Top o' the morning to you

[pjthompson]

The day did not begin auspiciously. After a disturbed night, I rolled out of bed with a snatch of Yeats' The Second Coming floating through my head:

WHITEAnd what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
WHITESlouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Off-putting, to say the least.

Wondering if I'd gotten the wording right, I went to see if my Yeats book had been unpacked yet. It had. It's amazing how many books have taken their titles from bits and pieces of that poem.

Then I started thumbing through, settling now and then on an old favorite. Like his poem from the end of his life, The Circus Animals' Desertion, about the reexamination of a life's work. It contains one of my all-time favorite poetic stanzas:

WHITEThose masterful images because complete
WHITEGrew in pure mind, but out of what began?
WHITEA mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
WHITEOld kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
WHITEOld iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
WHITEWho keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
WHITEI must lie down where all the ladders start,
WHITEIn the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Since I've been feeling a bit foul-rag-and-bone-shop-of-the-heartish lately, that one hit home. I went on to similarly cheerful material from the end of his life, about the death of living memory, of people passing away into nothing but history when the people who knew them pass that way, too: The Municipal Gallery Revisited.

WHITEMancini's portrait of Augusta Gregory,
WHITE'Greatest since Rembrandt,' according to John Synge,
WHITEA great ebullient portrait certainly;
WHITEBut where is the brush that could show anything
WHITEOf all that pride and that humility?
WHITEAnd I am in despair that time may bring
WHITEApproved patterns of women or of men
WHITEBut not the selfsame excellence again.

That one, at least, had a rousing conclusion:

WHITEThink where man's glory most begin and ends,
WHITEAnd say my glory was I had such friends.

I read a few more in a similar vein, then decided that unless I wanted this to be the theme of my Saturday, I need to shake myself loose. I also thought eating something might be advantageous because I was showing all the signs of low blood sugar.

It's remarkable how much better I felt after that. Fortified, I decided to get down to business with a joyful heart and finish reviewing that novel I'd promised to get done this weekend! I opened the file, went to the placemarker I'd left in the text and began to read. Wait. Hadn't I read this part before? In fact, hadn't I finished thirty pages further on from that point? Yet my placemaker and all those thirty pages of comments were gone. I realized I'd saved down the wrong version onto my flash drive. I thought maybe there was a chance I'd left a backup copy on my machine at work, like I sometimes do, but was not looking forward to going into the office on the weekend. I grew once more churlish.

Then I remembered I sometimes throw a backup onto my other flash drive! Praises, praises! There it was. I finished my appointed task in gratitude and a patter of happy, dancing feet, thinking myself well and truly blessed.

WHITEAnd pluck till time and times are done
WHITEThe silver apples of the moon,
WHITEThe golden apples of the sun.

(The Song of Wandering Aengus)

Comments

[pjthompson]

Double woot!