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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.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O 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.
-William Butler Yeats
The sixty-one year old Yeats is writing about his desire, in his old age, to leave behind the natural, bodily, sensual delights and values of youth–”the young in one another’s arms,” the “mackerel-crowded seas”–for the “artifice of eternity,” the “monuments of unageing intellect.” Byzantium is his city of the mind, where tender and mutable flesh is shed for the glittering, imperishable gold of artistic creation and intellectual achievement. When his body begins to break down, when he begins to become “a tattered coat upon a stick,” a scarecrow to frighten the young and impetuous, he pleads to be reborn. His heart, “fastened to a dying animal,” is no good to him anymore: he must be exchanged for a golden bird, a clockwork imitation of the natural world that transcends it. He will speak timeless truths from a vantage point that is beyond time.
I love this poem, though I feel as though I’m looking at it curiously, from across a broad gulf. It’s not just that I’m really young, it’s that I’m really into being young at this point: the new love and big plans and nice legs and stupid mistake parts of it. And with this awareness–”wow, it’s really fun being young, actually”–comes the insidious realization that it won’t last forever. I’ve always known that I was going to die, even though the young aren’t supposed to know that. Somehow, though, it’s never occurred to me that I would get old first.
So I like this poem. I like the idea of the old and worn-out body becoming a chrysalis for something altogether new and more splendid. I like the idea that we can transmute ourselves into a pure artistry, that we can transcend what is flesh. Flesh is lovely. Being young is lovely. But this poem speaks to me of something even better–something eternal–and whether that’s religion or art, I’m not sure and I don’t think Yeats is either. As we retreat from our failing bodies, we enter into a deeper knowledge, and we discover that what we have lost is far less than what we have won.
That’s the hope, anyway.
“Not Waving But Drowning”
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much farther out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
-Stevie Smith
What I like about this poem is its simple haunting rhythm and the image of the white hand out in the breakers. I like the combination of dialogue that’s attuned to real speech and utter spareness of words, the odd slant rhymes, the lurching meter that nonetheless hits all the right beats. It reminds me of Emily Dickinson. It’s also a poem I connect with personally, which always helps. I rarely need an excuse to feel sorry for myself, and the image of someone drowning and unable to prevent his plea for help from being misinterpreted–well, I like to pretend I understand.
Final round of the Poetry Out Loud competition went down tonight–what a wonderful, grand time. Beautiful poems read and performed beautifully. I was actually very glad to be a teacher–if I were a student I think I’d have been eaten up with nerves and really wanted more than anything else to win, whereas as a teacher I got to enjoy and applaud everyone’s poems without thinking, “Is she going to sabotage my chances?” Some really beautiful and unusual poems chosen too–a nice mix of the ones that were new and the ones discovered anew.
One girl read Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116.”
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no; it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Awesome.
Oh, also–on a more personal note, I got an interview at Cornell for their Near Eastern Studies program! Woohoo! That is, naturally, the one school that Blondie did not get into for chemistry…but it’s still good to be that much closer to an acceptance.
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?”
I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”
What I like about this poem is the last line, its simplicity, its freshness. The last word– “wait”– jars you, because you have to search back to three lines before for the rhyme. When you first hear it it seems as though it’s coming out of nowhere, and then you think, “Oh, right. State/wait. Now I get it.” There’s a little click that happens in your head as the poem feels “right” again.
In the same way, that line’s calm, inexorable message–”They also serve who only stand and wait”–brings a life back into balance. Milton wrote this poem (we conjecture) when he was 42 and going blind.* From the time he was a teenager at university, he had known himself to have an extraordinary capacity for poetry, and he planned to write a great verse epic, following the model of Homer and Vergil but with a distinctly English theme, perhaps focusing on a great king and warrior such as King Arthur. He knew that he could be the greatest poet of the English language.
And then he began to lose his sight.
Milton does not generally stoop to hyperbole (at least, not in my memory), and so the line, “And that one talent which is death to hide” stands out all the more–you almost think that he means it literally. The frustration, the anger of feeling as though God has given you gifts which God both expects you to use and is at the same time keeping you from using, the agony of watching the best part of yourself go to waste–they practically drip off the page, all the more awful because they come from the carefully chosen, measured, lucid voice of a middle-aged scholar. Milton never loses control, but that does not lessen his despair or his fear that he will fail God as he fails to develop his gifts.
And then–
“God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best / Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.” Milton finds that he has mistaken his essential mission. The best part of himself is not his creative genius, no matter how mighty it may be; it is his willingness to do his best with everything that has been given to him, not just the parts he is proud of.
“They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Click.
*Of course, 42 would have been on the far side, not the near side, of middle age at that time, creating one of the perennial scholarly problems of the poem. Why would he say that his light is spent “ere half my days” then? Is he writing about a figurative blindness, or writer’s block? Is he changing his age to heighten the pathos of the poem (not likely, to my mind–given how personal it feels, I don’t think he’s that interested in creating an elaborate poetic alter ego)? Or does he just assume he’ll live to be 85?
