Here's a question: what would have become of W. B. Yeats if Maude Gonne had jumped into his arms: "Willie, I'm yours!" Maybe there's a lot to be said for not getting what we want. We might not have any reason today to talk about Yeats if he'd been too personally fulfilled. Come to think of it, he has a little poem on just that thought:

WORDS

I had this thought a while ago,
"My darling cannot understand
What I have done, or what would do
In this blind bitter land.'

And I grew weary of the sun
Until my thoughts cleared up again,
Remembering that the best I have done
Was done to make it plain;

That every year I have cried, "At length
My darling understands it all,
Because I have come into my strength,
And words obey my call';

That had she done so who can say
What would have shaken from the sieve?
I might have thrown poor words away
And been content to live.

But all this is by way of getting to no. 99, "When You are Old." It's a keeper, 3 dings.

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.

2 dings: for 'When you are old' - I don't know why, but I'm not so keen on the former one by Yeats.

Unrequited Love is a fruitful subject for poetry.

I like the torn apart by circumstances subject best though:

What Shall We Do?

Here now, for evermore, our lives must part.
My path leads there, and yours another way.
What shall we do with this fond love, dear heart?
It grows a heavier burden day by day.

Hide it? In all earth’s caverns, void and vast,
There is not room enough to hide it, dear;
Not even the mighty storehouse of the past
Could cover it, from our own eyes, I fear.

Drown it? Why, were the contents of each ocean
Merged into one great sea, too shallow then
Would be its waters, to sink this emotion
So deep it could not rise to life again.

Burn it? In all the furnace flames below,
It would not in a thousand years expire.
Nay! It would thrive, exult, expand and grow,
For from its very birth it fed on fire.

Starve it? Yes, yes, that is the only way.
Give it no more food, of glance, or word, or sigh,
No memories, even, of any bygone day;
No crumbs of vain regrets – so let it die.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

98. "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass," by Emily Dickinson. It's a triumph. 4 dings.

A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides--
You may have met Him--
did you not
His notice sudden is--

The Grass divides as with a Comb--
A spotted shaft is seen--
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on--

He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too cool for Corn--
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot--
I more than once at Noon

Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone--

Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me--
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality--

But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone--*

DWill wrote:98. "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass," by Emily Dickinson. It's a triumph. 4 dings.

And Zero at the Bone--*

Add my 4 dings! Emily at her best. I am right with those last two line -- Zero at the bone!

Seldom that Emily would get less than 4 dings from me (though it has happened). Definitely 4! I love these lines:
a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone--

It is a lovely poem - but I am sorry to be so thick. What is she describing?

Is it a speckled snake?

Something dividing the grass - and causing a frisson of excitement?

I got the feeling of a snake because, one hot summers day a grass snake wriggled from the back garden into my kitchen, looking for a drink from the cat's water dish. I was delighted and terrified at the same time, even though grass snakes are non-poisonous, they are rarely sighted here.

I felt so privilidged - but 'tight breathing' indeed.

DWill wrote:My cheatin' heart.

Did that old Baron Samedi Hank Williams make the Billboard?

Penelope,
I certainly do hope it is a snake because if it isn't, then I've been reading it wrong all the time (blush). But I think more than the description of the snake per se, she's giving us a pretty accurate description about how the reader usually feels about snakes. I may be wriggling up the wrong tree here, but that's how I read it.

As snakes seem to crop up a lot in literature and especially in poetry (the icon of symbolism), here's one by D. H. Lawrence:

D. H. Lawrence
Snake

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
i o And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

Taormina, 1923

OOoooooh thank you for that. I enjoyed it superbly.

Of course on the day the snake entered my kitchen, I shouted for my two sons who were in their rooms upstairs. 'Jake, Jake, come quick' - Jake says he thought, 'Oh, that's Mum shouting.....but I'll wait and see if she shouts again'. So I shouted, 'Danny, Danny, come quick, there's a snake in the kitchen!' Danny says he thought, 'She's been at the cooking sherry again', but he came anyway and got the snake, and we duly admired it, tempted to keep its bright luminous greenness in a box, but we didn't, we put a saucer of water by the garden hedge and let it go. Jake says, he'll always regret not coming to see what the fuss was about.