Robert Peake

I woke up recently with a line from a song in my head. The song was “Cemetery Gates” by The Smiths—one of their signature jaunty-melody-with-morose-lyrics numbers. The actual meaning of the song is less important than the way my own subconscious seems to have appropriated the message upon waking. I rolled over in bed and repeated the line to Val: “Keats and Yeats are on your side.” She smiled. “You know, I think that’s true. I think they are on your side, Robert.”

What a strange and comforting thought. What would those generations of poets stretching back into antiquity think of those of us still practicing the art in the era of iPhones and micro-blogging? I think they might be proud. The prospects for wealth and recognition are certainly far greater in other disciplines, and always have been. And yet, in that moment, it occurred to me that the ghosts of poetry past might somehow be rooting for us, now more than ever, as we ply an art that must seem, to some, anachronistic.

Still, the poets of yesteryear probably had the same combination of wild inventiveness and ferocious discipline that attracts us contemporary poets to the page. Had we all met, therefore, we might have got along—and perhaps one day in the poetic afterlife, we will find, despite our factions and fracases, that we were all on the same side all along.

For those of you interested in hearing the whole song, here it is:

In case, like me, you may have been taking yourself a bit too seriously lately, please enjoy what may be one of the strangest Monty Python sketches in history, featuring three of the big six of Romantic poetry, ants, the queen, and lots of sherry—all conveniently subtitled in Spanish:

We sheltered in John Keats’s house this afternoon. (“Hampstead isn’t far; we won’t need our rain wear!”) Poignant, to see the couch on which he retired, the view he contemplated, toward the end of his short life. More fodder for my thinking on poetic tradition: apparently he wrote poems in the pages of his Complete Works of Shakespeare as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost. Talk about responding when the inspiration strikes… Afterward, I barely managed to roll back through The Heath after a phenomenal Indian food meal on High Street. No doubt ghee is now seeping from my pores. And on that note, I’m off to write some gritty laments on the back pages of the Larry Levis book I brought along.