St. Valentine's Day / Dulac, Yeats / Thaliad

Edmund Dulac, from Gods and Mortals in Love
Persephone accosted by Hades,
soon to be wrenched from the world of spring.
A Valentine for snowy climes
longing for the return of spring to the earth.
See more of this series at artpassions.net.

Edmund Dulac, Yeats, Valentine's Day

I picked a Dulac image for Valentine's Day, as I have been realizing how close he was to Yeats at various times--right to that strange, macabre business of Yeats's bones, moved from grave to ossuary and confused with others before they were returned to Ireland. I suppose in this age of inspecting the bones of kings, we will be digging him up next, to make sure we have the right pieces of him.

Long ago I felt absolutely transfixed by the presence of bones--if they were his!--in the churchyard under the shadow of Ben Bulben. I was 24, riding my blue-green Peugeot around the perimeter of Ireland. I still love Yeats, and never blame him for being "silly like us," as Auden says, because a major part of his silliness was in order to draw from himself those poems he left behind.

Thaliad in WNC

An article about Thaliad is in this week's The Sylva Herald in western North Carolina. Athough you have to sign up to read the entire piece and see images, alas, a good portion of the article is visible without signing in.

Lines for Valentine's Day--Yeats, again--

The wrong of unshapely things
is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew
and sit on a green knoll apart,  

With the earth and the sky and the water,
remade, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.
           --stanzas from "The Rose in the Deeps of His Heart"