After Long Silence

I got given this book as a school prize back in 1975. I had to choose it from the limited number of books available in the local department store. The poetry section was not particularly big, as I remember. Being the nearest thing available to the things I was interested in, it caught my eye. It cost £1.75. As it happens, I’d bought quite an interesting book. It’s viewed as an oddity by many critics: a book that says at least as much about the editor, WB Yeats, as it says about modern poetry of that time.

I picked it up yesterday for the first time in a long time. It struck me it had been a while since I'd read any Yeats. I turned to the first poem in the book he'd selected from his own work. I was interested to see what of his work he wanted his readers to read first. I immediately realised that although I've owned the book since 1975, and have dibbed into it quite a lot over the years, I'd not read it before - at least, not with a receptive mind. It's called After Long Silence:

Speech after long silence; it is right,

All other lovers being estranged or dead,

Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,

The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,

That we descant and yet again descant

Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:

Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young

We loved each other and were ignorant.

It hit me between the eyes - not least because it more-or-less spoke thoughts I'd been thinking recently. And it's one hell of a poem, too.