Well, email me, please!! I would love to get together anytime. I'll be out of town from Wednesday on, but after that, up for a meeting. And how old is your son? I have a nearly 5 year old daughter.

Kelly

You went to Hampstead Heath?! I'm not worthy. However, god I 'm glad I live in the same city as you. Sorry for the delayed response, but I have my son this weekend, which is also why I could not make it to the party. We need to have coffee(or wine) and talk about Keats soon.

Keats, you know things about Keats? Oh please do come to the party I emailed you about and talk with me about Keats. My pilgrimage to his home in Hampstead Heath was one of the most meaningful moments if my life. I still mourn his lost adulthood. What poetry he would have written then!

Kelly

That's a little gem.

"In Memory of Yeats" is profoundly beautiful poetry. Hearing it read aloud like that made me well up... and overflow.

The haunting horizon of war in Europe, along with the death of a beloved poet, is captured gravely, yet there is still a small twinkle of something hopeful at the end.

Here is the poem for those who have never read it:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumors;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
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.
III
Earth, receive an honored guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Auden so obviously loved Yeats. But one of Auden's criticisms was directed at Yeat's fascination for Mysticism, he summed it up as "the deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India."

Indeed.

Tell me more.

Nothing to do with Keats. Kiwi comic, best known for his Fred Dagg persona in the 70's and 80's. Did a very funny series in Australia called 'The Games'.

A funny thing though, in researching some Youtube clips it has become clear he may well be more on the politics of the left. All my icons are a'fallin.

Anyway, John Clarke as car salesman:

And the famous Fred Dagg Gumboot song:

Mark,
I've heard of Charles Cowden Clarke and his Mrs., via my studies of Keats, but never this John Clarke. Unless you mean "John Clarke", father of the aforementioned Charles Cowden Clarke, and teacher of the young Keats. Tell me more.

Jody, I think you are an American?

Have you ever heard of John Clarke? You probably won't have of his 'Fred Dagg' persona, but his very funny satire, 'The Games' may have made it to the States? 

How could any O'ist post an s.o.b. like Auden? WTF?...J/k Regardless of his political views, Auden was a genius with words. Thanks for posting this Mark!

Yes, that would have been apt, Stephen.

Although, now we're on gravestones, my personal favourite is Spike Milligan, written in Gaelic:

"I told you I was ill"

They did not put a verse on his stone at Westminster Abbey. I would have put these two lines:

Not a whisper, not a thought,

Not a kiss nor look be lost.