JOLLY DAYS

Your Yellow Hair

The world of ideology, politics, polemics - a dessicated landscape finally.

By W. B. Yeats:

Your Yellow Hair

For Anne Gregory

"Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair."


"But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair."


"I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair."

Being loved for oneself, or being loved for some other reason, not of your doing, not of your own creation...the mystery of attractiveness...the banter of verbal foreplay...the enigma of the magnetic attraction people have to one another...our appearance and its relation to our identity...the rich full landscape of associations evoked by our spiritual and our physical selves...