The “mingled seas” are the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. 11: The English scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) once wrote, “I do not know how I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding another pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” 12: Rosses is a wide beach near Sligo familiar to Yeats from his childhood days; he also mentions it in his early poem “The Stolen Child.”

THE CHOICE

First published as the next to last stanza of “Coole and Ballylee, 1931” in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932).

MOHINI CHATTERJEE

First published in A Packet for Ezra Pound (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1929) and, after two magazine printings, in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932). It was a companion poem to “At Algeciras.”

Yeats met the Bengali Brahmin sage Mohini Chatterjee (1858–1936) when he came to lecture to the Hermetic Society in Dublin in 1885–86.

BYZANTIUM

First published in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932).

The late Roman emperor Constantine rebuilt the ancient city of Byzantium as Constantinople, which became the capital of first the entire Roman Empire and then of the Eastern Roman Empire. Its modern name is Istanbul, in Turkey. Yeats’s prose draft read: “Describe Byzantium as it is in the system towards the end of the first Christian millennium. A walking mummy Flames at the street corners, where the soul is purified, birds of hammered gold singing in the golden trees, in the harbour [dolphins] offering their backs to the wailing dead that they may carry them to paradise.”

In a well-known passage from A Vision, Yeats wrote: “I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato.... I think that in early Byzantium, and maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one, that architect and artificers...spoke to the multitude and the few alike.”

5: The dome is probably that of Santa Sophia or Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), the famous church constructed by the emperor Justinian in sixth-century Byzantium. 11: In Greek mythology Hades is lord of the underworld, where the shades of the dead congregate. 16: The Romantic poet Coleridge used the phrase “The Nightmare Life-in-Death” in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

THE MOTHER OF GOD

First published in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932).

In his concluding “Notes” to this volume, Yeats writes: “In ‘The Mother of God’ the words ‘a fallen flare through the hollow of an ear” are, I am told, obscure. I had in my memory Byzantine mosaic pictures of the Annunciation, which show a line drawn from a star to the ear of the Virgin. She conceived of the Word, and therefore through the ear a star fell and was born.”

VACILLATION

First published in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932) There each section had its own subtitle and the later sections II and III were combined: I, What is Joy; II (including the current II and III), The Burning Tree; III, Happiness; IV, Conscience; V, Conquerors; VI, A Dialogue; VII, Von Hügel.

11–12: The tree that is half flame and half green comes from the medieval Welsh collection of tales The Mabinogion. Yeats quoted the relevant passage in his early essay “The Celtic Element in Literature” as translated by Lady Charlotte Guest: “... beautiful passage about the burning Tree, that has half its beauty from calling up a fancy of leaves so living and beautiful, they can be of no less living and beautiful a thing than flame: ‘They saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one half of which was in flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in full leaf’” (EE 130). 16f: Attis is a vegetation god in Greek mythology who castrated himself when driven to frenzy by Cybele the earth goddess and was turned into a pine tree. In the procession at Attis’ festival, the priest would hang his image on a sacred pine tree. 27: In Greek mythology Lethe was one of the rivers of Hades; drinking its waters made souls forget the past. 59: “The great lord of Chou” is presumably Chou-kung, who died in 1105 B.C. and was known as the Duke of Chou He was a Chinese statesman and author who advised his brother in overthrowing the Shang dynasty; Confucius later cited him as a model minister. 63: Famous for its astronomy and astrology among other arts and sciences, Babylon was the chief city of ancient Mesopotamia; Nineveh was the capital of the ancient Assyrian empire, destroyed by Babylonians and Medes in 612 B.C. 74: In the Bible (Isaiah 6) an angel touches Isaiah’s lips with a live coal to purify him and enable him to become a prophet. 77: Yeats followed Lady Gregory in seeing ancient poets, whether Irish or Greek, as singing what from a Christian perspective would be our fallen world. Yeats remembered in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Lady Gregory telling him that she preferred poems translated from the Irish by Frank O’Connor because “they come out of original sin.” 78: Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925), the son of an Austrian diplomat father and Scots mother, became a Catholic religious philosopher of mystical bent. Yeats read his The mystical element of Religion, as Studied in St. Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends, 1908. 80: Saint Teresa of Avila (1515–82) was a Spanish Carmelite nun and mystic. Yeats read the account of her allegedly undecayed body in Lady Lovat’s The Life of Saint Teresa, 1911. 89: In the Bible (Judges 14) Samson kills a lion and later takes honey from its carcass. He then makes the episode into a riddle, “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness,” and eventually tells his wife the answer, which she uses to betray him.

QUARREL IN OLD AGE

First published in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932).

The poem likely grew out of a quarrel with Maud Gonne over a hunger strike by women prisoners.