[Roger Slater]

More euphoria (sort of), this time from Yeats, Vacillation, part IV:


My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

[Jim Moonan]

I had been waiting for this one to arrive.

[RCL]

Plumb wonderful!

To a Poor Old Woman

munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her

You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand

Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her


by William Carlos Williams

[Erik Olson]

I found this poem fascinating for, among other things, the speaker's reconciling the other side of euphoria at times, as well as the questing and surfeit of sensual delight at other times... Excerpts from THE THOUSAND AND SECOND NIGHT in five parts, courtesy of James Merrill; all of the first, most of the third, and all of the fourth to be exact.

I. RIGOR VITAE

Istanbul. 21 March. I woke today
With an absurd complaint. The whole right half
Of my face refuses to move. I have to laugh
Watching the rest of it reel about in dismay

Under the double burden, while its twin
Sags on, though sentient, stupefied.
I’m here alone. Not quite—through fog outside
Loom wingèd letters: PAN AMERICAN.

Twenty-five hundred years this city has stood between
The passive Orient and our frantic West.
I see no reason to be depressed;
There are too many other things I haven’t seen,

Like Hagia Sophia. Tea drunk, shaved and dressed . . .
Dahin! Dahin!


III. CARNIVALS

Three good friends in as many months have complained
‘You were nice, James, before your trip. Or so
I thought. But you have changed. I know. I know.
People do change. Well, I’m surprised, I’m pained.’

Before they disappeared into the night
Of what they said, I’d make a stab at mouthing
Promises that meant precisely nothing
And never saved my face. For they were right.

These weren’t young friends, what’s more. Youth would explain
Part of it. I have kept somewhere a page
Written at sixteen to myself at twice that age,
Whom I accuse of having become the vain

Flippant unfeeling monster I now am—
To hear them talk—and exhorting me to recall
Starlight on an evening in late fall...

IV.

Love. Warmth. Fist of sunlight at last
Pounding emphatic on the gulf. High wails
From your white ship: The heart prevails!
Affirm it! Simple decency rides the blast!—
Phrases that, quick to smell blood, lurk like sharks
Within a style's transparent lights and darks.

O skimmer of deep blue
Volumes fraught with rhyme and reason,
Once the phosphorescent meshes loosen
And the objects of your quest slip through,
Almost you can overlook a risen
Brow, a thin, black dawn on the horizon.

The lips part. The plume trembles. You’re afloat
Upon the breathing, all-reflecting deep.
The past recedes and twinkles, falls asleep.
Fear is unworthy, say the stars by rote;
What destinations have been yours till now
Unworthy, says the leaping prow.

Except that in this virgin hemisphere
One city calls you—towers, drums, conches, bells
Tolling each year’s more sumptuous farewells To flesh.
Among the dancers on the pier
Glides one figure in a suit of bones,
Whose savage grave alerts the chaperones.
He picks you out from thousands. He intends
Perhaps no mischief. Yet the dog-brown eyes
In the chalk face that stiffens as it dries
Pierce you with the eyes of those three friends
The mask begins to melt upon your face.
A hush has fallen in the marketplace,
And now the long adventure

Let that wait.
I’m tired, it’s late at night.

Tomorrow, if it is given me to conquer
An old distrust of imaginary scenes,
Scenes not lived through yet, the few final lines
Will lie on the page and the whole ride at anchor.

It’s winter. I’m home, of course. Real
Snow fills the road. On the unmade
Brass bed lies my adored Scheherazade,
Eight-ninths asleep, tail twitching to the steel

Band of the steam heat’s dissonant calypso.
The wind has died. Where would I be if not here?
There’s so little left to see! Lost friends, my long ago

Voyages, I bless you for sore
Limbs and mouth kissed, face bronzed and lined,
An earth held up, a text not wholly undermined
By fluent passages of metaphor.

[Erik Olson]

One more then. Because in the first place, I thought it apt; and in the second, I could not resists. Politics by Yeats, of course.

In our time the destiny of man prevents
its meanings in political terms.
in aapolitical ts meaningiTHOMAS MANN

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!
e

[Roger Slater]

That strikes me as a somewhat sad poem, Erik. I don't think one gets a sense of euphoria from wishing one were young and vital again instead of a prattling old politician among politicians.

[Erik Olson]

To me, the wisdom of age is not altogether disparaged, but the euphoria of youth is yet more warmly recollected. It is the advantage of age and wisdom to estimate things at their true value. There are many things of which we cannot apprehend the true value until we have it not. The value of youth’s euphoria is not fully apprehended until one is no more young, that is, when one can reflect on it from the wisdom of age. I am made to imagine just how profound that euphoria must be in order for the speaker to say such a thing. What cannot be lived again becomes available only through memory; yet it seems a more powerful testament to just how sweet such times were as the realization comes from the profound perspective of candor and wisdom. Nostalgia, though tinged with sadness for what cannot happen again, equally exults the same with a keen awareness of just how special it was.
Anyway, this Yeats poem is more obviously suitable.

Sweet Dancer

The girl goes dancing there
On the leaf-sown, new-mown, smooth
Grass plot of the garden;
Escaped from bitter youth,
Escaped out of her crowd,
Or out of her black cloud.
Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer!

If strange men come from the house
To lead her away, do not say
That she is happy being crazy;
Lead them gently astray;
Let her finish her dance,
Let her finish her dance.
Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer!
l

[Brian Allgar]

My name is Vlad. You think me mad,
Or very bad, or simply sad?
Tomorrow will be gorier!
My foes are wailing, flailing, failing,
I am happily impaling -
That is true euphoria!

[Jim Moonan]

"That strikes me as a somewhat sad poem, Erik. I don't think one gets a sense of euphoria from wishing one were young and vital again instead of a prattling old politician among politicians." --Roger

So... the question is can euphoria arise from sadness? I think it can.

[Roger Slater]

Well, I acknowledge that happiness and sadness are sometimes close cousins, or, as in Rose's poem, flipsides, but an old man wishing he were young and vital again, and finding his current occupation to be empty and unfulfilling, hardly fits my definition of euphoria. Or at the very least, even if I could optimistically squeeze a silver lining out of it, it's not a poem I would point to as a classic example of euphoria.