seventy years ago today ...

Steve, WBY is one of my all time favorite poets. I've quoted those lines many times myself. Of course he was writing between the great wars and as Churchill said of the French at the time, "Worn down, doubly decimated, but undisputed masters of the hour, the French nation peered into the future in thankful wonder and haunting dread."

It was that dread coupled with a loss of confidence that infected the so-called great powers that set the stage for again as Churchill wrote, "Thereafter mighty forces were adrift, the void was open, and into that void after a pause there strode a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast--Corporal Hitler."

Is this possible today? Yes, I believe so. Only because greed, the flaunting of power in the face of law and justice and the willingness to make unwise and unjust war is so common place as to be seen as the price of doing business.

At least we still have a good men and women of conviction.

C

steveg144 said:

.. the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats went down into the hollow hills to rest with his ancestors.

Can anyone read those last two ineffable lines from his most famous poem without getting a cold chill? I've never been able to. Hell, I'm reading them right this second and they're totally freaking me out.

Click to expand...

An absolute genius.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

'He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven'

Yeats: a god among poets. Amongst select others in the pantheon.

And should anyone ever question the value of fiction, Yeats had an answer:

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

When you are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.