Wednesday
For a little midweek levity—we all need some these days, right?—here’s a revision of Yeats’s well-known but arguably fascist poem, forwarded to me by my son. It’s like the revision I shared recently of Philip Larkins’s “This Be the Verse.” While (needless to say) it’s far inferior to the original and does not stand on its own, it does raise the question whether Yeats was a tad hysterical with his apocalyptic vision.
Everything’s Fine 🙂
By “the domestic mammoth” (on tumblr)
Tracing a neat straight line, adept and sure,
The falcon heeds the calling falconer;
Things hang together, and the center holds;
Mere symmetry is ordering the world,
The sea-bright tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence proceeds;
The best have strong convictions, while the worst
Are full of resignation and are sad.
Surely no revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming’s far away.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When an indifference borne of stable comfort
Leaves my sight clear: somewhere in sands of the desert
A lion with lion body and the head of a lion,
A gaze calm and leonine, as is usual,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all around it
Reel shadows of the normal desert birds.
What a nice lion, right? And now I know
That twenty centuries have gone along
And things were bad sometimes, and things were good,
And if a lion slouches toward Bethlehem,
That’s ’cause it’s native to the Levant.
After this was posted, someone responded with a changed version of William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say.” By just changing four or five words, the respondent removed the “ick” factor. I’ve expressed my ambivalence toward Williams’s poem in the past (here) so it was fun to read this version.
I acknowledge that, like the Yeats parody, it lacks the punch of the original. We are not witnessing a Lewis Carroll, whose parodies made great poems out of mediocre ones. In addition to sparking thought, however, these ones can get us to appreciate more what Yeats and Williams accomplished.
I have not eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
that you said
you were
saving
for breakfast
enjoy them
they look delicious
so sweet
and so cold
I guess thoughtful partners are not as fascinating as jerks.
