News For The Delphic Oracle

William Butler Yeats 1865 (Sandymount) – 1939 (Menton)



THERE all the golden codgers lay,
There the silver dew,
And the great water sighed for love,
And the wind sighed too.
Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed
By Oisin on the grass;
There sighed amid his choir of love
Tall pythagoras.
plotinus came and looked about,
The salt-flakes on his breast,
And having stretched and yawned awhile
Lay sighing like the rest.
Straddling each a dolphin's back
And steadied by a fin,
Those Innocents re-live their death,
Their wounds open again.
The ecstatic waters laugh because
Their cries are sweet and strange,
Through their ancestral patterns dance,
And the brute dolphins plunge
Until, in some cliff-sheltered bay
Where wades the choir of love
Proffering its sacred laurel crowns,
They pitch their burdens off.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 27, 2023

37 sec read
236

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCBDECEFGHGIJKLMNOPACQR
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 730
Words 125
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 24

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. more…

All William Butler Yeats poems | William Butler Yeats Books

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1 Comment
  • Robert Dickerson
    Robert Dickerson
    This poem, despite its beauties, frustrates literal interpretation. A little piece of theater, it seems to recall a state of serene innocence, threatened by chaotic forces that advance irresistably, and live again, in the poet's mind. The actual nature of the threat is up for grabs, but within a short space its advent ushers in a mysterious minor mode. The individual stanzas bear minimal relationship to one another. The jumbling of mythologies is confusing, if intriguing. Syntactical logic is often set aside. Characters come and go as on a stage. Weirdly, past events are relayed in the present tense--the luxury of the visionary, but the visionary role here is only casually undertaken. The effect leaves the reader fascinated and bewildered. Memorization is virtually effortless, so unfamiliar and strange is the language. (always the sign of a good poem) The mood of the speaker is elusive, alternately refined and rough. The whole is an aery skein of words, which serves to persuade the reader there is some vital meaning woven into the poem's fabric that he or she has failed, as yet, to grasp. Again, there probably isn't any, or, if so, it operates at id level. Instead, it's a lovely pastiche-- a day-dream, probably half-nonsensical--a pythian eruption spewed by whatever part of the brain dictates poetry to its half-asleep mouthpiece. Is this a specimen of 'automatic writing', perhaps? Deep-seated meaning, take that! 
    LikeReply 17 years ago

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"News For The Delphic Oracle" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/39391/news-for-the-delphic-oracle>.

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