I was browsing through a selection of Yeats’ poems (he happens to be my favorite poet of all times), when among many poems familiar and known a rather unfamiliar one caught my eye. Frankly speaking all his poems tend to enthrall and reader and keep him or her captivated for hours. There is of course my dearest one, “Lake Isle of Innisfree” and others like “Leda and the Swan” or “He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” and many others that are well known to lovers of English Literature. However, one particular poem caught my attention today. Sharing it with my readers on this blog :

Ephemera by WB Yeats (written 1884, published 1889)

‘Your eyes that once were never weary of mine
Are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
Because our love is waning.’

And then she:
‘Although our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, Passion, falls asleep:
How far away the stars seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!’

Pensive they paced along the faded leaves,
While slowly he whose hand held hers replied:
‘Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.’

The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves
Fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once
A rabbit old and lame limped down the path;
Autumn was over him: and now they stood
On the lone border of the lake once more:
Turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves
Gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
In bosom and hair.

‘Ah, do not mourn,’ he said,
‘That we are tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and love through unripining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell.’

What made me ruminate about the above mentioned poem was the similarity of its language with Virginia Woolf’s prose. Then when I flipped through the pages and started going through his other creations, the similarity became even more evident. I have been currently re-reading Woolf’s “The Waves” and I’ve earlier read her other creations like “Mrs. Dalloway”, “Orlando” “To the Lighthouse” amongst others. The language is punctuated with images and sounds, both limpid and mellifluous to say the least. The same applies to Yeats too. It is as if the stanzas of his poems paint pictures that are both exquisite and vivid. Woolf does the same too. The pictures float and dance in front of my eyes. They tend to hold me and my emotions at ransom, forcing me to finish reading whatever has been laid out in front of me.

The resemblance is uncanny between these two virtuosos of literature. One focuses upon prose bringing out the virginal beaut of words underlying every sentence, and the other splashes paints across his canvases of immaculate poetry. And I am caught between these two, or rather I am tossed between these two like a tiny boat caught in the midst of two whirlpools of similar emotions and words. Words that resurrect my soul from within the clutches of a moth eaten civilization. Words that make me view the world differently, both as a reader as well as a writer. Words that carve out new pathways for me. Words that make me realize that my ultimate destiny is tied up in knots of words and emotions that I must unravel during the course of this tiny and insignificant life of mine. Before I end, I must share a few tiny gems from “The Waves”.

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

These two and others within me have been pushing me desperately to begin my new novel. Thus, I will return again to this blog whenever inspiration strikes me. Till then au revoir ! And happy reading !