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No Ability, No Dignity Can Fail Him Now...
Delmore Schwartz : "Yeats Died Saturday In France"Published/Written in 1939
Yeats died Saturday in France.
Freedom from his animal
Has come at last in alien Nice,
His heart beat separate from his will:
He knows at last the old abyss
Which always faced his staring face.
No ability, no dignity
Can fail him now who trained so long
For the outrage of eternity,
Teaching his heart to beat a song
In which man's strict humanity,
Erect as a soldier, became a tongue.This poem about William Butler Yeats, the Nobel Prize winning Irish poet sort of tells us what is true of every one of us. Dignity is truly in the eyes of the beholder after death since it no longer becomes personally necessary for the deceased. But.. before death as it was most likely with Yeats, if the person is aware, perhaps it may be very personally important. ..Maurice.
2 Comments:
One might, as I would, argue that dignity is eternal - something beyond our physical mortality. Yeats, I think sees beauty and horror in the passing of many lives he knew. In "Easter 1916" he wrote, of the many who died: "All changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born..." Yet, for Yeats, he perhaps suffered the loss of his "tongue" when, in the "Circus Animals Desertion" he wrote of the loss of "those images" in his early poems, which ended in the "foul rag and bone shop of the heart."
We honor the dead because dignity continues after death. Some wash the dead and pray all night "with" them. Thus, bioethics recognizes the respect of the person. Personhood exists before birth. We honor our ancestry just as we pray for our future, unconceived progeny. Just as G-D promised Abraham that his seed would be as the stars are numbered. Dignity is eternal hope.
Thanks to Anonymous for the thoughtful interpretation of Yeats writing. Dignity lives on. Do you think that it is this quality to human life, dignity and its persistence, which distinguishes us from other animals? ..Maurice.
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