My poems about Greece are up on Verse-Virtual.com,
the online journal that publishes a big batch of new poems every month.
Greece is both a
country with an ancient civilization and, judging by our recent visit, a
population that refuses to grow old. Hence the phenomenon of bearded, well-fleshed
motorcyclists that we encountered on busy thoroughfares throughout the country. It's not
just "Ancient Greece" we encounter on our visit, but a very lively contemporary society.
The
prevalence of active graybeards on bikes put me in mind of a famous fist line from one
of W. B. Yeats's most celebrated poems: "This is no country for old
men." This sentence is probably best known today as the title of a film by the Coen brothers that won a best picture Oscar in 2007. That film was based on a novel by Cormac
McCarthy, who of course borrowed from
Yeats's poem for his title.
The poem we're all borrowing from is "Sailing to Byzantium." a work gleaming with brilliant,
enduring phrases. The poet's notion of old men is represented this way in the
second stanza:
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,...
Wow. Both great language and good
advice.
I can testify that in our recent
visit to Greece, despite the country's serious economic woes in recent years,
we saw no one resembling "a tattered coat upon a stick." Maybe that
description befits the European Union in the wake of England's withdrawal vote. But, again, we saw few signs of senescence amid the perfect weather, perfect light, and pale blue
and turquoise-green water surrounding the shores like a benediction from a
better behaved god than any appearing in the tales of the ancient Olympians. Or in the courteous and capable people we met there. Greece
may no longer be the center of the Western world, but tourists can visit the site where
they once thought that center both originated and held: the world navel at Delphi.
Byzantium, of course, is Greece, as
it once was -- not the Hellenic Golden Age Greece that produced the Acropolis, democracy, theater, and the notion of applying reason to investigate natural phenomena. But Greece in the first
millennium of the Christian era. When the Roman emperor Constantine, who embraced Christianity as the empire's
official religion, decided to escape the barbarian threat by heading east, he
chose Byzantium to build his new capital, which he called Constantinople, and
which the world now knows as Istanbul.
Istanbul today is the capital of
Turkey, but for a thousand years it was the capital of a Greek-speaking empire
and the center of the Orthodox Christian religion, worshiped in Greek.The arts and thought of that
Byzantine civilization, its gold work, jewelry, tiled mosaics, sought after immortal forms
and timeless truths. These are what the mind of the "old man" of the poem's
first line longs for: "gather me [the poem's speaker asks from Byzantium] Into
the artifice of eternity."
There's a lot more to "Sailing
to Byzantium," a densely beautiful construct of four stanzas of eight
lines each, including the poem's insuperable characterization of mortal time
itself, when the speaker compares himself to a bird who would sing "Of what
is past, or passing, or to come."
You really cannot write a better line that sings itself.
And after all this necessary homage to Yeats, my appropriation
of his poem's famous first line to a poem of five lines seems a very slight affair,
which it is. It's a poor thing, but my own.
Nevertheless, it sums up my salute
to Greece's vitality. Modern Greece is not Byzantium, where the goldsmiths labor to
"keep a drowsy emperor awake."
In fact it's full of life.
Old Men
After watching bearded, pony-tailed, pot-bellied
motorcyclists
dart into mid-morning Athens traffic,
I think of Yeats' verdict on Ireland,
"This is no country for old men."
They should come to Greece.
(Here's a link: http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-knox-2016-july.html)
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