A Chinoiserie Poem for Chinese New Year from WB Yeats

Chinese new year…snakes and all that malarky…but at China Rhyming it’s an excuse to print another Chinoiserie poem for you holiday delectation…..this time Mr WB Yeats and a snippet of Chinoiserie from his poem Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, first published in 1921. You can read the whole thing here if you like.

Loie Fuller, the way, was a real dancer and a pioneer of modernist dance techniques in America and a big success in Paris. I’m not quite sure whether she actually had any Chinese dancers or danced in a Chinoiserie style but anyway…

When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound 
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth, 
It seemed that a dragon of air 
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round 
Or hurried them off on its own furious path; 
So the platonic Year 
Whirls out new right and wrong, 
Whirls in the old instead; 
All men are dancers and their tread 
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.