Another birthday turned my thoughts yet again to poetry. As I rode the train home from Sydney, Yeat's Sailing To Byzantium came to mind. It is not because I feel like "a paltry thing/a tattered coat upon a stick", which is bleak enough, but rather, I have a sense of being a little out-of-step with the younger generation. Or perhaps more than that or not just them. Much as I may try to stay current (and I do), I still perceive a sense of drift, as if something at a core level has changed.

Of course, that could just be my too-reflective self which can way go way too deep at times. Any birthday ending in a zero is likely to provoke "abstruser musings" and recollections of where one is located on the great lifeline. Alas, that might also induce a little melancholy. Truthfully, I am happy to have come this far and done as much as I have and I'd like to think there is much more to be done still. Meanwhile, the opening stanza from Sailing To Byzantium, the well-spring of these thoughts.

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.