Explore "The Thinking of the Body" by W.B. Yeats on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Those learned men who are a terror to children and an ignominious sight / in lovers' eyes, all those butts of a traditional humour where there is / something of the wisdom of peasants, are mathematicians, theologians, / lawyers, men of science of various kinds. They have followed some / abstract reverie, which stirs the brain only and needs that only, and / have therefore stood before the looking-glass without pleasure and never / known those thoughts that shape the lines of the body for beauty or / animation, and wake a desire for praise or for display.
There are two pictures of Venice side by side in the house where I am / writing this, a Canaletto that has little but careful drawing and a not / very emotional pleasure in clean bright air, and a Franz Francken, where / the blue water, that in the other stirs one so little, can make one long / to plunge into the green depth where a cloud shadow falls. Neither / painting could move us at all, if our thought did not rush out to the / edges of our flesh, and it is so with all good art, whether the Victory / of Samothrace which reminds the soles of our feet of swiftness, or the / Odyssey that would send us out under the salt wind, or the young / horsemen on the Parthenon, that seem happier than our boyhood ever was, / and in our boyhood's way. Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see / the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every / abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not / a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of / the body. Its morality is personal, knows little of any general law, has / no blame for Little Musgrave, no care for Lord Barnard's house, seems / lighter than a breath and yet is hard and heavy, for if a man is not / ready to face toil and risk, and in all gaiety of heart, his body will / grow unshapely and his heart lack the wild will that stirs desire. It / approved before all men those that talked or wrestled or tilted under / the walls of Urbino, or sat in the wide window seats discussing all / things, with love ever in their thought, when the wise Duchess ordered / all, and the Lady Emilia gave the theme.