…who has recently discovered Yeats. She sent me the following poem, with the editorial comment: “Oh. My. Fucking. God.”
I had a huge crush on a co-worker a couple years back, a really wonderful guy. I suppose he had a crush on me as well. We sat two cubicles away from each other, and used to have long hilarious IM conversations, as though we were in separate states, and couldn’t say to one another, “Hey there, what’s up” in PERSON. I would send him something amusing and hear him, four feet away from me, burst into laughter.
He was first-generation Irish-American, and was intimately familiar with the Irish canon. That was one of the things we loved to discuss. He IMd me the following Yeats poem, saying, “This one is my favorite, I think. I know it by heart.”
I fell madly in love with him at that moment. Unfortunately, it all crashed and burned a couple of weeks later. Unfortunately, he did not “love the pilgrim soul” in me. Bastard!
But here is the poem, I post this for Beth.
When You Are Old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face’
And bending down beside the glowin bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
