Poem of the Day: ‘Immortality’
George William Russell’s poem reflects that curiously delicate sadness of his era, which no other time in English poetry has ever quite matched.
George William Russell (1867–1935), who wrote under the pseudonym “AE,” was an organizer for an Irish agricultural association, helping establish rural credit societies and cooperative banks. Along the way, he was also a painter, a publisher, a Nationalist patriot, and an advocate of theosophy (the cut-rate mysticism of Madam Blavatsky, which captured some attention from the goofy and the lonely in those fin-de-siècle days).
But it was as a figure in the Irish Literary Revival, from around 1890 to 1910, that he gained the most attention — primarily as a poet. A tour of America in the 1930s brought out crowds to applaud his work and buy his books, while he regaled those enthralled Americans with tales of famous Irish writers from William Butler Yeats to James Joyce.
In “Immortality,” today’s Poem of the Day, AE indulges a little of the kind of mysticism that he put in such poems as “By the Margin of the Great Deep.” A little of that love-is-life pop philosophy that he put in such poems as “Brotherhood.” And a whole lot of that curiously delicate sadness of the era, which no other time in English poetry has ever quite matched. In two quatrains of an interesting meter — three seven-foot lines, capped with a five-foot line — AE urges an unselfconscious dwelling within the “fire of love.”
Immortality
by AE
We must pass like smoke or live within the spirit’s fire,
For we can no more than smoke unto the flame return,
If our thought has changed to dream or will unto desire.
As smoke we vanish though the fire may burn.
Lights of infinite pity star the gray dusk of our days:
Surely here is soul; with it we have eternal breath:
In the fire of love we live or pass by many ways,
By unnumbered ways of dream to death.
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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
