Text 101

THE CAP AND BELLS

The jester walked in the garden:

The garden had fallen still;

He bade his soul rise upward

And stand on her window-sill.

It rose in a straight blue garment,

When owl began to call:

It had grown wise-tongued by thinking

Of a quiet and light footfall;

But the young queen would not listen;

She rose in her pale night-gown;

She drew in the heavy casement

And pushed the latches down.

He bade his heart go to her,

When the owls called out no more;

In a red and quivering garment

It sang to her through the door.

It had grown sweet-tongued by dreaming

Of a flutter of flower-like hair;

But she took up her fan from the table

And waved it off on the air.

'I have cap and bells', he pondered,

'I will send them to her and die';

And when the morning whitened

He left them where she went by.

She laid them upon her bosom,

Under a cloud of her hair,

And her red lips sang them a love-song

Till stars grew out of the air.

She opened her door and her window,

And the heart and the soul came through,

To her right hand came the red one,

To her left hand came the blue.

They set up a noise like crickets,

A chattering wise and sweet,

And her hair was a folded flower

And the quiet of love in her feet.

7.1All you need is… a good conceit

W.B.Yeats's love poetry is enigmatic. That is why it is so enchanting. Love is a country where anything can happen, and among the multitudes who have crossed its shimmering frontiers there have been poets who made poetry of what they found. Feelings of passionate love have kindled the authors of different periods and places.

The Elizabethan age was keen on love. The theme thrived in the works of the Elizabethan poets. They still used the idiom of the Middle Ages casting their lovers in the roles of servant, vassal, and thrall, but those words had lost their force. The energizing forces of Elizabethan society were largely materialistic and, naturally, they penetrated and permeated its poetry. The sonnet flourished then.

Good poets more often than not speak the language of their time and reflect something of the changing nature of their society. The poetic diction in the Middle Ages' style combined with the hurried language of the street brought new fashions into love poetry. One of such 'fashions' is a conceit, which could be defined as an outrageous metaphor: a comparison between two highly dissimilar objects. In love poetry, conceits grow out of Renaissance tradition that depicts man as a warrior and the woman as a walled town; he attacks, she defends herself or surrenders. The metaphysical poets of the 17^th century made the unexpected a key ingredient in the conceit.

Everything became content of poems: physics, astronomy, navigation, everything that flourished at that time – any science, any intellectual endeavor − might yield a conceit that viewed the soul's progress and passions as parallels to the working of the universe it inhabited. That resulted in poetry which was remarkably tough intellectually, but also remarkably free, self-assured, and optimistic in its vision. Feeling declared itself openly and was completely unrestrained (and even unclothed more often than not)! The keenest on conceit was John Donne (1572—1631).

Early in his life he was but Jack Donne, a young man given to adventure that eventually led him to a secret marriage against his fiance's parents' will. That ruined his secular career. His marriage was a happy one, though. Later in his life, at 39, Donne became a priest. For the last ten years of his life he was Dean of St.Paul's Cathedral in London, and the best preacher of this day. Could one predict Donne's future reading the following poem written early in his life, in the 1590s?