I see him old; wrinkled where a poet
should be wrinkled, yet in the eyes and cheeks
shadows pool
and play their filthy games.
Everyone dressed like poets, then, simply
in suits too large for shoulders,
always hunched
as if the heavy fabric was enough
to burden Atlas.
Yeats’ small glasses
make me wonder how he found them again
after he noticed Maud was gone. Their frames
discarded on his desk to wipe his eyes.
Poets die twice, if they’re good and lucky.
Many of us can only glimpse a life
standing on the bodies of dead poetry.
Many never live for hope and longing.
Matthew is a poet and PhD student from Nova Scotia. His work has appeared in Queen’s Quarterly, Best Canadian Poetry, and others.
Questions and Answers
Do you use any resources that a young poet would find useful (e.g. books, films, art, websites, etc.)?
In my experience teaching poetry, the most important resource for a young poet is encouragement to try and to fail. Failure, unfortunately, is the best way I have found to learn. An ability to fail—and to fail graciously—is something I have tried to cultivate in my own practice. Of course, that’s a bit of an abstract answer, so let me concertize it.
I keep a copy of The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse on my desk. My copy is an Everyman paperback older than I am. The book contains some of the worst poetry written by some of the best English poets. It doesn’t punch down and attack poets that aren’t capable of better. It’s a humbling read. I leave it on my desk to remind myself that it’s okay to fail—that we will fail no matter how much practice and talent we have.
What inspired or motivated you to write this poem?
Yeats is a difficult character for me. The poem started with contradictions in my mind between Yeats as I see him and how he is depicted (young and pensive) on a collection of his works I was reading at the time. Yeats, more than anyone, perhaps, made himself a poet through acts of sheer will and was constantly reinventing himself, and he’s hard to pin down. His early work is very much in the world, but his later work—some of his best, in my opinion—is abstracted, blurred.
The greatest struggles I have with Yeats come from the tension between his work and his biography. He constantly wills change in his work, but never acts towards it in life. He constantly actualizes himself in his work, but stumbles when his feet hit the ground again. I could be wrong, of course, but my sense is that Yeats was never fully alive in this world, despite how much his poetry enriches our experience of it.
What poetic techniques did you use in this poem? How much attention do you pay to form and metre?
“Yeats” started life as an unrhymed sonnet, and still bears many traces of its earlier form. I paid a lot of attention to metre in the first draft, then broke the form.
The poem is light on literary devices. There’s the one simile comparing the old poets to Atlas. If the poem could be said to work, I think its power comes from the juxtaposition of the simple, slow description of Yeats with the bold statement “Poets die twice, if they’re good and lucky.” I wonder if I was thinking of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” when I wrote the poem.