Isobel Lilian Gloag, The Knight and the Mermaid, or The Kiss of the Enchantress (ca. 1890), detail
I keep wanting to say things in sorrow
Even when I've got nothing to say;
What best might be spoken tomorrow
I recklessly utter today.
“When I was young,
I had not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet sing it with such airs
That one believed he had a sword upstairs;
Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,
Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish,”
Yeats says.*
That’s wishful thinking—
You should quote these lines winking!
I, too, would have my helmet green
If poetry could scour it clean.
*”All Things Can Tempt Me,” in The Green Helmet (1910)