[Aaron Poochigian]

Lately I haven’t been able to get this poem out of my head. I memorized it in my late teens and recognized Yeats’ sublime bitterness in it. I understood that he saw bitterness as a necessary precursor to “greatness” as in:

Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
Called architect and artist in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The gentleness none there had ever known.
. . . . .
What if those things the greatest of mankind
Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
But take our greatness with our bitterness?

(Meditations in Time of Civil War, I)

Still, it seemed unhealthy to me that a poet, who should be a champion of the five senses, wished to be “Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.” I was all about sensation and romance back then, very much the young man who “had not given a penny for a song/Did not the poet sing it with such airs/that one believed he had a sword upstairs.”

Now, though, that I have suffered extreme romantic and political disillusionment, I finally really get the second and third lines: “one time it was a woman’s face, or worse—/The seeming needs of my fool-driven land.” After the abandonment of girl-chasing and political activism, there are no more distractions from “this craft of verse.” At the end of the poem the speaker is wishing, in his extreme bitterness, to be cut off from the outside world not so that he might be idle and blank but so that he might have “a mind that, if the cannon sound/From every quarter of the world, can stay/Wound in mind's pondering/As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound” (All Soul’s Night). I still doubt that this desire for hermeticism is healthy but it’s where I’m at right now. I guess that’s why the poem will not stop surfacing in my mind.

This poem is, in sum, amazing--so much life-experience packed into ten lines. There are hints of humor: “a woman’s face, or worse—“. Surprise! A beautiful face is a bad thing! I also find humorous the young man who only wants to hear poems by swashbuckling poets. (That’s about as funny as Yeats gets.) And, yes, there is also a clarity of reflection that comes with the speaker’s bitterness. I am eager to learn what others think about this poem.