Poetry Alert—Hit Back to Cancel

Poetry alert—hit Back to cancel
Paul is chug-a-lugging Yeats these days, and yesterday sent me He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven. This isn’t one of my bike-yelling poems, but it’s a favorite nonetheless. In return, I sent him Auden’s In Memory of WB Yeats:

‘You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth…’

It turns out that yesterday was the anniversary of Yeats’ death in 1939. Fitting, I suppose, that two Brooklyn bloggers would exchange his lines as small gifts between technical projects. This is the modest immortality that Patrick Kavanagh hopes for in Wet Evening in April:

‘The birds sang in the wet trees
And I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy. ‘