By Stuart Mitchner
For the past week the most played songs in my 26-year-old Honda CRV have been ABBA’s “Fernando” (“There was something in the air that night, the stars were bright”) and Patti Smith’s “In My Blakean Year” (“One road is paved in gold, one road is just a road”). For Indiana’s championship football team, led by quarterback Fernando Mendoza, the road to an undefeated Cinderella season was paved in gold. That Patti Smith’s road is paved in the gold of dreams can be read into the poem highlighted in her memoir Bread of Angels, “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by William Butler Yeats, who died on this date (January 28) in 1939.
Smith found the poem in Silver Pennies, a “precious book of poetry” her mother gave her “at a time of unfettered curiosity, without instruction, save to believe.” Certain that with this little book she would find the entrance into the mystical world she most desired, she memorized a prayer to the elves and fairies, “the mischievous angels of earth,” and repeated it to herself as she walked to school. Awarding her favorite poems penciled stars, she gave the most to Yeats’s “Cloths of Heaven,” which she reads in a YouTube video presented by Hope Cast:
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.
In W.B. Yeats: A Life (Oxford 1998), R.F. Foster says this was the last poem Yeats composed before the publication of The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). “Destined for immortality,” it was written when the 33-year-old poet was still “expecting some kind of mystical apotheosis,” and it ends by hinting at a final reconciliation with his muse Maud Gonne. Half a century later it became the gateway to a “mystical world” for a New Jersey schoolgirl.
Snow
Last Sunday’s snow sent me to Yeats’s poem “Mad as the Mist and Snow,” composed in 1929 when he was 63. Although Princeton’s snow fell closer to noon than night, the first stanza reflected the mood: “Bolt and bar the shutter / For the foul winds blow: / Our minds are at their best this night, / and I seem to know / That everything outside us is / Mad as the mist and snow.” A minute later, the snow had stopped, the mood had faded, no more mist, no falling snow, but what mattered was that the last two stanzas featuring Horace, Homer, Tully, and Cicero, revived the memory of “Lapis Lazuli,” which I discovered long ago on an overnight bus from Tehran to Baghdad.
“Lapis Lazuli”
Sad to say, Harold Bloom, author of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a critic I almost always agree with, called one of my favorite poems “inhumane nonsense.” Admittedly, my response was shaped by mood of the moment, having first read it in a paperback of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury on my way back from India. I was 27. The feeble bus light overhead was flickering when Shakespeare entered the second stanza, which is presumably what bothered Bloom, that Yeats superseded the Bard, bringing Hamlet, Lear, Ophelia, and Cordelia on to the stage of the poem, where “should the last scene be there, the great stage curtain about to drop,” Ophelia and Cordelia do not “break up their lines to weep, they know that Hamlet and Lear are gay:
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
I still get a night-bus-to-Baghdad tingle when I read those lines ahead of the final two stanzas about the Chinamen with ancient instruments “carved in lapis luzuli.”
The Road to Marriage
The copy of Yeats’s Collected Poems on my desk, open to “Lapis Lazuli,” is the one my future wife studied and annotated her last year at Berkeley, around the time she wrote a letter to me in India, asking about my alma mater Indiana University, one of the graduate schools she was applying to. That simple question about my school and my hometown (Bloomington) prompted a correspondence that led to a summer hitchhiking through Italy and Greece on the road to almost 60 years of marriage.
Wondering if Yeats had ever been to Indiana, I scoured Foster’s biography and found that he’d given a reading in Bloomington on January 18, 1904; although Foster provided no specific details of Yeats’s visit, I learned that “college girls had developed crushes on him en masse” and his reading before engineering students at IU’s arch rival Purdue had gone over “like wet sand.”
Indiana Our “Overlord”
…the night Indiana officially became our overlord…
Our overlord! How strange for someone who grew up in Bloomington to read that storybook word in last Wednesday’s New York Times under the headline “Sport’s Most Remarkable Story.” At the top of the page in red ink is “Indiana’s Record” 16-0, next to the scores of all 16 wins including the one that decided the championship 27-21 over Miami.
On the facing page in huge letters this lapsed Hoosier saw THE HOOSIERS, REDEFINED beneath a photo of IU quarterback Fernando Mendoza throwing himself headfirst into the end zone to score what proved to be the game’s decisive play, with the 1976 ABBA hit “Fernando” blaring at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium “as Indiana University fans sang along.”
“There was something in the air that night, the stars were bright, Fernando.” With the sound turned down (it was after 11 and my wife was asleep), I couldn’t actually hear Frida singing as the stardust of victory fell on the postgame celebration, but the starry atmosphere of the line revived thoughts of “Stardust,” the song Hoagy Carmichael composed on the piano in the Book Nook, a campus hangout in Bloomington.
And there was no one I could call, no one alive with whom I could share this Indiana football fantasy come true. Anyway, why do I care? Why did the coinciding of music and event matter so much? With Yeats in mind, perhaps hoping for some kind of occult Yeatsian poetry of dates, I looked online and found that “Fernando” was first released in March 1976, a week before Indiana’s championship basketball team completed an undefeated season. At that hour, it seemed truly strange, if not downright supernatural, that IU’s historically hopeless football team accomplished the impossible 50 years later with the same song playing.
“Fernando” in Indiana
“Strange” is right, given the Stranger Things connection. On January 1st, the day after viewers all over the country saw the fictional town of Hawkins Indiana, led by its superkinetic Fernando, Bloomington-born Jane Ives, better known as Eleven, destroy the monsters of the Upside Down, IU’s Cream and Crimson destroyed Alabama’s Crimson Tide in the Rose Bowl. Then add to that coincidence the appearance of “Fernando” in the second episode of the fifth and final season of the series when the Demigorgon attacks Holly Wheeler’s mother as she’s sipping wine in the bath room, preparing to bathe, as ABBA sings, “Can you hear the drums, Fernando? I remember long ago another starry night like this.”
“A Dark Cold Day”
William Butler Yeats died in the South of France, having provided his own epitaph: “Cast a cold eye / on life, on death. / Horseman, pass by.” When I think of Yeats’s death it’s hard not to turn to W.H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” which begins “He disappeared in the dead of winter” when the “brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted.” Twice Auden sounds the knell, “The day of his death was a dark cold day.” No wonder, Auden’s flight from England had just landed in New York, where the low on January 27, 1939, was 6 degrees, almost 8 inches of snow having fallen on January 13.
Ending With a Kiss
My wife just said, “Well, that’s a downer,” which prompted me to look up one of the poems in her copy of Yeats that we both underlined and awarded penciled stars, like Patti Smith. “The Song of Wandering Aengus” begins, “I went out to the hazel wood / Because a fire was in my head” and ends with the poet “old with wandering through hollow lands and hilly lands” in search of a “glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair.” When he finds where she has gone, he’ll “kiss her lips and take her hands” and “pluck till time and times are done / The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun.”