SAILING TO BYZANTIUM 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. II 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. III 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. IV 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. FROM: LONGMAN ENGLISH SERIES POETRY 1900 TO 1975 Editor George MacBeth
Tag: Irish Poetry
Diary of the Plague Year: Day 52 6 May 2020: Quotidian Poetry: Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

AT TOOMEBRIDGE Where the flat water Came pouring over the weir out of Lough Neagh As if it had reached an edge of the flat earth And fallen shining to the continuous Present of the Bann. Where the checkpoint used to be. Where the rebel boy was hanged in ’98. Where negative ions in the open air Are poetry to me. As once before The slime and silver of the fattened eel. FROM: SEAMUS HEANEY Electric Light Faber & Faber
Diary of the Plague Year: Day 18 2 April 2020: Quotidian Poetry Michael Longley
Telling Yellow
after Winifred Nicholson: a found poem
Yesterday I set out
To pick a yellow bunch
To place as a lamp
On my table in dull,
Rainy weather. I picked
Iceland poppies, marigolds,
Yellow iris; my bunch
Did not tell yellow. I
Added sunflowers, canary
Pansies, buttercups,
Dandelions; no yellower.
I added to my butter-
Like mass, two everlasting
Peas, magenta pink,
And all my yellows broke
Into luminosity.
Orange and gold
And primrose each
Singing its note.
From:
Angel Hill
Cape Poetry