Plain Old Men in Ruins

One tale about dead white men
Goes like this—supposedly
Stevens told Frost that his verse

Suffered from being about
Subjects, to which Frost shot back
That the problem with Stevens’

Poetry was that it was
About bric-a-brac. There’s truth
In that. Few have made an art

So founded on bric-a-brac
As had Stevens. Nonetheless,
Every poet, even Frost,

However pedestrian
Or revolutionary,
Leaves some tracks of bric-a-brac,

Some tics of thought, some habits
Akin to hem-and-hawing,
Some sun-bleached hobby horses

Abandoned in their phrases.
The temptation’s to read those
As ruins, but they’re contrast—

Yeats, yet another dead man,
And an Irish one at that,
Littered his poems with Greek myths

He couldn’t translate, the names
Of minor compatriots
Cast as if they, too, were myths,

And some pretty kitsch notions
Re art and eternity.
Yet, somehow, his verses worked.

See how bare he swept his lines
Around those landscaped follies,
How his woodland paths were dry.