#yeats — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #yeats, aggregated by home.social.
-
Näin #perjantai'na (vaikka #TGIF jnpp.) tekee taas illalla väsyneenä mieli lainata #Yeats'iä:
[...] O heart, we are old;
The living beauty is for younger men,
We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears. -
Näin #perjantai'na (vaikka #TGIF jnpp.) tekee taas illalla väsyneenä mieli lainata #Yeats'iä:
[...] O heart, we are old;
The living beauty is for younger men,
We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears. -
Näin #perjantai'na (vaikka #TGIF jnpp.) tekee taas illalla väsyneenä mieli lainata #Yeats'iä:
[...] O heart, we are old;
The living beauty is for younger men,
We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears. -
Näin #perjantai'na (vaikka #TGIF jnpp.) tekee taas illalla väsyneenä mieli lainata #Yeats'iä:
[...] O heart, we are old;
The living beauty is for younger men,
We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears. -
RT by @eurireland: Visit the Local Studies Centre, Westward Town Centre, Bridge Street, to view Yeats: The Life and Work of W.B. Yeats. On display until 5 August. Presented by the National Library of Ireland in partnership with Europe Direct at Sligo Central Library. #Yeats #Sligo @culture_ireland
---
https://nitter.net/ed_sligo/status/2079585866230452671#m -
RT by @eurireland: Visit the Local Studies Centre, Westward Town Centre, Bridge Street, to view Yeats: The Life and Work of W.B. Yeats. On display until 5 August. Presented by the National Library of Ireland in partnership with Europe Direct at Sligo Central Library. #Yeats #Sligo @culture_ireland
---
https://nitter.net/ed_sligo/status/2079585866230452671#m -
RT by @eurireland: Visit the Local Studies Centre, Westward Town Centre, Bridge Street, to view Yeats: The Life and Work of W.B. Yeats. On display until 5 August. Presented by the National Library of Ireland in partnership with Europe Direct at Sligo Central Library. #Yeats #Sligo @culture_ireland
---
https://nitter.net/ed_sligo/status/2079585866230452671#m -
Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild
A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/
-
Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild
A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/
-
Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild
A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/
-
Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild
A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/
-
SOME EXCELLENT READINGS If you like Yeats, these may be worth your time. #poetry #yeats #reading #errtling #bookcafe #art-of-review #pleasant-things #art #writing #poem youtu.be/STjSTzaFEOQ
W.B Yeats' best poems -
SOME EXCELLENT READINGS If you like Yeats, these may be worth your time. #poetry #yeats #reading #errtling #bookcafe #art-of-review #pleasant-things #art #writing #poem youtu.be/STjSTzaFEOQ
W.B Yeats' best poems -
SOME EXCELLENT READINGS If you like Yeats, these may be worth your time. #poetry #yeats #reading #errtling #bookcafe #art-of-review #pleasant-things #art #writing #poem youtu.be/STjSTzaFEOQ
W.B Yeats' best poems -
SOME EXCELLENT READINGS If you like Yeats, these may be worth your time. #poetry #yeats #reading #errtling #bookcafe #art-of-review #pleasant-things #art #writing #poem youtu.be/STjSTzaFEOQ
W.B Yeats' best poems -
As it's W.B. Yeats' birthday today:
TO HIS HEART, BIIDING IT HAVE NO FEAR
Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;
Remember the wisdom out of the old days:
Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,
And the winds that blow through the starry ways,
Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood
Cover over and hide, for he has no part
With the lonely, majestical multitude. -
As it's W.B. Yeats' birthday today:
TO HIS HEART, BIIDING IT HAVE NO FEAR
Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;
Remember the wisdom out of the old days:
Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,
And the winds that blow through the starry ways,
Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood
Cover over and hide, for he has no part
With the lonely, majestical multitude. -
As it's W.B. Yeats' birthday today:
TO HIS HEART, BIIDING IT HAVE NO FEAR
Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;
Remember the wisdom out of the old days:
Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,
And the winds that blow through the starry ways,
Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood
Cover over and hide, for he has no part
With the lonely, majestical multitude. -
As it's W.B. Yeats' birthday today:
TO HIS HEART, BIIDING IT HAVE NO FEAR
Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;
Remember the wisdom out of the old days:
Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,
And the winds that blow through the starry ways,
Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood
Cover over and hide, for he has no part
With the lonely, majestical multitude. -
really outstanding discussion between Richard Murphy & Steve Keen
& at the end i liked the analogy of people committed to a bad ideology is like people committed to their religion, whether it is sensible or a destructive force for humanity. & #Yeats 😁
-
really outstanding discussion between Richard Murphy & Steve Keen
& at the end i liked the analogy of people committed to a bad ideology is like people committed to their religion, whether it is sensible or a destructive force for humanity. & #Yeats 😁
-
really outstanding discussion between Richard Murphy & Steve Keen
& at the end i liked the analogy of people committed to a bad ideology is like people committed to their religion, whether it is sensible or a destructive force for humanity. & #Yeats 😁
-
really outstanding discussion between Richard Murphy & Steve Keen
& at the end i liked the analogy of people committed to a bad ideology is like people committed to their religion, whether it is sensible or a destructive force for humanity. & #Yeats 😁
-
‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ by William Butler Yeats
#poem #poetry #english #literature #yeats
https://www.deadpoetsdaily.com/p/william-butler-yeats-poem-the-lake-isle-of-innisfree
-
‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ by William Butler Yeats
#poem #poetry #english #literature #yeats
https://www.deadpoetsdaily.com/p/william-butler-yeats-poem-the-lake-isle-of-innisfree
-
‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ by William Butler Yeats
#poem #poetry #english #literature #yeats
https://www.deadpoetsdaily.com/p/william-butler-yeats-poem-the-lake-isle-of-innisfree
-
‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ by William Butler Yeats
#poem #poetry #english #literature #yeats
https://www.deadpoetsdaily.com/p/william-butler-yeats-poem-the-lake-isle-of-innisfree
-
“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” #thetower #yeats #readingirelandmonth26
Amongst the pile of possible choices for Reading Ireland Month lurked a slim volume of poetry: "The Tower" by W.B. Yeats. He's a poet I'm not aware of having ever read before, which was why I was pleased when this book was reissued by Renard Press and came to me as part of my subscription with them. It seemed like the perfect option to explore for my second Irish author of the month,…
-
We make poetry out of a mouthful of air
In his wonderful How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry, Edward Hirsch reflects on the orality which marks the poetic form. For most of history it was been an oral art and it retains that orality even now. Inspired by the boast of W.B. Yeats that “I made it out of a mouthful of air” Hirsch reflects that:
As every poet does. So, too, does the reader make, or remake, the poem out of a mouthful of air, out of breath. When I recite a poem I inhabit it, I bring the words off the page into my own mouth, my own body. I become its speaker and lt its verbal music move through me as if the poem is a score and I am its instrumentalist, its performer. I let its heartbeat pulse through me as embodied experience, as experience embedded in the sensuality of sounds.
At the weekend I found myself thinking about the word ‘phoneme’ and its parallel to tokens upon which large language models rely. We too compose meaningful units out of components so atomic that their constituent character falls beneath the surface of our awareness. I was making the point to a friend using the word ‘phoneme’ and was suddenly struck that ‘phoneme’ itself is composed of phonemes: pho-ne-meme. It was startling to experience the concept itself involuntarily decomposed into atomic units.
Except these aren’t phonemes. These are syllables. Phonemes are even more basic units of sound out of which syllables are composed. The fact what presented itself to me as the most basic unit was not, when I thought about it, actually the most basic unit was itself striking. This led me to discover the International Phonetic Alphabet in which phonemes can be rendered using the phonemic alphabet. In which case ‘phoneme’ is composed as /f əʊ n iː m/. This is how GPT 5.2 breaks that down phonetically:
f as in fan
əʊ the diphthong like the vowel in go
n as in no
iː the long vowel like in see
m as in manIt’s a struggle to remain at this atomic level. It’s too basic and too strange. Though it does suddenly make me regret not doing the linguistics degree I fleetingly considered as a teenager. You can stay at this level but it takes a bit of training to do it. The syllabic register is more accessible but even then it takes work. You have to manually decompose as an analytical exercise rather than seeing or feeling the composition. This highlights to me how we’re embedded in the semantic register such that we have to abstract from what words convey in order to analyse them as sign systems.
There are mysteries in the phonetic register. This exercise is akin to repeating a word until the meaning is lost. It just becomes a sound. Then a series of sounds. Until its unsettling to realise that only a minute ago, before you repeated the word fifty times, it conveyed a meaning with an immediacy which now feels inaccessible. There are mysteries in the semantic register as well though. If we instrumentalise our use of words, or rush through speaking and writing, we lose the experience of the force which animates them. There are words which energise us and words which drain us. Words which move us and which leave us cold. There’s a meeting in our experience of words between something deeply human and something…. Other.
Poetry I think is the purest form of connection to that mystery. If we rush through reading a poem it remains flat and inert. The meaning only emerges through us if we take the time to linger with what we are reading. There’s an obvious role of the unconscious here, at least in my experience of as someone who gets gripped by certain lines which I then find myself circling round and preoccupied by. Why am I gripped by these lines? What is it they are evoking in me? Why are they evoking this? I find it hard to appreciate a poem as a whole because I need that foothold to gradually learn to inhabit the poem or rather to find a way to let it inhabit me. The analytical register is too ready-to-hand for me, a tool that presents itself when I have a question but if I do that with a poem (at least too soon) the fragile life of what I’m ready withers and dies in front of me.
There’s something there which we’re encountering with poetry. How it feels and looks changes as we change. But it is in a real sense, I increasingly think, an encounter:
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages
As Yeats put it we make poems out of mouthfuls of air. What I’m circling round is I think how mysterious and remarkable this is. How we have the capacity not just to produce meaningful sounds with motor movements of our mouth, tongue and throat that coordinate human action but that carry transformative meaning that transcends the very system of signs we have constructed. That reaches beyond and past it. The theme of the Other I’m just as much circling round relates to what is beyond. What is that deeper reality beyond the sign system. This makes me think that I’m unsatisfied with the obvious Lacanian reading that I’m talking about the machinic quality of the linguistic system. The alien mechanisms through which it churns away in a quasi-autonomous way. I’m talking about what’s in us that exists beyond that system yet remains utterly dependent on it for intersubjective expression.
Perhaps this is just the unconscious: the mycelium which chains together more sensory intensities then we could possibly process and out of which a mushroom of conscious meaning occasionally pops up. I don’t know, I’ve confused myself and I’m going to stop rambling now. But this feels like fertile terrain.
(I’ve also got a book to finish imminently and I’m struck that this sudden mystical fixation on inarticulacy could be the world’s most abstract procrastination exercise 🤔)
#EdwardHirsch #eliot #inarticulacy #language #linguistics #poetry #sound #Yeats
-
We make poetry out of a mouthful of air
In his wonderful How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry, Edward Hirsch reflects on the orality which marks the poetic form. For most of history it was been an oral art and it retains that orality even now. Inspired by the boast of W.B. Yeats that “I made it out of a mouthful of air” Hirsch reflects that:
As every poet does. So, too, does the reader make, or remake, the poem out of a mouthful of air, out of breath. When I recite a poem I inhabit it, I bring the words off the page into my own mouth, my own body. I become its speaker and lt its verbal music move through me as if the poem is a score and I am its instrumentalist, its performer. I let its heartbeat pulse through me as embodied experience, as experience embedded in the sensuality of sounds.
At the weekend I found myself thinking about the word ‘phoneme’ and its parallel to tokens upon which large language models rely. We too compose meaningful units out of components so atomic that their constituent character falls beneath the surface of our awareness. I was making the point to a friend using the word ‘phoneme’ and was suddenly struck that ‘phoneme’ itself is composed of phonemes: pho-ne-meme. It was startling to experience the concept itself involuntarily decomposed into atomic units.
Except these aren’t phonemes. These are syllables. Phonemes are even more basic units of sound out of which syllables are composed. The fact what presented itself to me as the most basic unit was not, when I thought about it, actually the most basic unit was itself striking. This led me to discover the International Phonetic Alphabet in which phonemes can be rendered using the phonemic alphabet. In which case ‘phoneme’ is composed as /f əʊ n iː m/. This is how GPT 5.2 breaks that down phonetically:
f as in fan
əʊ the diphthong like the vowel in go
n as in no
iː the long vowel like in see
m as in manIt’s a struggle to remain at this atomic level. It’s too basic and too strange. Though it does suddenly make me regret not doing the linguistics degree I fleetingly considered as a teenager. You can stay at this level but it takes a bit of training to do it. The syllabic register is more accessible but even then it takes work. You have to manually decompose as an analytical exercise rather than seeing or feeling the composition. This highlights to me how we’re embedded in the semantic register such that we have to abstract from what words convey in order to analyse them as sign systems.
There are mysteries in the phonetic register. This exercise is akin to repeating a word until the meaning is lost. It just becomes a sound. Then a series of sounds. Until its unsettling to realise that only a minute ago, before you repeated the word fifty times, it conveyed a meaning with an immediacy which now feels inaccessible. There are mysteries in the semantic register as well though. If we instrumentalise our use of words, or rush through speaking and writing, we lose the experience of the force which animates them. There are words which energise us and words which drain us. Words which move us and which leave us cold. There’s a meeting in our experience of words between something deeply human and something…. Other.
Poetry I think is the purest form of connection to that mystery. If we rush through reading a poem it remains flat and inert. The meaning only emerges through us if we take the time to linger with what we are reading. There’s an obvious role of the unconscious here, at least in my experience of as someone who gets gripped by certain lines which I then find myself circling round and preoccupied by. Why am I gripped by these lines? What is it they are evoking in me? Why are they evoking this? I find it hard to appreciate a poem as a whole because I need that foothold to gradually learn to inhabit the poem or rather to find a way to let it inhabit me. The analytical register is too ready-to-hand for me, a tool that presents itself when I have a question but if I do that with a poem (at least too soon) the fragile life of what I’m ready withers and dies in front of me.
There’s something there which we’re encountering with poetry. How it feels and looks changes as we change. But it is in a real sense, I increasingly think, an encounter:
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages
As Yeats put it we make poems out of mouthfuls of air. What I’m circling round is I think how mysterious and remarkable this is. How we have the capacity not just to produce meaningful sounds with motor movements of our mouth, tongue and throat that coordinate human action but that carry transformative meaning that transcends the very system of signs we have constructed. That reaches beyond and past it. The theme of the Other I’m just as much circling round relates to what is beyond. What is that deeper reality beyond the sign system. This makes me think that I’m unsatisfied with the obvious Lacanian reading that I’m talking about the machinic quality of the linguistic system. The alien mechanisms through which it churns away in a quasi-autonomous way. I’m talking about what’s in us that exists beyond that system yet remains utterly dependent on it for intersubjective expression.
Perhaps this is just the unconscious: the mycelium which chains together more sensory intensities then we could possibly process and out of which a mushroom of conscious meaning occasionally pops up. I don’t know, I’ve confused myself and I’m going to stop rambling now. But this feels like fertile terrain.
(I’ve also got a book to finish imminently and I’m struck that this sudden mystical fixation on inarticulacy could be the world’s most abstract procrastination exercise 🤔)
#EdwardHirsch #eliot #inarticulacy #language #linguistics #poetry #sound #Yeats
-
We make poetry out of a mouthful of air
In his wonderful How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry, Edward Hirsch reflects on the orality which marks the poetic form. For most of history it was been an oral art and it retains that orality even now. Inspired by the boast of W.B. Yeats that “I made it out of a mouthful of air” Hirsch reflects that:
As every poet does. So, too, does the reader make, or remake, the poem out of a mouthful of air, out of breath. When I recite a poem I inhabit it, I bring the words off the page into my own mouth, my own body. I become its speaker and lt its verbal music move through me as if the poem is a score and I am its instrumentalist, its performer. I let its heartbeat pulse through me as embodied experience, as experience embedded in the sensuality of sounds.
At the weekend I found myself thinking about the word ‘phoneme’ and its parallel to tokens upon which large language models rely. We too compose meaningful units out of components so atomic that their constituent character falls beneath the surface of our awareness. I was making the point to a friend using the word ‘phoneme’ and was suddenly struck that ‘phoneme’ itself is composed of phonemes: pho-ne-meme. It was startling to experience the concept itself involuntarily decomposed into atomic units.
Except these aren’t phonemes. These are syllables. Phonemes are even more basic units of sound out of which syllables are composed. The fact what presented itself to me as the most basic unit was not, when I thought about it, actually the most basic unit was itself striking. This led me to discover the International Phonetic Alphabet in which phonemes can be rendered using the phonemic alphabet. In which case ‘phoneme’ is composed as /f əʊ n iː m/. This is how GPT 5.2 breaks that down phonetically:
f as in fan
əʊ the diphthong like the vowel in go
n as in no
iː the long vowel like in see
m as in manIt’s a struggle to remain at this atomic level. It’s too basic and too strange. Though it does suddenly make me regret not doing the linguistics degree I fleetingly considered as a teenager. You can stay at this level but it takes a bit of training to do it. The syllabic register is more accessible but even then it takes work. You have to manually decompose as an analytical exercise rather than seeing or feeling the composition. This highlights to me how we’re embedded in the semantic register such that we have to abstract from what words convey in order to analyse them as sign systems.
There are mysteries in the phonetic register. This exercise is akin to repeating a word until the meaning is lost. It just becomes a sound. Then a series of sounds. Until its unsettling to realise that only a minute ago, before you repeated the word fifty times, it conveyed a meaning with an immediacy which now feels inaccessible. There are mysteries in the semantic register as well though. If we instrumentalise our use of words, or rush through speaking and writing, we lose the experience of the force which animates them. There are words which energise us and words which drain us. Words which move us and which leave us cold. There’s a meeting in our experience of words between something deeply human and something…. Other.
Poetry I think is the purest form of connection to that mystery. If we rush through reading a poem it remains flat and inert. The meaning only emerges through us if we take the time to linger with what we are reading. There’s an obvious role of the unconscious here, at least in my experience of as someone who gets gripped by certain lines which I then find myself circling round and preoccupied by. Why am I gripped by these lines? What is it they are evoking in me? Why are they evoking this? I find it hard to appreciate a poem as a whole because I need that foothold to gradually learn to inhabit the poem or rather to find a way to let it inhabit me. The analytical register is too ready-to-hand for me, a tool that presents itself when I have a question but if I do that with a poem (at least too soon) the fragile life of what I’m ready withers and dies in front of me.
There’s something there which we’re encountering with poetry. How it feels and looks changes as we change. But it is in a real sense, I increasingly think, an encounter:
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages
As Yeats put it we make poems out of mouthfuls of air. What I’m circling round is I think how mysterious and remarkable this is. How we have the capacity not just to produce meaningful sounds with motor movements of our mouth, tongue and throat that coordinate human action but that carry transformative meaning that transcends the very system of signs we have constructed. That reaches beyond and past it. The theme of the Other I’m just as much circling round relates to what is beyond. What is that deeper reality beyond the sign system. This makes me think that I’m unsatisfied with the obvious Lacanian reading that I’m talking about the machinic quality of the linguistic system. The alien mechanisms through which it churns away in a quasi-autonomous way. I’m talking about what’s in us that exists beyond that system yet remains utterly dependent on it for intersubjective expression.
Perhaps this is just the unconscious: the mycelium which chains together more sensory intensities then we could possibly process and out of which a mushroom of conscious meaning occasionally pops up. I don’t know, I’ve confused myself and I’m going to stop rambling now. But this feels like fertile terrain.
(I’ve also got a book to finish imminently and I’m struck that this sudden mystical fixation on inarticulacy could be the world’s most abstract procrastination exercise 🤔)
#EdwardHirsch #eliot #inarticulacy #language #linguistics #poetry #sound #Yeats
-
We make poetry out of a mouthful of air
In his wonderful How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry, Edward Hirsch reflects on the orality which marks the poetic form. For most of history it was been an oral art and it retains that orality even now. Inspired by the boast of W.B. Yeats that “I made it out of a mouthful of air” Hirsch reflects that:
As every poet does. So, too, does the reader make, or remake, the poem out of a mouthful of air, out of breath. When I recite a poem I inhabit it, I bring the words off the page into my own mouth, my own body. I become its speaker and lt its verbal music move through me as if the poem is a score and I am its instrumentalist, its performer. I let its heartbeat pulse through me as embodied experience, as experience embedded in the sensuality of sounds.
At the weekend I found myself thinking about the word ‘phoneme’ and its parallel to tokens upon which large language models rely. We too compose meaningful units out of components so atomic that their constituent character falls beneath the surface of our awareness. I was making the point to a friend using the word ‘phoneme’ and was suddenly struck that ‘phoneme’ itself is composed of phonemes: pho-ne-meme. It was startling to experience the concept itself involuntarily decomposed into atomic units.
Except these aren’t phonemes. These are syllables. Phonemes are even more basic units of sound out of which syllables are composed. The fact what presented itself to me as the most basic unit was not, when I thought about it, actually the most basic unit was itself striking. This led me to discover the International Phonetic Alphabet in which phonemes can be rendered using the phonemic alphabet. In which case ‘phoneme’ is composed as /f əʊ n iː m/. This is how GPT 5.2 breaks that down phonetically:
f as in fan
əʊ the diphthong like the vowel in go
n as in no
iː the long vowel like in see
m as in manIt’s a struggle to remain at this atomic level. It’s too basic and too strange. Though it does suddenly make me regret not doing the linguistics degree I fleetingly considered as a teenager. You can stay at this level but it takes a bit of training to do it. The syllabic register is more accessible but even then it takes work. You have to manually decompose as an analytical exercise rather than seeing or feeling the composition. This highlights to me how we’re embedded in the semantic register such that we have to abstract from what words convey in order to analyse them as sign systems.
There are mysteries in the phonetic register. This exercise is akin to repeating a word until the meaning is lost. It just becomes a sound. Then a series of sounds. Until its unsettling to realise that only a minute ago, before you repeated the word fifty times, it conveyed a meaning with an immediacy which now feels inaccessible. There are mysteries in the semantic register as well though. If we instrumentalise our use of words, or rush through speaking and writing, we lose the experience of the force which animates them. There are words which energise us and words which drain us. Words which move us and which leave us cold. There’s a meeting in our experience of words between something deeply human and something…. Other.
Poetry I think is the purest form of connection to that mystery. If we rush through reading a poem it remains flat and inert. The meaning only emerges through us if we take the time to linger with what we are reading. There’s an obvious role of the unconscious here, at least in my experience of as someone who gets gripped by certain lines which I then find myself circling round and preoccupied by. Why am I gripped by these lines? What is it they are evoking in me? Why are they evoking this? I find it hard to appreciate a poem as a whole because I need that foothold to gradually learn to inhabit the poem or rather to find a way to let it inhabit me. The analytical register is too ready-to-hand for me, a tool that presents itself when I have a question but if I do that with a poem (at least too soon) the fragile life of what I’m ready withers and dies in front of me.
There’s something there which we’re encountering with poetry. How it feels and looks changes as we change. But it is in a real sense, I increasingly think, an encounter:
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages
As Yeats put it we make poems out of mouthfuls of air. What I’m circling round is I think how mysterious and remarkable this is. How we have the capacity not just to produce meaningful sounds with motor movements of our mouth, tongue and throat that coordinate human action but that carry transformative meaning that transcends the very system of signs we have constructed. That reaches beyond and past it. The theme of the Other I’m just as much circling round relates to what is beyond. What is that deeper reality beyond the sign system. This makes me think that I’m unsatisfied with the obvious Lacanian reading that I’m talking about the machinic quality of the linguistic system. The alien mechanisms through which it churns away in a quasi-autonomous way. I’m talking about what’s in us that exists beyond that system yet remains utterly dependent on it for intersubjective expression.
Perhaps this is just the unconscious: the mycelium which chains together more sensory intensities then we could possibly process and out of which a mushroom of conscious meaning occasionally pops up. I don’t know, I’ve confused myself and I’m going to stop rambling now. But this feels like fertile terrain.
(I’ve also got a book to finish imminently and I’m struck that this sudden mystical fixation on inarticulacy could be the world’s most abstract procrastination exercise 🤔)
#EdwardHirsch #eliot #inarticulacy #language #linguistics #poetry #sound #Yeats
-
CW: CW: auspol, Guardian Essential Poll, One Nation.
I shouldn’t hear #Yeats’ “The Second Coming” in my head when I read opinion polls.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/28/guardian-essential-poll-one-nation-coalition-liberal-national-labor-anthony-albanese-bondi-attack-ntwnfb #auspol
-
CW: CW: auspol, Guardian Essential Poll, One Nation.
I shouldn’t hear #Yeats’ “The Second Coming” in my head when I read opinion polls.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/28/guardian-essential-poll-one-nation-coalition-liberal-national-labor-anthony-albanese-bondi-attack-ntwnfb #auspol
-
CW: CW: auspol, Guardian Essential Poll, One Nation.
I shouldn’t hear #Yeats’ “The Second Coming” in my head when I read opinion polls.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/28/guardian-essential-poll-one-nation-coalition-liberal-national-labor-anthony-albanese-bondi-attack-ntwnfb #auspol
-
CW: CW: auspol, Guardian Essential Poll, One Nation.
I shouldn’t hear #Yeats’ “The Second Coming” in my head when I read opinion polls.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/28/guardian-essential-poll-one-nation-coalition-liberal-national-labor-anthony-albanese-bondi-attack-ntwnfb #auspol
-
“ #Yeats was a strange #modernist: an #anti-modern man nevertheless too intellectual, honest, and rigorous to deny the necessity of coming to some terms with #modernity” daily.jstor.org/yeats-and-th...
Yeats and the Occult Imaginati... -
“ #Yeats was a strange #modernist: an #anti-modern man nevertheless too intellectual, honest, and rigorous to deny the necessity of coming to some terms with #modernity” daily.jstor.org/yeats-and-th...
Yeats and the Occult Imaginati... -
“ #Yeats was a strange #modernist: an #anti-modern man nevertheless too intellectual, honest, and rigorous to deny the necessity of coming to some terms with #modernity” daily.jstor.org/yeats-and-th...
Yeats and the Occult Imaginati... -
“ #Yeats was a strange #modernist: an #anti-modern man nevertheless too intellectual, honest, and rigorous to deny the necessity of coming to some terms with #modernity” daily.jstor.org/yeats-and-th...
Yeats and the Occult Imaginati... -
"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."
-W.B. Yeats
#photography #nature #naturephotography #quotes #literature #Yeats #perception -
"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."
-W.B. Yeats
#photography #nature #naturephotography #quotes #literature #Yeats #perception -
"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."
-W.B. Yeats
#photography #nature #naturephotography #quotes #literature #Yeats #perception -
"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."
-W.B. Yeats
#photography #nature #naturephotography #quotes #literature #Yeats #perception -
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
#W.-B.-Yeats #Yeats #poem #poetry -
William Butler #Yeats
EsejeKtoś jest fanem?
Zastanawiam się, co są w stanie wnieść przemyślenia człowieka, który je zapisał jakieś 120 lat temu?Tylko dzisiaj, 9,90 zł -- https://ebookpoint.pl/ksiazki/eseje-william-butler-yeats,e_1h8k.htm
Owszem jest to domena publiczna... ale w oryginale, niestety tłumaczenia mają swoje prawa autorskie.
-
William Butler #Yeats
EsejeKtoś jest fanem?
Zastanawiam się, co są w stanie wnieść przemyślenia człowieka, który je zapisał jakieś 120 lat temu?Tylko dzisiaj, 9,90 zł -- https://ebookpoint.pl/ksiazki/eseje-william-butler-yeats,e_1h8k.htm
Owszem jest to domena publiczna... ale w oryginale, niestety tłumaczenia mają swoje prawa autorskie.
-
William Butler #Yeats
EsejeKtoś jest fanem?
Zastanawiam się, co są w stanie wnieść przemyślenia człowieka, który je zapisał jakieś 120 lat temu?Tylko dzisiaj, 9,90 zł -- https://ebookpoint.pl/ksiazki/eseje-william-butler-yeats,e_1h8k.htm
Owszem jest to domena publiczna... ale w oryginale, niestety tłumaczenia mają swoje prawa autorskie.
-
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 Yeats (Writers and Critics) by Peter Ure
-
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 Yeats (Writers and Critics) by Peter Ure
-
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 Yeats (Writers and Critics) by Peter Ure
-
-
#poetry #yeats #ai #phonetics #linguistics K guys, is Yeats’ “gyre” a hard G or a soft G?
-
They returned to Scotland where Gabriela won the admiration of her husband’s society friends – Wilde, Yeats, Engels, & others – with her “slight accent, neither French nor Spanish, but most attractive and charming, as foreign accents sometimes can be, especially with ladies.”
11/18
#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #20thcentury #Victorian #Edwardian #OscarWilde #Yeats #WBYeats #Engels #FredrichEngels
-
They returned to Scotland where Gabriela won the admiration of her husband’s society friends – Wilde, Yeats, Engels, & others – with her “slight accent, neither French nor Spanish, but most attractive and charming, as foreign accents sometimes can be, especially with ladies.”
11/18
#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #20thcentury #Victorian #Edwardian #OscarWilde #Yeats #WBYeats #Engels #FredrichEngels
