A Farewell to Angel
Feb. 14th, 2004 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakAnd so it ends. My take on the news of the AtS cancellation is basically the same as ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kathyh's: I'd rather it go out in style (which it does, imo) at a point when I am still craving more. The one point where my Angel love was seriously shaken was during season 3; Darla and teenage Connor and Wesley's arc kept me hanging, but otherwise that was the only season where I would not have minded the news of cancellation at all. Which would have been foolish of me, because then I'd have missed the Greek tragedy that was season 4 (I mean this in the best sense, as a compliment - did I mention I have a thing for tragedies?), and season 5 which is intriguing and delighting me so far. (And I would have missed the salvation of Cordelia's character from the depths of St. Cordy-dom. Season 4 Cordy does not count, since it was mostly Jasmine.) So hail and farewell, AtS.
Instead of recounting favourite moments and arcs, which a lot of eloquent people are doing already, I decided to go on poetry rampage. Yeats was referred to repeatedly in the Jossverse, both on AtS and BTVS, and he strikes me as an eminently suitable poet for the show.
So, poems, pieces of poems, and briefly sketched reasons why they're Angel-relevant:
From SAILING TO BYZANTIUM
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms; birds in the trees,
- those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
(…)
Oh sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
LEDA AND THE SWAN
A sudden blow; the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs,
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by that brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity….
The noir hero and his femme fatale
NO SECOND TROY
Why should I blame her that she fill my days
With mistery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there a second Troy for her to burn?
kathyh's: I'd rather it go out in style (which it does, imo) at a point when I am still craving more. The one point where my Angel love was seriously shaken was during season 3; Darla and teenage Connor and Wesley's arc kept me hanging, but otherwise that was the only season where I would not have minded the news of cancellation at all. Which would have been foolish of me, because then I'd have missed the Greek tragedy that was season 4 (I mean this in the best sense, as a compliment - did I mention I have a thing for tragedies?), and season 5 which is intriguing and delighting me so far. (And I would have missed the salvation of Cordelia's character from the depths of St. Cordy-dom. Season 4 Cordy does not count, since it was mostly Jasmine.) So hail and farewell, AtS. Instead of recounting favourite moments and arcs, which a lot of eloquent people are doing already, I decided to go on poetry rampage. Yeats was referred to repeatedly in the Jossverse, both on AtS and BTVS, and he strikes me as an eminently suitable poet for the show.
So, poems, pieces of poems, and briefly sketched reasons why they're Angel-relevant:
From SAILING TO BYZANTIUM
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms; birds in the trees,
- those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
(…)
Oh sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
LEDA AND THE SWAN
A sudden blow; the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs,
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by that brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity….
The noir hero and his femme fatale
NO SECOND TROY
Why should I blame her that she fill my days
With mistery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there a second Troy for her to burn?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-02-14 10:32 am (UTC)Another?
The Circus Animals' Desertion
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.
What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.
And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.
There were some very good things about last season; this from an ep that I believe also alluded to Othello and referenced "The Teddy Bears's Picnic."
no subject
Date: 2004-02-14 01:39 pm (UTC)Sigh. Yes. Another fitting poem. And cross post away.
Beautiful way of saying goodbye.
Date: 2004-02-14 04:27 pm (UTC)We all thought that.
Date: 2004-02-15 12:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-15 02:11 am (UTC)This is no good news. I really liked Angel. Well, at least we know now that the last season of Angel is a really good one, which can not be said of every TV Show.
Still, how sad that the place for the unusual in TV is narrowing down very much.
This quote of Whedon summs it all up: (Thanks for posting the link)
I've never made mainstream TV very well. I like surprises, and TV isn't about surprises, unless the surprise is who gets voted off of something. [...]
Remember the words of the poet:
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN' SHOW. I totally shoulda took the road that had all those people on it. Damn."
Oh, and lest I forget: With
F.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-15 02:13 am (UTC)The CD arrived!
Date: 2004-02-16 04:28 am (UTC)