An aged man is but a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick
Unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium. From W.B. Yeats Sailing to Byzantium
According to Augustine of Hippo, and later quoted by Charles Wesley, “One who sings prays twice.” The songs and the singing from the Festival of Advent Lessons and Carols this Sunday past are still resonating in my head and heart and soul: the gentle soprano, the mellow alto, the harmonic tenor and sounding bass; each voice become artifice pointing to something or someone near, mysterious and profound.
Yeats the poet is seeking a way to marry the mortality, not just of humankind, but of the creation, to the eternal. His first premise is that it is art that bespeaks the eternal in the midst of a transient life, but the stunning discovery in this poem is that in singing, the singer becomes the artifice, the bearer of the song, and therefore participates in this illusive life eternal. Yeats is re-articulating the romantic high premise that beauty is truth and truth beauty…the means and ends of the eternal.
Indeed singing is a fine metaphor for the life of faith….all of us artisans in the courts of holy Byzantium imagining and building our world, still in its infancy, into what God imagines it to be. If the editors of Genesis had been paying closer attention when they wrote and rewrote the stories of creation, they might have been careful to note that God didn’t just speak the world into being; rather the world was sung into being….the singing voice of God begetting the graceful rhythm and harmony of the universe…God’s song moving over the face of the deep, ordering the world into a significant ineffable beauty…and we, heirs of the same song, still singing the same song….the song from the source…the song that moves the spheres of the universe entire…the song that will resonate in heaven and earth, the one Soul, forever….and its name among many names is love…love palpable and audible…love that transforms and saves and creates…love that redeems the tatters of the mortal dress of all ways and all things… So even if you think you can’t sing…for God’s sake sing.
And now a few words from Uncle Walt:
__________________
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
***
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through
the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
***
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
receive them the same.
***
With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,
I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for
conquer’d and slain persons.
***
This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just same as the righteous, I make appointments
with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.
***
I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their
counterpart of on the same terms.
***
Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.
***
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
__________________
I have nothing else to add to that (except that Song of Myself now has to be included in our earlier discussion).