High Talk

Another stormy overcast day. Coming home from the park with Lola, I noticed this path of bright light burning behind the old chestnut tree that borders the smaller park and artificial lake; an intensely sunlit slot, like a bright portal When I stepped around the tree, the intensity was mesmerising: the lemon-sharp rays of the low sun barreling into us, blowing our shadows into stilted, telescope-creatures, searing our passing or standing shadows on the trunk, as if each was Yeats' circus man, Malachy Stilt-Jack. The poem is very much a dawn poem, but that 'terrible novelty of light' could apply to sunset too, if we tilt the angle (and the whole meaning). Anyway, it's regarded by many as one of the strangest Yeats wrote, so here it is:

High Talk

Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.
What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,
And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern Stalks upon higher,
Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.

Because piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, ake but poor shows,
Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon This timber toes,
Because women in the upper storeys demand a face at the pane,
That patching old heels they may shriek, I take to chisel and plane.

Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.

All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.