Andrew's Wiki
Chestnut Flambeaux (changes)

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Content

• Late spring – early summer: that’s when chestnuts bloom, having these conical fiery red blooms
  • So, the blooms are falling off, which is autumnal
• Speaker is talking to peer in a tavern, to “curse” the evil tide of time b/c they’ve had an ugly spring: it’s not fair!
• Notes that such suffering moves from person to person like the seasons move from place to place
  • He seems really close to a fascinating image, of the seasons whipping around the earth, but he can’t elaborate b/c of his form…see below
    • “If her to-day the cloud of thunder lours / To-morrow it will hie on far behests; / The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours”

Form

• Seven stanzas of four lines each, same as Athlete Dying Young
• The verses are laced through with “pass the can” (the tankard of beer), making it inevitable formally to end with “Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale,” making him go back to original point instead of developing a point and going onward
  • Again we have someone who kinda gets near Yeats but can’t go the distance
  • It’s a good example of why free verse kinda had to happen….Yeats managed to use formal verse w/out having his meaning chained to it, but first the spell—the rules of poetry—had to be broken open before Yeats could muse
    • Yeats’ work may have a rhythm and form that is classical rather than free verse, but the MEANING and the search for it in his work is like a free verse of content that strains against a classical constraint of meter IN MEANING