In a folder in my office are a bunch of pieces of paper, each of which has a nicely formatted poem or quotation. At some point they were either posted in my cubicle, back in the days when I worked outside the house, or else they were framed and displayed in my house during the days before I had art. I liked to say that I decorated with words.
I was looking through this folder today, and the top page was this:
An untitled poem by W. B. Yeats
Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly fisher’s wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had
Know why an old man should be mad.
At twenty-three I liked the idea that there were secrets that you learned from experience, and there was a seductive pathos to the idea that promise not being achieved is the normal state of affairs.
At thirty-three I am beginning to get a glimmering of a different, and less Romantic interpretation. I certainly (still) think it’s true that is is “matter of course that chance/Should starve good men and bad advance”. Not that chance always starves the good men, or advances the bad one, but that it certainly does sometimes, randomly. You know, by chance.
Not yet mad, though. Or at least not any more so than at twenty-three.
