by Nils Peterson
Today (June 13) is W.B. Yeats’s birthday. He would have been 157. I am compelled to remark upon the similarities between Yeats, the Nobel prize winner, and Peterson, the scribbler in the corner. I quote from a short Yeats biography, “he was lackluster at school,” an elementary report card said he was “Very poor in spelling,” and his early poems were described as a “vast murmurous gloom of dreams.” Peterson’s academic career and early poems could be described in a similar fashion. Where they differ is noted in that Yeats’s elementary report, “Perhaps better in Latin than in any other subject.” Peterson says of himself that the “D” he received in Latin was not earned, but a gift.
Yeats said of the woman he loved that she affected him as “a sound as of a Burmese gong, an over-powering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes.” Peterson says that that’s got it about right, “an over-powering tumult…[with] many pleasant secondary notes,” but adds “There are ‘dis-chords’ too. Music that is too sweet for too long gets tedious. One needs notes that grind against each other as well as those that get along.”
Yeats wrote that “Bodily decrepitude is wisdom.” Peterson is testing out that hypothesis. He’s not yet convinced. Yeats says, “This is no country for old men….” Peterson wonders if there is such a place, not wanting to end up as Yeats seems to as a mechanical cuckoo hanging in a cage in the emperor’s palace. Yeats thought of himself as kind of a jester, Peterson thinks himself as more of a clown. Both are useful, though the jester is more likely to get the Nobel prize.
Yeats, towards the end of his life after a dry period, wondered what the source of his poetry was and found it in “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart where the “old kettles, old bones, old rags” of his life lived along with “that raving slut/Who keeps the till.” He thought he “must go lie down there again” amidst the objects of his life to be refreshed. Peterson finds himself “Down in the Dumps” where he “sits on a bucket feeling/ supple as a seal” and bangs on “a bottle with his lost wooden horse leg, chinka chink-a chinkety-chaw-chaw-chaaah!”
On Vacation, Thinking of Yeats
Yeats has been a life-long companion for me, his long, mostly unfulfilled love for Maude, his strange interests in the occult, his lovely lyricism sometimes approaching but never quite falling into sentimentality, the music of his rhythms. In more practical ways too. Once I was teaching “Among School Children” shortly after a birthday and realized that I now too was a “sixty-year-old smiling public man,” his momentary awareness and mine were one.
A couple of years ago I was on vacation. We had rented for a week a stunning house with a great several-acred backyard sloping down to Puget Sound. There was a small apple orchard with wonderful apples and outside my bedroom window (A room with an enormous walk-in closet, an attached 20 footlong bathroom with an enormous footed tub, and an attached sunroom fitted out as a writing room with desk and daybed) was an enormous maple, tall, tall with a trunk at least four feet thick at the bottom. We had some marvelous severe weather and it was a treat to lie in bed at night and see and hear the great limbs and leaves thrash about.
We were there from the end of September into the beginning of October. Many of the trees had put on their autumn clothing and the Yeats line “The trees are in their autumn beauty” came to my mind from “The Wild Swans at Coole.” I have a program that is filled with wonderful things and so I downloaded all of Yeats (with pictures) and turned to that poem. You may remember the opening stanza,
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans
He’s feeling old and out of it, but they still seem the same than when he first saw them. (He started feeling old when he was very young.) This was before he finally got married (not to Maude) and started an almost second life.
The poem goes on:
Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But there are nine and 50 swans, so clearly one swan no longer has a partner though it flies with the rest of them. So, I found myself thinking of me about to start my 88th year (much older than Yeats got to) as the 59th swan. Judith has been gone a year and a half and one of the reasons we chose this location was so we could go over easily to the place where Judith is buried on Bainbridge Island, one of the few places around Seattle where green burial is allowed. We went twice. It is a beautiful place, a small meadow surrounded by forest, a sweet pond with ducks just below her site. I can’t actually get out to see her place with its level-to-the-ground stone with my name on it too because the slope is too severe for me and my walker. So, I watched my daughters and their 2 dogs frolic around through an open car window and looked at the photos they took and sent. It is very peaceful there and I felt part of that great peace.
It took a lot of engineering and a lot of equipment to get me to where we were staying and have me comfortable. I was worried about it. But Erika is a great manager and so she got me into the car along with my walker and my chair that raises up and down and has brakes and skitters about as I propel it with my legs and my footstool so I could get dressed in the morning, and my back rest so I could sleep with an upward slant and charger cables for all of the paraphernalia that makes up a modern life.
I once wrote “Nils is in his autumn beauty,” but now I add – truthfully, “it’s winter.”