Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.
– Yeats
The cruelest regret of aging is the friends we’ve lost.
For a shining moment we were so alive to each other, co-dependent, lovers – in a spiritual, not a romantic sense. Our beings smiled anticipating our next meeting. We would be friends forever! Then circumstances separated us. We were no longer neighbors or engaged in the same pursuit. We “kept up” as we could – when we could – aching remembering – our times together surely, but more hauntingly, those times that might have been.
This is the difference between friends and family. Family you do not lose. They may die or live apart, but they will always be family, permanent players in the drama of your life. I carry my parents in mind, as readers of these pages know; our relationships continue to evolve, with my dad especially, though he died nearly sixty years ago. People are alive to us if – and only if – they live in mind.
Friendships we know will be temporary, though we may protest otherwise. We will go our separate ways, gradually, inexorably losing track. Their memory evokes an epoch now locked away and fading.
I just woke remembering such a friend. I opened my laptop and started typing to yank myself from the pain. Nothing happened to part us, just the tug of time in two directions. The present blinds us with its urgency; memories blur. Remembering, I wonder what’s become of my friend, so vivid once.
Yeats captures this ache in “The Municipal Gallery Revisited”, one of those poems that make us thankful for the language it was written in. Among literature’s glories is never having to bid farewell to one’s loves. They wait on the shelf patiently, my darlings, for my return.
In Dublin’s gallery (now the Hugh Lane), an older Yeats faces the faces of intimates from the stirring tragic thrilling years of the Irish War of Independence. “Bliss
it was in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven,”
wrote Wordsworth of an earlier revolutionary time. “Around me the images of thirty years; an ambush,” Yeats explains; then describes those affectionate bonds:
pilgrims at the water-side;
Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars,
Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride…
ten souls in all, in seven eight-line stanzas so quiet and convincing in their gait one feels one’s walking beside the halting literary man. Some meetings were just glimpses:
Before a woman’s portrait suddenly I stand;
Beautiful and gentle in her Venetian way.
I met her all but fifty years ago
For twenty minutes in some studio.
Other paintings – of Lady Augusta Gregory and her son, and of the playwright John Synge – depict the souls he'd loved best in the world, whose love had tended his tender early years.
The intensity of these recollections nearly kneecaps the poet:
Heart smitten with emotion I sink down,
My heart recovering with covered eyes;
Wherever I had looked I had looked upon
My permanent or impermanent images.
His pain is so present, poignant, it hurts to read. How he loved these souls – oh, oh!
John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought
All that we did, all that we said or sang
Must come from contact with the soil, from that
Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.
We three alone in modern times had brought
Everything down to that sole test again,
Dream of the noble and the beggarman.
Yeats wrote to preserve, however imperfectly, his vanished loves. I, too, to seize friends who are gone.