Settings

1/11/11 seems like a good time to start enforcing one's New Year's resolutions; my blog-related resolution is to start tagging my posts. I don't know why I haven't been doing this -- everyone else does it! -- maybe I just never expected the thing to live so long. Also, I've made my Google feed public; it was private for a while -- I'd protected it out of paranoia about Buzz -- for no good reason.

I wanted to post a Seamus Heaney poem from the sequence "Settings," but annoyingly can't find one online, and my copy of Opened Ground is still in Jeremy's possum-infested basement. Instead, here's an Auden poem -- Auden having been much-mentioned lately -- that is vaguely on topic, and is not especially smug nor self-congratulatory.

Song of the Master and Boatswain 
from The Sea and the Mirror

At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s
We drank our liquor straight,
Some went upstairs with Margery,
And some, alas, with Kate;
And two by two like cat and mouse,
The homeless played at keeping house.

There Wealthy Meg, the Sailor’s Friend,
And Marion, cow-eyed,
Opened their arms to me, but I
Refused to step inside;
I was not looking for a cage
In which to mope in my old age.

The nightingales are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep.