Yeats on TV and in Music

The television show House has an episode where a boy named Lucas Palmeiro reads poetry to his mother Lucy Palmeiro to calm her down.  The poem was intriguing.  I discovered that the book used in the show was an out of print and expensive copy of The Wild Swans at Coole.  I bought two different inexpensive copies of this collection and they were amateurish compilations with errors.  The best way to get The Wild Swans at Coole is to get a book like The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (ISBN 0020556500) which has his poems grouped by book.  Then you can read through all the poems in The Wild Swans at Coole and know there are no typos.  I own this copy and recommend it.

The poem that got my attention in this episode of House was Her Praise.  The Lucas Palmeiro character only read a fragment of the poem, the concluding lines, which were these:
     "If there be rags enough he will know her name
     And be well pleased remembering it, for in the old days,
     Though she had young men's praise and old men's blame,
     Among the poor both old and young gave her praise."
The poem on the whole is silly, so do not be disappointed if you read it.  Yet there was something about the concluding lines that caught my ear and made me want to learn more.  Perhaps that is the essense of poetry, that it captures your imagination.

There are music CDs where musicians have set some of Yeats poetry to music:
An Appointment With Mr. Yeats by The Waterboys Format: Audio CD
Now & In Time to Be A Musical Celebration Of The Works Of W.B. Yeats  by various artists
Both collections have these poems in common:
     Lake Isle Of Innisfree
     An Irish Airman Forsees His Death
     The Song of Wandering Aengus
     Politics
     Before the World Was Made
I will make a point to read all of these since they are popular with the musicians.

You can hear Yeats read his poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree
on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLlcvQg9i6c
and follow along with the words here
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43281/the-lake-isle-of-innisfree
It seems to me that his love of the country life is very British, and very human.

I think the script writer for this episode of House was John Mankiewicz.  Think of all the pleasure I got from reading Yeats because of this one episode of House!

Robert

The House episode was season 1, episode 6,  The Socratic Method (2004)