‘Because a fire was in my head’

 

W B Yeats evocative poem ‘The Song of the Wandering Aengus’;
throughout his poetry, Yeats works with the inescapable polarities
inherent in being human. One  is the gap created
by our ability to imagine perfection, to dream , to pass
into a world of mystery and magic, to imagine a life better
than we know — and the mundanity of everyday life.

We feel the pain when the imagined life makes the life we lead seem desolate, when the ordinary everyday is our only reality.  It behoves us to allow our real lives to support our dreams and vice versa. This is how Yeats expresses the task, of living in hope of a dreamt possibility, forever.

Yeats is a favourite poet of mine, expressing the longing in the individual for something yearned for yet possibly unfathomable.  The quest is the inevitable journey each individual must take. It is the perpetual drive to retain the mystery and magic in a world that is sometimes inhumane, hostile.

One more thing – read it aloud, it is music .

The collage is mine, borrowing from Rembrandt and the portrait of his son as Titus courtesy of the Rijks