YEATS ON RHYTHM.

Via Pensate Omnia:

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols. If certain sensitive persons listen persistently to the ticking of a watch, or gaze persistently on the monotonous flashing of a light, they fall into the hypnotic trance; and rhythm is but the ticking of a watch made softer, that one must needs listen, and various, that one may not be swept beyond memory or grow weary of listening; while the patterns of the artist are but the monotonous flash woven to take the eyes in a subtler enchantment.

From Yeats’s 1900 essay “The Symbolism of Poetry.”

Comments

  1. So tramp! and march!
    and keep in…
    …step!
    Hold your head up high.
    ‘Cause out here in the wilderness
    Man was meant to die.
    –The Boyscout Song
    by the Wigglin’ Taters

  2. “You read Deleuze and Guattari,
    You do not say things as they are.”

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