Hi everyone, here’s a coupla panels from a new comic I made. Experimenting with a new watercolor technique. It’s a two-page square comic coming out in the summer reading issue of Bookforum. This one is based on a poem by William Butler Yeats that I originally found in The Rattlebag. Tim told gave me The Rattlebag because it’s a pretty randomly organized poetry book, kinda like the b-sides of the world’s great poems. It’s designed so that you pick it up, open it to a page, and if you like the poem, cool, read more. That random walk-through-the park style of research is my favorite kind.
The Yeats poem is actually a part of a play called “The Dreaming of the Bones”.
I like the groovy-pagan wizardy world of Yeats.
I like that he was a senator too. He always talks about curlews crying.
Here’s the poem:
At the grey round of the hill
Music of a lost kingdom
Runs, runs and is suddenly still
The winds out of Clare-Galway
Carry it: suddenly it is still.
I have heard in the night air
A wandering airy music:
And moidered in that snare
A man is lost of a sudden,
In that sweet wandering snare.
What finger first began
Music of a lost kingdom?
They dream that laughed in the sun.
Dry bones that dream are bitter,
They dream and darken our sun.
Those crazy fingers play
A wandering airy music;
Our luck has withered away,
And wheat in the wheat-ear withered,
And the wind blows it away.
My heart ran wild when it heard
The curlew cry before dawn
And the eddying of the cat-headed bird;
But now the night is gone.
I have heard it from far below
The strong March birds a-crow,
Stretch neck and clap the wing,
Red cocks, and crow.
Pings & Trackbacks ¬