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Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
Wow. This is totally fascinating. I’ve never come across anyone who has made the connection between Yeats’s description and this painting. But this surely is the painting that he (or the woman) had in mind. Vera, this might be a fun little project for you–see if you can find any critical commentary on Yeats’s “Magic” that draws a connection with the painting. Then, report back in this space. Thanks for this–I’m not sure what to say about the painting at this point, but it provides a new way of thinking about “Magic.”
One of the things that interesting about “The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart” is the phrase, “casket of gold.” There’s a sense of something at once important (gold) and dead (casket), as if what the lover wants of his beloved is to freeze into pure essence–to become, in other words, a beautiful (but dead) statue. On this reading, the lover desires the end of desire, the point, that is, at which the beloved is captured. The final line, though, returns us to the realm of desire: “for my dreams of your image….” We get a “dream” (which is about desire) for an “image” (the golden statue but now rendered as something considerably less ‘solid’) that results somehow in the blossoming of the rose (a symbol). In this way, we can see the poem as essentially about poetry: the longing (the dream) for the end of desire (the golden statue / image) produces the rose (the beautiful poem). This, of course, all ties in now with Andrew’s point: “The Song of Wandering Aengus” does what this poem theorizes. “The Song” is the rose, the beautiful thing, produced out of the desire for an image.