[Tim Murphy]

I think Lance has it absolutely right. Great poetry insinuates itself into our nerves and sinews. Alan and I were becalmed in the Hawk Channel off the Florida Keys, and after I'd done Sunlight On The Garden, he asked me to go below, bring up the Collected Yeats from the tiny ship's library. I just started saying Yeats without the book, and I quit when the wind came four hours later and I had to go on deck and tend to the sails. Now those were poems I had very deliberately memorized as a boy, but I was astonished that I could do them thirty years later. I could no longer do that. "We grow old, we grow old..." After four hours of Yeats I was so spaced out I came within yards of running us aground on a shoal protruding from Key Largo.