To failure
You do not come dramatically, with dragons
That rear up with my life between their paws
And dash me butchered down beside the wagons,
The horses panicking; nor as a clause,
Clearly set out to warn what can be lost,
What out-of-pocket charges must be borne,
Expenses met; nor as a draughty ghost,
That's seen, some mornings, running down a lawn.
It is these sunless afternoons, I find
Install you at my elbow like a bore
The chestnut trees are caked with silence. I'm
Aware the days pass quicker than before,
Smell staler too. And once they fall behind
They look like ruin. You have been here some time.
I love the darkness in this. Very vivid imagery. He springs the end out at you.
Marginalia
Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - "Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" - that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like why wrote "Don't be a ninny" alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of "Irony" fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, Hands cupped around their mouths. "Absolutely," they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. "Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!" Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written "Man vs. Nature" in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge. Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird signing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page- anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet- "Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love." - Billy Collins
A lovely poem. It evokes fond memories of school desks, playgrounds and first books. This nostalgia is a poignant and forceful thing, it chokes you with a wish to be back in that time and place, back to when it seemed that magic was in the air.
Promise her the moon
I don't know if you all would like this. This is a song by
Mr.Big. It's about love, the eternally pervasive emotion.
You don't know what you've got
'Till the love is almost gone
This time.. She's giving up
Still in a state of shock
I should have seen it coming on
It's too late for waking up
Her mind's made up
The dream is over
But my heart just can't let go
She's too good to be forgotten
Too good to be true
Before my world is torn apart
I'll promise her the moon
I'll promise her the moon
I was too blind to notice her
Wrapped up in myself
Working hard overtime, night and day
I thought we were so secure
Can't imagine someone else
Her mind's made up
The dream is over
But my heart just can't let go
She's too good to be forgotten
Too good to be true
Before my world is torn apart
I'll promise her the moon
I'll promise her the moon
And all the times that she stood by me
I never said " I love you"
But I kept it deep down in my soul
And all the while I've been a fool
She's too good to be forgotten
Too good to be true
Before my world is torn apart
I'll promise her the moon
I'll promise her the moon
I'll promise her the moon
Memory, and The Great Day
What better way to write about memory and revolution! Short gems from Yeats, the first from "The Wild Swans at Coole" and the second from a collection titled "New Poems":
MemoryONE had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.
-- William Butler YeatsThe Great Day
Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar on horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
-- William Butler Yeats
Men improve with the years
Recently impassioned by
The Collected Work of Yeats, I present some short poems that stood out in my mind:
Men improve with the yearsI AM worn out with dreams;
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams;
And all day long I look
Upon this lady's beauty
As though I had found in a book
A pictured beauty,
pleased to have filled the eyes
Or the discerning ears,
Delighted to be but wise,
For men improve with the years;
And yet, and yet,
Is this my dream, or the truth?
O would that we had met
When I had my burning youth!
But I grow old among dreams,
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams.
-- William Butler Yeats
This poem is one in a collection called "The Wild Swans at Coole". I sat up and reread this poem, not because of the sense of profundity its title evoked, but because of the intense reverie and consciousness of its opening line, "I am worn out with dreams" that I experienced. There is something more immense in the statement, which quickly dispels any hopes of optimism that the title might have promised, that transcends the fatigability of the human mind. And for a second the protagonist is lost and he does not know where -- in his dreams or in the truth. "Men improve with years" fails to reassure against the tenebrous "Is this my dream, or the truth?" and the protagonist's pining for his youth. The constancy in imagery -- "weather-worn, marble triton among the streams", "a pictured beauty (in a book)" are all delectable visions of the chimaera -- reiterates that Yeats is a master craftsman of verse. The repetition of the first three lines in the end ring in the inexorable. Yeats accomplishes the intended irony with ease: "Men improve with the years" starkly contrasts with its title.
