Whence all this jealousy, this possessiveness, these genteel niceties, this touchy masculine honor (duels, indeed!), and this language that reads like a translation from the French of Alexander Dumas??
Whither has the spirit of orgiastic pagan Beltane departed? This old voyeuse summons the poet Yeats to help revive it:
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 Phythagoras.
Plotinus came and looked about,
The salt-flakes on his breast,
And having stretched and yawned awhile
Lay sighing like the rest...
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Down the mountain walls
From where Pan's cavern is
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam. |
