There’s Michael D. Higgins – not a very good poet, but good at so many other things (like getting elected President at age seventy) that we will praise him here.
There’s W.S. Merwin (age eighty-four), who tells an interviewer that
I still find myself reciting for pleasure, as I have ever since I was 18, [Yeats’] “Sailing to Byzantium” and hearing something in one of the lines that I didn’t hear before. You go on learning. What a great poem teaches you, and it’s not intellectual at all, is the resonance in the language that’s heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language. I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing — an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible. If something can’t be said, what do you do? You scream. You make some terrible noise of pain or anguish or anger or something like that. You make a sound, an animal-like sound which, with time and society trying to calm you down, begins to take shape into something.
Merwin’s just like Higgins; he has, the interviewer notes, “no intention of slowing down.”
And of course Merwin cites restless old Yeats, who wrote “Sailing to Byzantium” in his sixties, because Merwin wants to make a statement about resonance — about living long enough to make and hear sounds that resound very deeply.
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Expressing the inexpressible, the poem is a scream calmed, shaped; but you still want the resonance of the scream, the vibrant memory, coming off the sensual music the words make, of the outburst.
Yeats begins not resonantly, because his first stanza wants merely to describe the always-dying song of mindless physical beings. Happy in their summer of full heedless life – who wouldn’t be? – the young ignore their coming paltriness, and so remain in place, feeling none of the old poet’s spiritual restlessness.
In the next stanza, when he evokes old age, the poet spits out simple, often monosyllabic words, which convey both anger and the personal meagerness prompting the anger:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick
baBAHbaBAHbaBAHbaBAH BAH!
The anger’s sharpened with all those loud hard letters: t, p, k. Then, with unless, the soft sibilant esses begin, the soft confiding whisper of poetic voice to poetic soul begins:
unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
The holy buzz of Byzantium whispers to the poet that the only way he’s going to sustain his own being is through transcending it into art, into being the art to which he has so far given only sensual music. Now he must study, in Byzantium, an aesthetic that doesn’t, like the poet, die. He must learn what it means to be immortal.