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Sailing to Byzantium

by Vanderleun on May 17, 2020

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James ONeil May 17, 2020, 11:22 AM

Before listening, I went and got my Yeats off the shelf so I could read and listen at the same time.

As usual for Yeats, he hammered out the form and format quite precisely; four stanzas, each eight lines of iambic pentameter, stuffed with concepts and constructs,, forcing the reader to pause and contemplate.

I was a bit shocked and startled being reminded of his old man thoughts and laments while in his early sixties but I must allow that when he wrote it, close to a hundred years ago, many, if not most, were old, quite old, in their sixties.

Though thinking back I most allow, that when I first read ‘Sailing to..’ in my late teens or early twenties, I absolutely knew that those in their sixties, those doddering tottering tatter coated sticks, were worn and rusted ancient fossils whose mere continued existence challenged belief.

Needless to say, as I contemplate firing up my chainsaw and cutting some brush after finishing this post, I find myself chuckling at my youthful naivety.

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Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020

Once by the Pacific

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.

— Robert Frost

At the Sulzberger’s Summer Home

Bright blooms of flame spattered shadows on that tide
Whose strangling fingers clawed into our lands,
And scraped out slots, fresh graves upon our sands.

A far-off signal flared and sputtering fell,
Its bloom of sparks erupting deep in slate,
But, like our last edition, this signal came too late.

The drumming bursts of broken cannons
Stomped along the edges of our gilded cage,
And faded like the lies we smeared on our front page,

Faded until all we heard of want or wish or war
Were the screams of our grandchildren slain
Beyond our gilded sand, upon our once fruited plain.

— Van der Leun

My Back Pages

Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”