Somehow Consoling
Your Monday Vitamin
Feeling distraught over the public mess, I turned to this poem…
To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
W.B. Yeats



How timely! How topical!
Another spit in Yeats’ observation of today’s political mess. Has it been thus ever so?