Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
—Shakespeare, As You Like It, act 2, scene vii
Yeats when young wrote a poem he called,
“He thinks of his Past Greatness when
a Part of the Constellations of Heaven.”
I think of my Present Obscurity—
an Aspect of the Depredations of Earth.
Toys scorn the Constellations now,
"The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough";
I do my best—for what my best is worth.
“I became a rush that horses tread:
I became a man, a hater of the wind,"
a cicerone in the Country of the Blind.
Who know too much confound surprise.
“O beast of the wilderness, bird of the air,
Must I endure your amorous cries?”
Note: The quoted lines are quotations from Yeats’s poem, published a century and a quarter ago.
Sunday, March 9, 2025
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