re: #356 Cato the Elder

Indeed. Poor Yeats.

We had a student newspaper in high school called “The Rough Beast”. It was shut down for being too, umm, rough-tongued.

Every half-assed prognosticator, doomsayer, threat-seer, end-times smeller and amateur vaticinator quotes that damned poem as if nothing more foreboding could possibly be conceived. Try any prophetic book in the Bible, folks.

Next time I find the time to engage in some automatic writing, I’m going to ask Willie Butler what he thinks of it all. I bet he wishes he’d never written it.

No, he wished he’d never written “The Lake-Isle of Innisfree”, after hearing it recited by little girls in school uniform for decades. OK, different Yeats:

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

He was a snob, and a poser, and a bit of a wanker was Yeats, but the gift was from God.