Question:
Poets' themes on aging and identity through imagery
Poems are in attached document
Read Donald Justice's "Men at 40 ", Maurya Simon's "Women at 30" , Judith Ortiz Coffer's "The Other",, and William Butler Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium".
Using all that you have learned thus far:
1. Discuss how Justice, Simon, Cofer, and Yeats advance their themes on aging and identity through imagery.
POEMS FOR ASSIGNMENT
A. Donald Justice's
"Men at Forty"
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.
And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practises tying
His father's tie there in secret
And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.
-- Donald Justice
B. Maurya Simon's "Women at 30"
Women at thirty
learn to swing lightly
In the hinges of their steps
As they ascend
At ease on the carpeting
They feel it gliding
Beneath them now like an air-borne sail
Though its speed is slowed down
And deep mirrors
They recover
The face of the girl she tries on
Her mother's smile and kisses
The face of that mother
Still warmed by the mystery of father
They are more and more women now
Something is touching them, something
That is like the sun's brush
Of white light, minute,
Unfurling the ferns at the base of the yard
Beyond their children's windows
-- Maurya Simon
C. Judith Ortiz Cofer's "The Other"
A sloe-eyed dark woman shadows me
In the mornings she sings
Spanish love songs in a high
falsetto filling my shower stall
With echoes.
She is by my side
in front of the mirror as I slip
into my tailored skirt and she
in her red cotton dress.
She shakes out her black mane as I
run a comb through my close cropped cap>
Her mouth is like a red bull's eye
daring me.
Everywhere I go I must
make room for her; she crowds me
in elevators where others wonder
at all the space I need.
At night her weight tips my bed, and
it is her wild dreams that run rampant
through my head exhausting me. Her heartbeats
like dozens of spiders carrying the poison
of her restlessness over the small
distance that separates us,
drag their countless legs
over my bare flesh
--Judith Ortiz Cofer
D. William Butler Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"
This is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
__Those dying generations__at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, Flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
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.
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away, sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature, I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come
--William Butler Yeats