Category: Books and Other Reading

William Butler Yeats, “When You Are Old” / “Peggy Sue Got Married”

peggy sue collage

Part three of my personal tribute to Yeats and his 150th anniversary.

I remember a scene or two from the 1986 film “Peggy Sue Got Married” (directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Kathleen Turner) in which Yeats’s poetry was mentioned. In case you haven’t seen this movie: Peggy Sue Bodell is an unhappily married, forty-something woman who attends her high school reunion and wonders what her life would have been like if she’d just made some different choices.

She finds out soon enough, when she faints at the reunion and time-travels back to her senior year of high school.

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William Butler Yeats, “No Second Troy” / Sinead O’Connor, “Troy”

maud gonne

Part Two: this one dates back to my teen years.

Even if I had tried, I wouldn’t have been able to keep track of the times I listened to Sinead O’Connor’s debut album “The Lion and The Cobra,” first on vinyl and then on CD. I loved nearly every track on that album, but “Troy” was one of my favorites. It ran well over six minutes long and it really did feel epic (long before that word became overused) — it had highs and lows of volume and emotion.

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William Butler Yeats, “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” / “84, Charing Cross Road”

Yeats Cloths As promised, here’s my first of four posts about some of my favorite poems by William Butler Yeats and the funny ways that I first learned about them. I think Yeats is quoted more in other literature and popular culture than we realize. “No Country for Old Men”… “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”… etc.
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William B. Yeats Sesquicentennial!

william-butler-yeats-1908

I’m doing some studying up on John Singer Sargent this month, for work-related purposes, and last week I was admiring Sargent’s 1908 drawing of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The, just a few days ago, I heard this radio story on WNYC (now illustrated on the WNYC website with the same image!). I didn’t realize until now that 2015 is the 150th anniversary of Yeats’s birth. All kinds of events are being held in the poet’s honor, so I think I’ll be writing my own series of short posts about Yeats this month, featuring four of my favorite poems by Yeats and the ways I first learned about them.. Stay tuned…

Image: John Singer Sargent, William B. Yeats, 1908. Private collection.

My Back Pages: Bluebells in “Rebecca” (and at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden)

bluebell wood

This week I made a visit to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Bluebell Wood, just in time to catch the bluebells before they start to fade away. This corner of the garden always reminds me of Manderley in Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca.

“Too early yet for blue bells, their heads were still hidden beneath last-year’s leaves, but when they came, dwarfing the more humble violet, they choked the very bracken in the woods, and with their colour made a challenge to the sky.

He never would have them in the house, he said. Thrust into vases they became dank and listless, and to see them at their best you must walk in the woods in the morning, about twelve o’clock, when the sun is overhead. They had a smoky, rather bitter smell, as though a wild sap ran in their stalks, pungent and juicy. People who plucked bluebells from the woods were vandals, he had forbidden it at Manderley…”

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