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I don't like all this making fun of Yeats. The occult is somehow a "fact" resulting from divine (creative) imagination, just as science, whose rational "truth" is changing all the time anyway, is also a creative "fact". Because someone believed in flying machines and drew some in the 1500s we have airplanes now. Yeats asks from us, a cognitive shift of expansion... including the rational its possible to expand towards a deeper way of cognition... deeply connected with an imaginal that is ... alive!
Chekes's question "Is this silly" can always be answered by, "Yes, very much so!" The confluence of Theosophy (and stuff like it) and Psychonanalysis is not at all strange or unexpected: nonsense joining up with nonsense.
An embarrassing lecture, marred by blunders. Mme Blavatsky, glittering eyes notwithstanding was not head of the Golden Dawn, with which she had no official connection. She founded the Theosophical Society, so the heavy sarcasm and playing for cheap laughs (mostly met with silence from the audience) was wasted. Dr. Cheeke suggested that when James Joyce in Ulysses talked of the ‘snot-green sea’ and ‘scrotum-tightening sea’, he was ‘possibly parodying Yeats’, who was fond of ‘hyphenated adjectives’ like ‘the rook-delighting heaven,’ ‘the mackerel-crowded seas,’ and ‘dolphin-torn, gong-tormented sea.’ The title of Joyce’s novel surely gives the clue to where the finger of parody was pointing. The adjectival-phrases are usually called ‘epithets’, and abound in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as in the two corresponding Sanskrit epics the Mahabharata and the Ramyana. In each case one epic is about a huge war with heroic warriors on both sides, and the other is about a long, wandering, perilous journey in which monsters are encountered and must be overcome. In Homer’s Greek we find epithets like ‘wine-dark-sea οἶνοψ πόντος,’ ‘rosy-fingered-dawn ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς,’ ‘fleet-footed Achilles πόδας ὠκύς Ἀχιλλεύς ,’ ‘ox-eyed Hera βοῶπις Ἥρη’ etc. And the Sanskrit epics similarly speak of the sea as ‘blue lotus-like नीलोत्पल,’ and has ‘vishalakshi विशालाक्षी - huge-eyed’ and mṛganayanī मृगनयनी ‘deer-eyed’ for beauties like Draupadi and Sita. These portmanteau descriptors must have been used bards who had to memorise thousands of lines and needed to fill-in gaps or invent whole lines when memory failed. Yeats, recalling Irish poetry was experimenting, it was certainly not a case of logorrhea. The talk also suffered from over-reliance on the sneers and spite of W. H. Auden, who might with justice have been called ‘urine-scented Auden’ or perhaps ‘old-pissy-tweeds’ and who wrote a quatrain which has been called the worst in English poetry. Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. The audience occasionally tittered or laughed nervously when cued to do so, the lecturer at one point saying, ‘that was a joke.’ What a waste of a good subject. Sorry Dr Cheeke, you’re a disgrace to our alma mater.
This is like a member of the tory Party trying to analyse the depths of a gaelic soul..... its like asking a plumber to psychoanalse you... same result. He'd be better suited to writing treatsies on the Oxford boat race.
just came across this...other than the couple of factual errors pointed out by many, it was a brilliant and incisive analysis...was wondering where it was going for the longest time...loved the last few quotes that brought it to a close...
This is the most addled, ill-informed rubbish, even by RU-vid's standards, that I've seen in a very long time. If this nit can't even distinguish between Blavatsky's Theosophy and the Golden Dawn, Dr Cheeke (well named) would do well to find a new subject.
Brilliant exposition...thank you so much...as a Vedantin with your help, I could understand the total brilliance of his poetical expression. Every rendering blew me away. Auden was spot on in the first quote...but Auden's clever but crass use of the word 'silly' is also exposed by your analysis of Yeats thoughts on the word belief. You portrayed a spiritual giant in a fallible body. Thank you.
Whatever “silly” beliefs he may have held, he managed to, more so than any other poet writing in English, to make that language sing as gracefully as the Latin languages. As a composer who has set many of his poems to music, he made that task easy! His poems sing themselves.
Any sceptic with respect for logic must, of course, remain sceptical about scepticism itself which automatically opens one up to mystical speculation. Yeats always followed his mystical intuitions without ever abandoning scepticism completely. That always seemed to me the best route to any dealing or confrontation with that potential which we call 'spiritual'.
A half-assed lecture with a poor reading. W.B.Yeats composed six equals five and seven four initiations, and added all the other initiations, and added a lot of poetry that exists in the Stella Matutina. In the 1898 1899 Celtic explorations insisted that it be not founded in Egypt or Greece for they must make the land in which they live a Holy Land (Ireland). The Speckled Bird is an autobiographical novel, by the Irish poet, writer, mystic and Nobel laureate in literature in 1923. "A living ladder of souls with God himself..." Neo Druidism from a Gemini, lolz the oldest of the heroic race and represent keter and hokma, the crown of wisdom...In the kaballah, the Thaumiel qliphoth is the opposite of the Keter sepiroth. It means "Twin of God" and is the place where Satan is (for Keter is where God enters the universe). In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp is a mediator between the unconscious and conscious realms. It is symbolically personified in dreams as a wise man or woman, or sometimes as a helpful beast.
❤ I find this an amazing insight in the great poet, lots of intrigue surrounded this great man. This gent explained his life in a way everyone can understand, many thanks.
I studied Yeats in England in the 60s His mystical and occult beliefs were not emphasized Later I got into the Occult myself What joy to find Yeats had been there too My fave poet
"THIRTY centuries of stony sleep????" How could the presenter get it so wrong? The whole point of the poem (written in the first years of the twentieth century) seems to me to be to reflect on how "things fall apart" after almost TWO thousand years (the actual line reads "TWENTY centuries") of Christianity. The "rough beast" of the closing lines can be seen as the 'rough beast' of SECULARISM.
The word"Silly" has an older meaning of being blessed or perhaps happy. Perhaps Auden knew this and used "silly" to this intent. I refer to the line in a Christmas Carol "Behold a silly tender child..." It is surprising that Dr. Cheeke does not seem aware of this. In Hiberno-English to refer to a deceased person as silly would be regarded as at least disrespectful, or even insulting. I'm not so sure it would not hold the same significance in English English. Nor do I think Auden would have wished to be insulting. So, I am not convinced by the manner of the Doctor's dealing with this issue.
imo - the "elites" know all about. this occult world & powers & use it to control the masses.. TV "programming" for social engineering is one example.. also the "power numbers' seen repeatedly for use in rituals.. 9/11, 911, 33...
WB Yeats wouldn't have appreciated clapping much, although he, surely, have indulged them as testimonies of human flaws, confusing respect with clapping, namely, among so many others, like retiring derivations of the Thorn Tree, Cloths of Heavan, his songs of drinking, No Second Troy, etc, etc. Respect to folklore, mythology is the label or navel of all great thinkers. India is undervalued by UK superficial thinkers, although greater members like Richard Francis Burton never dismissed a language or a creed for being little or dismissed. Blake, William and better half, & engravings, a little bit of exageration, maybe? Ectoplasm and gullible minds are preferable to the closed ones. Buddhism and Hinduhism, sects of Islam, sects of Christianity, which one would name here, show that we are on the side of hope and knowledge and others on the side og socual control, normalization (not physics renotmalization problem ), strict rationalism, social engineering, strict atheism etc. Anima Mundi, Gaia so many names for Earth, Humanity, Mars, if as we were the portal of the possible, that We Are. Thank you so much ✨.
In a world were women are nemesis of men by definition, against a patriarchy maybe only a name for something different, some, by precaution and afraid of a "Second Coming" of his sins, are compelled to live in indignant distance from the beautiful, wonderful sex.
This is a wonderful talk, thank you. I do believe Yeats foretold of the coming New World Order, and what a wonderful description he gives in The Second Coming.
I just read The Second Coming at a poetry reading tonight. 4-23-24) as we celebrated Shakespeare's birthday. We are indeed experiencing the bloid-dimmed tide right now, and the ceremony of innocence has everywhere drowned. Vexed to nightmare indeed. And let Auden say what he likes, he has clearly never seen a fairy. I have.
all other like the hot mess fatty in £150,000 home. Not for you to learn, silly cunt. The fatty isn't worth any money to be charged for over cutting its throat... Why can't Sarah afford insurance to receive the care she wants for any type of disorder?
