‘Y’ for ‘William Butler Yeats’  who was born, June 13,1865 in Sandymount, Republic of Ireland and died in Cannes, France on January 28, 1939.

He was an Irish poet, a dramatist, a prose writer he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. His themes were on unrequited love, dreams, visions, country living, Irish history, Celtic mythology, then onto Modernist poems.

As you read, William Butler Yeats, keep in mind he wrote about his time, his life. Things and people who impressed or irritated him, places he saw, his thoughts on what was said about him, about mysticism and spiritualism. Mainly, he wrote for himself and a small amount of people.

On page 298, in ‘The Vein of Gold by Julia Cameron author of the Artist Way, Julia takes us into a “psychological space that allows you to entertain alternative belief systems” This chapter is called, “Spiritual Experience”.

Julia Cameron uses part of Yeats prose poem from, The Celtic Element in Literature, to get you to play, to dream, to dance. Cameron’s set up three points. Imagining the world lived only by candlelight.  She then tells us to experience an ethnic restaurant and see this as your normal daily life; and the third is to read and think about a specific piece of prose by W.B. Yeats.

“Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine and could take human or grotesque shape and dance among the shadows; and that deer and raven and foxes , and wolves sand bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not less divine and changeable…They dreamed of so great a mystery in little things that they believed the waving of a hand, or of sacred bough, enough to trouble far –off hearts, or hood the moon with darkness.”~The Celtic Element in Literature you can read the entire here for Free at Gutenberg.org.

Even more  of W.B. Yeats work HERE

In The Vein of Gold by Julia Cameron,  chapter titled: “Ceilings’ page 328.in the margins she quotes the first quatrain of his poem:

A Prayer for Old Age by W.B. Yeats.

GOD guard me from those thoughts men think

In the mind alone;

He that sings a lasting song

Thinks in a marrow-bone;

 

From all that makes a wise old man

That can be praised of all;

O what am I that I should not seem

For the song’s sake a fool?

 

I pray — for word is out

And prayer comes round again –

That I may seem, though I die old,

A foolish, passionate man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6n–A-uHLU

Yeats usage of ‘marrow-bone’ I wondered, did he use it as religious  expression? Or is he seeing it as nourishment for the soul. Or maybe just soup.

Take in account the years that these poems were written, and that  we didn’t know that stem cells were in the marrow- filled with the makings of life.   But, a cook did.

Yeats used the word  ‘marrow’ in these poems:

“Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones “~Adam’s Curse   by William Butler Yeats

“And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone;”~September 1913

“I THOUGHT of your beauty, and this arrow,
Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.”~The Arrow by

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-arrow/