Happy Birthday to Me………..Yeats, Keats, & Kittens

This thing was written in twenty-seven minutes while listening to the Two Non Blondes cover (sort of) of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ song “By Thw Way”. It’s a cover. Sort of.

My senior year at Miami University, I took a two credit poetry course as an elective. It was a wonderful course. The professor was stunningly beautiful….not that this means anything because genetics are handed to you during that whole zygote process and makeup is relatively easy to apply…….she also had a beautiful mind. A beautiful mind is 3,907 times more attractive than genetics. When I choose to fall in love, it is always with the mind…..that is a fine rule to follow. Write that down. You are welcome. She was my singular college professor crush. Unrequited. She could recite Dickinson, Wadsworth, Longfellow, Whitman, and Tennyson from memory. And Yeats & Keats. She loved her some Yeats & Keats.

During the second week, the instructor asked me to please explain five similarities and differences between Yeats and Keats. Not having completed the reading and nursing a pretty significant hangover, I replied simply that “Yeats was Keats…………with a “Y”. That reply got me a ten page assignment comparing and contrasting Yeats and Keats

That two credit course began a long and torrid love affair with poetry……and with Yeats and Keats.

I spend roughly, or precisely, six hundred twenty-four hours per year on planes and have spent (roughly or precisely) six hundred twenty-four hours on planes each year for the last twenty-five years. When you take six hundred twenty-four hours and divide it into days using something I like to call “math”, you get twenty-six days. Never fond of speaking with strangers anywhere I am assigned to sit (e.g. my favorite seat….3B….on planes, the bar area of a sushi bar, any bar in any airport or hotel, ad infinitum) because the vast majority of strangers will bore you to tears or make you want to stick knitting needles in your ears with their stories, those twenty-six days in the air tend to be an excellent adult “time out”. Twenty-six days of solitary confinement with alternating periods of silence, Motley Crue and diagraming poetry. Diagramming poetry keeps your mind fresh and….you get to read a bunch of poetry. Thanks to that ridiculously beautiful professor and that two hour elective course at Miami University,

I mostly do Yeats, although Keats pops up now and then. Yeats is Irish…..which makes him a better writer.

Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Yeats, Yeats, Yeats……..soooooooo, we have Yeats’ three principles of the mind in “A Vision A”. Hanrahan is the romantic primitive, Robartes is the intellectual, and Aedh is the starcrossed lover, speaking that poem up there. And those three can be traced to Yeats digging Plotinus, whose philosophical writings had three principle…..the One, the Intellect, and the Soul. And if you trace Plotinus back, you’ll end up at his teacher Saccas….and if you trace Saccas back you end up at Plato.

That ten page paper as punishment for a flippant reply did not go to waste. Not even a little bit.

Keats……”Bright Star”

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art –
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors –
No – yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever – or else swoon to death

New Kittens…Yeats, Keats, Dre, and Eminem

These little bastards living here for the next two weeks……named after poets.

Birthday Gift for You

Today is my birthday and, like Joey on the dead series “Friends”, I am a giver. I’m giving to all you loyal Mind of Mully (Whatever One) the following.

First, for those of you feeling emotionally precarious or the need to feel alive again, we are re-opening the Mind of Mully Indefinite Time Period videos on YouTube and…..perhaps more importantly……we are going to start making more Mind of Mully Indefinite Time Period videos. Here is one to get you warmed up. You don’t want to pull a hamstring.

There are many of you who simply visit this page and have not seen our Two Non Blondes videos….like the one there up at the top. This week, we are opening a Two Non Blondes YouTube channel where you will be able to see really awful things like this cover of Jewel’s “You Were Meant for Me”