Cast a cold eye

… On life, on death
Horseman pass by

— WB Yeats’s epitaph

When we were small children, our dad made us memorize the epitaph in order to get part of our allowance (which was all of 75 cents). So all of us, ages 12 to 2, would stand there and chant in unison:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death
Horseman pass by!

You would KNOW this story, by the way, if you had read my essay in Sewanee Review, my first published piece – where I detail the entire allowance ritual set up by my father.

Not even a nuclear blast could knock Yeats’s epitaph out of my brain.

This photo below is framed and on my desk.