Most Read... Rebecca WattsThe Cult of the Noble Amateur
(PN Review 239)
John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Tim Parksin conversation with Natalia Ginzburg
(PN Review 49)
Next Issue Hal Coase 'Ochre Pitch' Gregory Woods 'On Queerness' Kirsty Gunn 'On Risk! Carl Phillips' Galina Rymbu 'What I Haven't Written' translated by Sasha Dugdale Gabriel Josipovici 'No More Stories' Valerie Duff-Strautmann 'Anne Carson's Wrong Norma'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
PN Review 275
PN Review Substack

This article is taken from PN Review 30, Volume 9 Number 4, March - April 1983.

Poets on Stilts: Yeats and some Contemporaries Donald Davie

ONE of the poems of Yeats that has attracted least attention is in Last Poems. It is called 'High Talk' ; and one reason why it is seldom noticed is, I should like to think, that it ends with Yeats at his most foolish and least plausible. However, up to the last three lines it contains much that is pleasing, and it addresses itself to one feature of Yeats's writing which I think we should, in 1982, be particularly concerned with:


Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.
What if my great-grand-dad 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 storeys 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, ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image