Memories and Recollections

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,

Memory says: Want to do right? Don’t count on me.

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

And suddenly the memory revealed itself.

True reconciliation does not consist in merely forgetting the past.

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and heartstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

I have had playmates, I have had companions,

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Midnight shakes the memory

Footfalls echo in the memory

… Nessun maggior dolore,

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

John Anderson my jo, John,

Do you remember an Inn,

Les souvenirs sont cors de chasse

It all came back to me last night, stirred By the sootfall of your things at bedtime, Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer For the black plunge-line nightdress.

For this is action, this not being sure, this careless Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow, Making ready to forget, and always coming back To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms Inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can’t quite name.

Never such innocence again.

And remembering… Remembering, with twinklings and twinges, As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Of sunlight And the legend of the green chapels.

Life and the memory of it cramped, dim, on a piece of Bristol board.