Poem: Remorse for Intemperate Speech

I ranted to the knave and fool,
But outgrew that school,
Would transform the part,
Fit audience found, but cannot rule
My fanatic heart.

I sought my betters: though in each
Fine manners, liberal speech,
Turn hatred into sport,
Nothing said or done can reach
My fanatic heart.

Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.

            William Butler Yeats 

Burning silence

When something is festering
in your memory or your imagination,
laws of silence don’t work,
it’s like shutting a door and locking it
on a house on fire
in hope of forgetting that the house is burning.
But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.
Silence about a thing just magnifies it.
It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant.

            Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Good stories

Some of these things are true
and some of them lies.
But they are all good stories.

        Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stay out

True happiness, we are told,
consists in getting out of one's self;
but the point is not only to get out -
you must stay out;
and to stay out
you must have some absorbing errand.

             Henry James, Roderick Hudson

 

 

 

 

The era of tea

The joy of the new, hip, happening, double-espresso Dublin
is that you can blame any strange mood on coffee deprivation.
This never worked in the era of tea,
at least not at the same level of street cred.

            Tana French, In the Woods

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dangerous inclinations

The spiritual disposition of a poet inclines to catastrophe.

        Osip Mandelstam, Selected Essays

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well played

Whereas elsewhere in Europe,
no educated man would be caught dead speaking a vernacular,
the Irish thought that all language was a game.

            Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization