And then there’s Sylvia Plath…

It makes no sense at all that

Keats and Yeats

have never rhymed.

I don’t mean

that each had never

used  the form in poems,

I mean the names them-

selves aren’t what they

seem to be:

“Keets” as in meets,

“Yates” as in mates,

although neither

ever met  the other,

they couldn’t have been

good friends—

in the English

sense of the word,

being a pair of

generations

apart.   

Perhaps it’s the

Anglo/Irish

dynamic,

the died-in-his-

blooming remembrance,

like a poetry’s Jimmy Dean,

struck down within his

prime, that draws me at once

to Keats,  

while William Butler

paraded

his grey and glasses—

between the wars

to end all wars—

had much better things

to write of

than Grecian Urns,

an unrequited

love, for instance,

a Maud that rhymes

with God—

no-no,

not Monsieur

Rimbaud, he’s a

beast of another

kind,

a poet in a class

of his own, whose name’s

not apropos,

except to say that he,

like Keats and Dean and Plath,

knew when to cash the chips,

deem the straw 

which had broken

to be the very final one,

be buried in his beauty,

forever be  

forever young.

Andreas Gripp

RF Image