Now coming out of copyright

[wolfinthewood]

William Butler Yeats died in 1939. The volume Last Poems was published later that year. So the whole of Yeats's poetic corpus comes out of copyright today in the UK and Europe.

High Talk

Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.
What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,
And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher,
Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.

Because piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, make but poor shows,
Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon his timber toes,
Because women in the upper stories demand a face at the pane,
That patching old heels they may shriek, I take to chisel and plane.

Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.
All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

Other deaths that year: Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud (but the standard English translations remain in copyright), and Ford Madox Ford (I've never managed to warm to him, but some readers admire him greatly).

Comments

[artnouveauho.livejournal.com]

Fantastic poem! Yeats is glorious.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought about anniversaries in that way before - very neat. And the poem is splenid: certainly I should read more Yeats.