return to song

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row

—Bob Dylan, "Desolation Row"

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016

two Irish things

If poetry creates a paradise of its own, and tends to make mankind happier, Ireland has indeed need of song…The days of her mourning are not ended. The dirge of a thousand years still swells over the land of numberless sorrows. The voice of her song is still plaintive over the razed homesteads of her valleys, over the sweltering plague-ship and shattered bark of the Western Main.

—Edward Hayes, The Ballads of Ireland, 1856

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The Irish have an abiding sense of tragedy which sustains them throughout temporary periods of joy.

—Oscar Wilde

learn it and die

Solon of Athens (c.640-560 BCE), the great lawmaker and reformer, attended a banquet where he heard a young man sing a poem by Sappho. Upon hearing the song Solon asked the boy to teach it to him. When others at the table asked Solon why he was so keen on knowing that song, he replied: "I want to learn it and die.

[Anecdote told in various classical sources.]

towering crag

The best line is a towering crag.
It won't be woven into an ordinary song.
The mind can't find a match for it
but casts about, unwilling to give up.

—Lu Ji, quoted in The Act of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters, (Shambala, 1996), translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping