|  I
thought that this week our subject would be old age. As you may
have noticed, many of the earlier poets did not always live very
long, and so one might suppose that old age would not have been
a common topic; but of course they observed the aging of their
parents; and their general perception clearly led them to understand
at least the superficial aspects of aging.
A poem I have quoted several times in these pieces is the villanelle
by Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953), addressed to his father shortly
before his death; this begins:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965) is, as many of you who have read these
pieces before will recognize, one of my favorite poets, in particular
because of his technique coupled with his perception. Very early
on, I read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which ends:
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
 I
thought the whole poem was a striking description of how it felt
to grow old, and it was much later that I realized that the earliest
version of the poem dates from 1911, when Eliot was 23. How did
he know?
In 1920, Eliot published Gerontion. The word comes from
the Greek geron which means ‘old man’, and the poem begins:
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
And it ends:
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.
Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) had a few items relating to
old age; I earlier quoted some lines from his long poem The
Excursion. However, here is something a little shorter, from
his Poems referring to the Period of Old Age; the title
is Animal Tranquility and Decay: A Sketch:
The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought. He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten; one to whom
Long patience hath such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing of which
He hath no need. He is by Nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
I had thought that one of the best-known opening stanzas on this
topic was that of Robert Browning (1812 – 1889) in Rabbi
Ben Ezra. I have quoted it before:
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith, "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all nor be afraid!"
However, I was traveling when I started this piece, and away
from my books, so I went into Google to search for the first line,
because I wanted to do some research. To my surprise, what came
up was not this poem, but a lyric by John Lennon (1940 – 1980),
Grow Old With Me; the first stanza is:
Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be
When our time has come
We will be as one
God bless our love
God bless our love
 I
had not known of this song before, although I have a fairly large
Beatles collection. That, however, is not the surprise. The majority
of the entries referring to this were by people who seemed unaware
that the first two lines were a quotation; one made some passing
remark about it having come from a “Victorian pot-boiler”. This
I found (as you can imagine!) very annoying. John Lennon himself,
of course, would have known exactly where it came from: he attended
a good High School in Liverpool, England. I was also educated
in Liverpool. Although I attended a different High School (actually,
that attended by Paul McCartney and George Harrison), the character
of the education was essentially the same. Anyway, to compensate
for this apparent fan ignorance I am going to use the complete
text of Rabbi
Ben Ezra as my first poem of this week; it was published
in 1865.
Rabbi Ben Ezra was a real person whose full name was Abraham
ben Meir ibn Ezra (although as usual there are variants on the
spelling). He was born in 1092 in Tudela, Emirate of Saragossa
(now Spain); and he died in 1167 in Calahorra, Spain. Not a great
deal is known about the early part of his life, but he earned
a reputation as a scholar and a poet. From 1140 to 1160 ibn Ezra's
life changed markedly. He traveled extensively throughout Europe
and eventually settled down in Rome, then Lucca, for a few years
before his death. It was during this latter period of his life
that he composed his most famous works. He wrote extensively on
philosophical matters; he wrote exegeses on parts of the bible,
notably the Pentateuch; his writings are believed to have influenced
Spinoza. He also wrote extensively on mathematical topics. He
is of particular importance because he spread the learning of
the Arabs through Europe at a time when scholarship in Christian
Europe had been neglected for five hundred or more years. Ibn
Ezra's writings on grammar and poetry were often motivated by
the "paytanim”. These were individuals appointed by synagogues
to compose religious poems for special occasions; the word comes
from the Greek for ‘poet’. They not only used the entire biblical
vocabularies, but invented thousands of new words. Abraham ibn
Ezra attacked this approach, and he was the first to introduce
Arabic meters in religious poems. (I drew this information from
a number of web sites, and the Encyclopedia Brittanica;
quite a lot of the sites in essence used the same words. I believe
that J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson may have written the original
material.)
Tennyson (1809 – 1892) wrote of old age, and I included one of
his poems on this in my Poems of
the Week article on him: Crossing
the Bar. I am not going to repeat this poem this week.
 Thomas
Moore (1779 – 1852) was an Irish poet, satirist, composer and
musician. His major poetic work was Irish Melodies, published
over the period 1807 – 1834. This was a group of 130 poems, set
to music by Moore himself and Sir John Stevenson. Its primary
purpose was to arouse sympathy and support for the Irish nationalists.
My second poem of this week is one of these: Believe
Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms.
Here is Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892), the first stanza of Prayer
of Columbus:
A batter’d, wreck’d old man,
Thrown on this savage shore, far, far from home,
Pent by the sea and dark rebellious brows, twelve dreary months,
Sore, stiff with many toils, sicken’d and nigh to death,
I take my way along the island’s edge,
Venting a heavy heart.
And William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939), The Old Men Admiring
Themselves in the Water:
I heard the old, old men say,
‘Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.’
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
I heard the old, old men say,
‘All that’s beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.’
 My
third poem of the week is also by Yeats, and it is perhaps more
personal: the title is An
Acre of Grass. It is from his collection New Poems
and was composed in November 1936, and first published in April
1938. Notice his use of a rhyming couplet at the end of each stanza.
And now let’s end with a small poem by Phillip Larkin (1922 –
1985), called The Winter Palace. It is dated 1 November
1978.
Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.
I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what had learnt at university
And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints,
And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces
And swearing I’ve never been in certain places.
It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.
Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.
I had planned to finish with Ogden Nash; but actually this poem
sounds almost as though Nash might have written it!
Hope you like this vision of your future.
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