Sherry Chandler » Auden
Auden
from In Memory of W. B. Yeats
(d. Jan 1939)
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.
—W. H. Auden, text from Poetry Speaks
Everybody knows this poem but I think it’s good occasionally to look at that line — “poetry makes nothing happen” — in context.
Related posts:
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Good on Barney Frank; he has impressed me lately, although my only previous knowledge of him was through...
Leave a comment