The French Made Me Fasten It

OK, people, I've been sitting here thinking about tomorrow, awful tomorrow when I have to haul 300 bales of 1st crop hay from the field to my pole barn. & I have to do this all alone, except for my truck, my Sirius satellite radio, 4 dark setters & 1 yellow lab , & 2 Tennessee Walkers & 2 Spotted Saddle Horses who only care about the grain I'm keeping away from them. Mrs. coldH2O left me again for the wilds of northern MN & I hope she stays clear of the fires that are crying havoc in the Boundary Waters. (Note to dumbasses: the fires are not the result of not allowing salvage logging.) & of course, I prefer 2nd crop hay, but this year looks very bad, since we have had 0 rain. This stuff looks green, so it'll probably be OK. To get my mind off all that, I clicked on over to this blog. I've read it randomly in the past, but I was really happy to see the discussion in this post It was good to think about Yeats again, & not just his "best"/"worst"/"rough beasts" etc. So go read the post & here's a tidbit. If it wasn't for poetry, there would be no culture. & if there were no culture there would be no left-wing progressive thinking boys & girls.

But this is just warmup, folks, for the devastating third stanza:

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

You just can’t get any more incendiary-yearning than that.

In fact, when I heard that stanza, particularly its second four lines, I broke out in a cold sweat. I could slip my way down the sinuous slant-rhymes of wall, soul, animal, but I got stuck on “fastened” and couldn’t get loose. Fastened to a dying animal. Jesus H. Christ. Next to this, T. S. Eliot’s evocations of old age (which, of course, he began writing at about the age of nine) look thin and watery. And fastened: how much more evocative, and more powerful, than a cognate like “tethered to” or “burdened with”: it says “held fast,” sure, and it merely tells us what we already knew, namely, that this sublunary sphere and all its flailing fleshly creatures are impediments and worse. But as Viktor Shklovsky would say, it renews perception, it makes the stone stony. It’s almost impossible, I think—no matter how old or young you may think you are—to read that line without becoming sick with desire—and viscerally aware of the dying animal that houses the desiring. Remember “The young/ In one another’s arms, birds in the trees” from the poem’s opening lines? Yes, well, now you know why your poet referred to them not as emblems of burgeoning life but as “those dying generations.” For as Yeats sails east, sick with desire, he speaks of a most Buddhist wish to be free of all attachment, not least to the dying animal in which his soul is temporarily encased. No, that’s not quite right: to which his soul is fastened.