No Misery, No Poetry: The Story of Us

Looking back, finding the beginning was the most difficult. The endings, like the reunions, came twice a month. Like clockwork,

a precise machine. Predictable. Inner workings somehow beyond our control.

Maybe if we'd been horologists or cardiologists
we could have some clarity.

Something.

Convinced it was a miracle, an ecstatic, a raving fanatic, so newly reborn, I pleaded against a closed door

for the miraculous

to enter my dark heart

just once more.

The Mire and Blood, always the mire and blood.

Byzantium

By William Butler Yeats
 

The unpurged images of day recede;

The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;

Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song

After great cathedral gong;

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

All that man is,

All mere complexities,

The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,

Shade more than man, more image than a shade;

For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth

May unwind the winding path;

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

Breathless mouths may summon;

I hail the superhuman;

I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,

More miracle than bird or handiwork,

Planted on the starlit golden bough,

Can like the cocks of Hades crow,

Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud

In glory of changeless metal

Common bird or petal

And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit

Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,

Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,

Where blood-begotten spirits come

And all complexities of fury leave,

Dying into a dance,

An agony of trance,

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,

Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,

The golden smithies of the Emperor!

Marbles of the dancing floor

Break bitter furies of complexity,

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget,

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

 

W. B. Yeats, “Byzantium” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed © 1961 by Georgie Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of A. P. Watt, Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

Yeats, my love.

Sailing to Byzantium

W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

 

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.

Word of the Day

quixotic, adj. and n.

Pronunciation:  Brit. /kwɪkˈsɒtɪk/ , U.S. /kwɪkˈsɑdɪk/

Forms:  16– quixotic, 17 quixotik, 17–18 quixotick, 18 quixottic

Etymology:  < Quixote n. + -ic suffix. Compare earlier quixotical adj. and Quixote adj.

 A. adj.

 

 1. Of an action, attribute, idea, etc.: characteristic of or appropriate to Don Quixote; demonstrating or motivated by exaggerated notions of chivalry and romanticism; naively idealistic; unrealistic, impracticable; (also) unpredictable, capricious, whimsical.

1718   N. Amhurst Protestant Popery iv. 61   Pulpit and Press ficticious Ills engage, And combat Windmills with Quixotic Rage.

1779   J. Thaxter Let. 15 Dec. in L. H. Butterfield et al. Adams Family Corr. (1973) III. 251   We made a Quixotik Appearance [on mules in Spain]..For we had Don Quixots, Sancha Pancas and Squires in Abundance.

1826   Lancet 16 Dec. 356/2   It would be somewhat Quixotic to expect, that no protests would be made.

1851   ‘L. Mariotti’ Italy in 1848 131   A daring that would seem almost quixotic.

1874   J. R. Green Short Hist. Eng. People x. 719   A quixotic mission to the Indians of Georgia.

1929   Travel Jan. 7 (caption)    One of the most romantic adventures of modern times: the quixotic attempt to carve an empire out of the New World.

1956   Zanesville (Ohio) Signal 2 July i. 4/5   A man of quixotic whims who once ran for president of the U.S.

1990   Times Lit. Suppl. 26 Feb. 90/4   Shostakovich was not the only artist who survived because of Stalin's quixotic approachability.

2004   T. Rosenbaum Myth of Moral Justice Introd. 3   The law comes across as unjust and quixotic... Its results don't feel right emotionally to those who are neither its insiders nor cast members.

 2. Of a person: resembling Don Quixote; visionary; enthusiastically chivalrous or romantic; naively idealistic; impractical, capricious.

1777   Mutability Human Life II. 259   Count Dismallo..waited on good Mrs. White before your Quixotic Villars had taken his final leave of her.

1815   J. Adams Wks. (1856) X. 157,   I considered Miranda as a vagrant, a vagabond, a Quixotic adventurer.

1857   T. Hughes Tom Brown's School Days i. i. 4   This family training..makes them eminently quixotic.

1898   Sandusky (Ohio) Star 15 July 1/4   Cunningham-Graham has long been familiar to the public as a Quixotic champion of lost causes.

1939   Fortune Oct. 30/2,   I was sad, because I always used to think of the Belgians as wonderfully quixotic, which it seems that they are not.

1974   N.Y. Times 20 May 33/2   No quixotic lot, this pool of windmill advocates now includes members of some of the most serious research institutes.

1994   H. Bloom Western Canon ii. v. 129   Against that claim I set the most poignant and Quixotic of all critical agonists, the Basque man of letters Miguel de Unamuno.

 

  A quixotic person. Also (rare) in pl.: quixotic sentiments.

1896   Spectator 7 Mar. 337   If..our Quixotics seem foolish or extravagant.

1918   Times 16 Mar. 9/3   ‘Our’ opera..will have nothing to do with maudlin decadents or unbalanced quixotics.

1974   Amer. Jrnl. Agric. Econ. 56 888/1   The quixotics, of course, also tilt among themselves whenever windmills are scarce.

1998   Eng. Hist. Rev. 113 501   Iain McCalman's joyfully written essay compares the perceived lunacies of Lord George Gordon and Edmund Burke, quixotics and prophets both.

  quiˈxoticism n. = quixotism n.

1850   De Bow's Rev. Aug. 169   The landing at Cardenas could only have been considered a piece of American Quixoticism.

1939   Tablet 3 June 705/1   Hungarian public life, that curious mixture of eloquence and generous impulse, of Quixoticism and brutal reality.

2005   Vanity Fair (N.Y.) (Nexis) Oct. 194   You might argue that it's quixoticism, an effort to preserve what's already lost..an effort to embrace for dear life the remains of the day.