Tag: w b yeats

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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