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President Bush quoted some poetry in a speech the other day. It was last Sunday in Holland where he was observing the 60th anniversary of V-E day and speaking to a crowd at an American war cemetery there. He talked about the 8,000 men buried there “who did not live to comb grey hair”.
This phrase came from a poem by William Butler Yeats, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”. Major Gregory was a British flier in World War One, who was killed in Italy in 1918. His mother, Lady Gregory, was Yeats’ closest associate in writing and staging plays at the Abbey Theater in Dublin. Her son was a “soldier, scholar, horseman” whom Yeats called “our perfect man”, but whose prospects for long life he thought poor, as the poem shows.
The President deserves congratulations for his knowledge of this great poem and his apt use of it in his speech. So much for those who try to tell us he’s got no culture. He’s actually got excellent taste in English lit, as we can see from the recent photo of him with Tom Wolfe’s latest book under his arm. He’s a good picker.
Yeats, who died in 1939, was the best-known of all Irish writers since the Stone Age at least. This ensured him a warm welcome in America, which he visited a number of times. He achieved international recognition when he was given the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923
Another poem of his about Major Gregory got itself featured in the World War II movie “Memphis Belle“ a few years ago. It was called, no surprise, “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death“ and .was recited by an American flier before taking off on an air raid. I thought it was kind of dragged in myself, but when you have a scriptwriter who likes a particular poem, this kind of thing is likely to happen.
Where do I come in in all this? It comes from my liking for the poem, with that memorable line “What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?” and my self-satisfaction with spotting it in Bush’s speech. I admit I have an eye for these things. No one cares, of course, but still, there it is. I stand alone.
Yeats’ position as the greatest Irish writer means obviously it may be challenged by those who have other candidates for that title. My spot as the least-known Irish writer is safe.
Even so, the itch is there. I first felt it in 1969 when I was thirty-nine and had never written a line of verse in my life. Then Chappaquiddick happened. Somehow it reverberated with me. It was just outré. It sounded like a comedy, “The Senator and the Blonde”, but it wasn’t. There was an outburst of doggerel all over the country and I found myself to be part of it. To the tune of fourteen stanzas of balladry fit to be heard in any bar in the land.
The dam had burst. For a few years all the bottled-up poetry that had been stored in some subterranean corner of my mind. burst forth and overflowed. In fact I started this website over a year ago with a poem about the drug trade in Brooklyn, which I am going to reprint here one of these days until someone notices it.
Policing led to poetry. I wrote another narco poem “The Warrant at the Door” describing how it was to charge up the stairs of a drug house to challenge the iron-bound apartment door and the antagonistic dog to be found inside. I wrote about my union and its leadership and their shortcomings.
I did a little more, something which ties in with the subject of this essay and solves my problem of staying relevant to it instead of wandering off to the woods somewhere. Yeats wrote an elegy, well so did I, as I’ve now remembered. Here it is:
TEN DEAD MEN
To the memory of the members of the Police Department who lost their lives in the line of duty, in the City of New York, in the year 1971.
Ten dead men. In a year of little peace
They held the line.
And may we never cease
To honor them and those they left behind.
Ten dead men. They paid the price
Of all our errors, all our crimes.
It is not the end of sacrifice,
These are not ordinary times.
Ten dead men. No more by them is heard
The lie, the smear, the whine,
No more the sly accusing word
Of little men, to Sense, but not Ambition, blind.
Ten dead men. To die when young is hard.
Nor do I yet quite plainly see
The hour of their reward.
But it must come and it shall come
To a people unafraid.
When Honor is no longer dumb
And Honor’s debts are paid.
When little men are swept aside,
No more to harm or wrong
The Truth for which our brothers died.
How long, O Lord, how long?
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