Margotlog: A Terrible Beauty Is Born

Margotlog: A Terrible Beauty Is Born

In the dark, waking hours when I'm up with the cats, William Butler Yeats' famous lines written September 25,1916, in the Irish/English turmoil, move slowly and repetitively through my thoughts, "All changed, changed utterly,/ A terrible beauty is born."

If I ever knew, I've forgotten the circumstances that led this greatest of 20th-century Irish poets to write this longish poem, "Easter, 1916," though along with others in this volume from my graduate school days at Columbia, this poem is full of minute jottings, paring from the lectures of William York Tindall, now also, no doubt, "changed in his turn."

With Yeats' calm turnings of an almost biographical nature:
"This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force..."




Yeats offers lines exquisitely modulated with sorrow. He suggests an enormous upheaval even as he casts what feels like the ultimate quietly across our path:
"What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may yet keep faith..."

A lot of us this November 2016 are sliding around as did Yeats in dark, yet imagined uncertainties, grasping for names, for what has happened and yet will happen:
"For what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDouagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse...

Can we ever understand enough to grasp what this election of a man called Trump may have done to us? Glimmers there will be, perhaps a cataclysm, but for now, there is foreboding. We are mourning, and listening to the wind in the trees, as cats meow for their food in the dark.