Dear friends,
When I was a pupil in primary and secondary school, there were poems every week — in Irish and English — for memorisation and some kind of “what did the poet mean in the final line?” knowledge acquiring. I just went to the local schools, nothing fancy. I’m sure there are good critiques of the Irish education system, but I’m glad for how it influenced me. The poets we learnt were not writing cute verses for children; they were writing about war, guns, resistance, love, mid-life crises, land, longing, God, grief, joy, rites of passages, and history. Some of the most notable poets had been assassinated after a failed revolution calling for Irish freedom: that influenced me too, knowing that poetry is always in conversation with public life.
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) was a lyrical poet who wrote in English, but in an English that was sometimes influenced by the cadences, half-rhymes, and assonances of Irish language poetry he heard from the servants in his Anglo-Irish family’s homes. I don’t know if there was a year in my schooling where we didn’t learn some of his poems by heart. (During the pandemic, I re-read all of his work and was astounded at how much ground we’d covered over the 13 years of schooling.)
Anyway, all of this goes to say that there’s one poem I have loved for years, ever since it was on the curriculum. Its title also tells us who it addresses: “To A Child Dancing in the Wind.” It’s in the public domain, so I can reproduce the whole thing here.
Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of the wind!
(There are other versions, some with an additional stanzas, including a slightly earlier version published in Poetry Magazine in 1912.)
During the pandemic, this was the poem I recited twice while washing my hands, so if I hadn’t repeated it enough before 2020, it is burnt into me now. The distance between a world-weary speaker, who knows about “fool’s triumph” or “Love lost as soon as won” or that dead “best labourer” or the work of binding sheaves … not to mention the “monstrous crying of the wind!” Someone is speaking who doesn’t feel young and whose ache is dragged out of him watching a “Child Dancing in the Wind”.
And that child — who are they? Whoever they are, they’re dancing, without care for what is roaring at them from the future, their hair tumbled out, wet from salt water.
Yeats uses beautiful rhythm in the first three lines:
Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
But then, the fourth and fifth tumble into each other, even as the sea-water wet hair tumbles:
And tumble out your hair [t]hat the salt drops have wet;
Thereafter, it’s like a series of stops echo the approach of some kind of doom:
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph (BOOM), nor yet
Love lost as soon as won, (BOOM)
Nor the best labourer dead (BOOM),
And all the sheaves to bind. (BOOM),
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of the wind!
(*BOOMs are, obviously, mine)
An older man, who has been concerned with the question of a country’s independence from empire, is feeling the weight of years — and impending war — upon his shoulders, not to mention the crisis of seeing fools triumph, gains lost as soon as they’re won, good people dying, and traitors rising.
Is he cynical looking at this child? I don’t think so. But he’s moved by them, and — perhaps — wishing that the unfurling future could be otherwise for this dancing child. There’s yearning, wistfulness, and melody in the poignant lyric, helped along by lines that sometimes alternative in syllable length, making you do a hop, skip, and jump with your mouth as you shape the lines aloud. The music in it has its own rhythm: resonant with how nature formulates things, not necessarily a strict pentameter.
I find it impossible to read Yeats’s poem today without the images of children dying in Gaza in my mind, and of other war zones and catastrophes too. The poem’s child has levity, even if the future is likely to be weighty, but to experience levity, there must be a modicum of nutrition. The poet Mosab Abu Toha’s New Yorker article this week about finding food in Gaza was heartbreaking. Adults there, like adults in so many wars, go hungry themselves in order to give some nourishment to children who would otherwise die of starvation. A poem locates you in the point-of-view of the original writer but also reaches through time — to whenever now is — alive again on our breaths. This dancing child of Yeats’s 12 lines becomes a child we’d wish to see safe and full enough to dance.
I’m curious what you see in the poem, as you read it today.
Thank you, as always, for your messages, and for coming along to events. I’m on the road for March through July, and I hope to see you at a stop along the way,
Poetry in the World
March 5, 7, 14 at 7pm Eastern Australia time, online
I’m giving three talks about poetry and spirituality as part of the Australian Joint Spirituality Development series. Learn more and register here. Sadly, I won’t be in Australia for these; I’ll be zooming from Ireland.
March 7 at 6pm ET, online
I’m leading a Zoom seminar called “Time in Conflict; Time in Poetry” about conflict in time and poetry. Register for it here.
March 14 at 7pm, London, England
I’m giving a talk for the paperback release of Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World. Registration here.
April 19–21, Round Top, Texas, US
I’m delighted to be one of the featured poets at the Round Top Poetry festival. Information and tickets here.
May 14, Pittsburgh, PA, US
For you theologically interested folks, I’ll be speaking at the Festival of Homiletics. Info here.
May 17 at 2–4pm, Camden, Maine, US
I’ll be talking about the word “you” in poetry at the Camden Public Library. You can attend either in person or over Zoom.
May 24–26, Boone, North Carolina, US
I’m leading a a 48-hour Poetry Unbound retreat, where there will be poetry readings, responding to prompts, and sharing. Information and registration here.
June 27–July 7, Patmos, Greece
I’m one of the speakers at the 10-night “Journeying into Common Good” salon, together with Krista Tippett, Allison Russell, JT Nero, and Joe Henry. More details here.
Thank you, Padraig. Your interpretations and your generous sharing of your heart are such important nourishment for me.
I simply catch on the line: “what need have you to dread” — and that shapes my whole response to the poem. I’m sorry to say that I find so much to dread in the world, from the true atrocities you describe that threaten the lives of so many, to the mundane Sunday evening fears of the coming work week and the lonely self-doubt that accompanies it. I’m not equating those two things, certainly, but merely demonstrating that the sensation is irrational and can occupy any space regardless of circumstance.
The poem makes me want to be in conversation and communion with the child on the shore that lives in me and within each of us — to remember some uninhibited joy to be expressed freely, in response to and defiance of life’s hardness. I know it’s possible.
Thanks for the invitation to this poem. I’m wishing you and everyone a beautiful Sunday wherever you may be.
Before the pandemic years, this poem was about my son. Then, of course, the world got its hands on him. Without me reassuring him that he was safe (because, how can I?), his dancing grew more cautious. He's learned to check the weather on his tablet before he steps outside.
Today, this poem is about Betty. Regardless of starving children, school lockdowns, and strangling binaries, my dog still does figure eights around the palm trees in the backyard. Her body is still lawless and clumsy and deliciously free. Every day, I envy her.