ah’ sound in ‘all,’ ‘wandering’ and ’stars’ is operatic–it is like a held note, like a stone skipping across the surface of a lake. It is a second increase in the already moving momentum of the second stanza–in its movement it is a miniature of what the stanza is already doing, but a repeated sound here instead of slight change. I suppose it makes the whole poem feel a bit like a chord.
Is it just coincidence that the “ah” sound is a universal sound of sustained satisfaction? You make the sound of contentment at the end of this poem three times! With just a few scant syllables in between to catch your breath. It’s like a scaffolding around the pleasure the poem already gifted us.
There’s a correlation between reading him out loud and the muscle tone of your lower face. The fact that it is some of the most beautiful poetry aloud isn’t chance–it is treasure. Hoard it.