wb-yeats

The King Cannot Hold

Antique and vast things fall apart,
shattered upon the world.
The blood-visage lies loosed,
wrinkled innocence is drowned,
the best of passions survive.
Some lifeless revelation troubles the heart.
Somewhere, the head of a man is moving its shadows.
The darkness drops these words:
“Know my name, my works, my nightmare.”
Remains of that boundless beast
stretch to be born.

Erin Marie Hall, 2017

Remixed works:
Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats

In Gyres Fluttering

by
William Thomas Wallace Whitman

In gyres fluttering,
In the falcon by falconers of empty things,
Shaken from the centre that lay itself,
From all the anarchy hitherto broken, from the worlds, tides, ceremonies,
Which too empty I was thinking to sit my innocence,
Constant to me now anarchy not yet broken, constant to me that my best,
That the best of the conviction I sit for arises in the worst,
Here by myself away from the revelation of the hand,
letting fall and drawn back here by comings inhuman,
No longer veritable, (for in these medleyed words I can drool as I would not call elsewhere,)
Grinding upon me the image that does not go itself, yet used to be all the Spiritus Mundi,
Striving to make no sights to­day but those of gasping waste,
Scouring them along that ever­hooded desert,
Threatening hence sands of tragic­gestured shape,
Body this dark colored head in my sunken man,
I blow for all who need or have needed clear gaze,
To lay the shadows of my birds and darkness,
To wonder the centuries of sleep.

 

An Oulipian Chimera
by Esther Greenleaf Murer, 2014

Remixed works:
Calamus (In paths untrodden) by Walt Whitman
The Second Coming by W B Yeats (Nouns)
Channel Firing by Thomas Hardy  (Verbs)
The Idea of Order at Key West by Wallace Stevens (Adjectives)

The Second

by
Butler Yeats 

            turning in
                       the falconer;
Things                        cannot hold;
     anarchy is
                                     everywhere
                innocence is drowned;
The best lack
                       intensity.

Surely      revelation
Surely     Second Coming is
                   Hardly     those words

When        image out of
            sight: a waste
                                    of a man,
                             the sun
   moving     slow
     shadows of the                  birds

                                 I know
            centuries       of sleep
Were          nightmare by a                         
               beast                      at last
                                 born

CT, 2014

Sculpted work:
The Second Coming, by W.B Yeats