Poem of the Day

Sailing to Byzantium, W.B. Yeats

I
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 unaging 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.

***
Stanza 2 in particular is a favorite of mine. "Perne" means "to spin" or "to move in a spiral motion", and apparently Yeats is the only writer, or almost the only writer, to have used it; the online Oxford English Dictionary gives the definition above specifically "in the works of W.B. Yeats, or in reference to [his work]."

That Yeats.

Burdies

As Robert Burns would call them, have been seen in profusion 'round Chez Indessed, and Lady J has chronicled their antics. There are many birds 'round my apartment complex as well; it is next to the campus quad, and it's a nice green space for them. Pigeons and crows abound, and there is also a sort of non-pigeon dove which lives here and calls at night and in the early morning. (I have no idea why it would call at night; I don't think they're nocturnal, and to call from your nest seems like saying "Come and get me!" to nocturnal prowlers.) I only discovered what kind of bird it was that made that call a few days ago; it is not a very dovelike call.

We used to have a hawk who would come and perch on the light fixture next to the building, but the construction next door seems to have frightened it away. One of my favorite bird memories out here was seeing a red-tailed hawk circle at low altitude (~40 feet) over the park as we played softball and our high-school neighbors carried on their football practice. Urban wilderness!

Dialogue...so bad...

Yesterday I was playing Axis & Allies with my friend E, and his girlfriend was watching a would-be drama on the television--a drama full of special police forces and kidnappings and stuff. I would like to like it, if for no better reason than because the main character and I share a name. (That's right, he's named Sealion Too. ;))

But the dialogue! Oh, my bleeding ears!

It was largely in the delivery, which was cynical and sneering from all sides, and boy does that get old fast. But then they were also dropping chestnuts such as this...in arch, cynical, sneering, self-serious tones: "Boy, isn't it funny how you always find things in the last place you look."

...
...

Guys. Of course it's in the last place you look. When you find something, you stop looking.

Most random regrets:

1) Not getting better evidence for that potentially world-record-setting centipede I encountered in Venezuela.

Topeka!

Not just for Kansas anymore! Look here for more details.

Arsenal 2-2 Barcelona

That is how they do scores in England...home team first. In America we almost always do home team second, which I think must be a carryover from baseball, since the home team always goes in the bottom of the inning and appears on the lower line of the box score.

ANY-way.

It may have been a Pyrrhic victory, but it was a victory of a sort. Barcelona dominated play, but must go away with a draw after two late Arsenal goals. Unfortunately, three of Arsenal's best players (Cesc Fabregas, William Gallas, Andrei Arshavin) were injured (re-injured, in the cases of Fabregas and Gallas).

Perhaps we will make this...Arsenal Week!

This is cool:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q02ompQhtY8

(In case you can't tell what's going on...he's using the little foot-activated gadget to record each segment, then adding another segment, until he has five or six "layers" of self-harmonization. It's really amazing. Imogen Heap does this really well too.)