*In Rambling Talk with an Image of Air / *From Wllm. Butler Yeats, c. 1918

Kevin Fletcher

William Butler Yeats wrote the poem "Broken Dreams" in 1915 after Maud Gonne rejected his marriage proposal when he was fifty-two years old. It was published four years later in a collection of poems titled "The Wild Swans at Coole," number twenty-five in the collection. The line which Kevin Fletcher has named his monotype after is from the final passage:

The Last stroke of midnight dies. / All day in the one chair / From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.

A chaotic collection of shapes sits dejectedly at the bottom Fletcher’s composition, bordered on both sides by towering dark walls, like a wrecked ship aground at the mouth of a sea cavern. Just beyond, a slice of sunset the color of roses leaks through the landscape, illuminating the ruins below in soft hues.

Fletcher illustrates the wrenching emotion of Yeats’ famed poem with his signature economy of line, focusing on the overall aesthetic rather than finite detail. Perhaps unintentionally, he communicates equally the weight of grief and love in this rare color monotype from his recent works.