“I see a schoolboy when I think of him,
With face and nose
pressed to a sweet-shop window.”
--Yeats
on Keats
“A
river’s lazy essing,
An
interstate or two,
Some
ridging here, a city
There…a
god’s-eye view
“To
which we’re only privy
At
30,000 feet—
And
travel agents ask me
If
I’d like a window seat.
“Talk
about an easy
Call….If
there’s a trace
Of
child surviving in me
It
figures in a face
“Inches
from a window
That
answers from above
To
the one between the sweets and
Keats.
May glimpses of
“The
shifting vista in it
Continue
to beguile
When
my bladder’s frequent promptings
Have
put me on the aisle.”
The
Yeats epigraph is from “Ego Dominus Tuus” (The
Wild Swans of Coole, 1919). The Dantean title means “I am your lord,” and
the names of the speakers in the dialogue, Hic
and Ille, are Latin for “this man”
and “that man,” respectively. With Yeats, snobbery is never far off. In the
lines following those in the epigraph, Ille continues:
“For
certainly he sank into his grave
His
senses and his heart unsatisfied,
And
made—being poor, ailing and ignorant,
Shut
out from all the luxury of the world,
The
coarse-bred son of a livery stablekeeper—
Luxuriant
song.”
A
mixed verdict at best. A century earlier, in eight essays published in Blackwood’s Magazine, John Gibson
Lockhart famously libeled the “Cockney School of Poetry,” including Keats,
Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt. The articles were less literary criticism than
elaborate exercises in class snobbery. Lockhart writes: “Mr Hunt is a small
poet, but he is a clever man. Mr Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is a boy
of pretty abilities, which he has done everything in his power to spoil,”
followed by this, playing on Keats’ medical training:
“It
is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet;
so back to the shop Mr John, back to `plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,’
&c. But, for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado [a reference to the medical
practice of bleeding], be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics
in your practice than you have been in your poetry.”
Yeats
likewise patronizes Keats by imagining him as a schoolboy peering longingly
through a shop window at candy, yet the image has always struck me as not greedy
or unsophisticated but charming. In a comic vein, Brown reclaims the image and
turns it around. The speaker in his poem, a man in “late-middle age,” is boyish
in the best sense, holding on to his enthusiasm for the world’s bounty, whether
sweets or the Earth seen from five miles up. Even with my airline-crippling dimensions,
I prefer the window seat. The “shifting vista” is always a better show than the
lousy in-flight movie or my seatmate’s silly e-book. Only so long as the world “Continue[s]
to beguile” can we remain grateful and reasonably happy.
[Twenty
years ago I interviewed the late William M. Murphy, the Yeats scholar at Union College
in Schenectady, N.Y. He was about to publish Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His Relatives (1995). After
almost half a century immersed in the Yeats clan, Murphy expressed disgust with
“Willie” and “all of his occult crap.” He said: “I got tired of him a long time
ago, but I stuck with his family.”]
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