Sailing

 The poem is by William Butler Yeats, the guy who wrote The Second Coming that I refer to often.  I didn't memorize this one but it has been a little bit on my mind ever since that class sixty plus years ago.

It's about being old or as WBY puts it: A tattered coat upon a stick.

At the time I read it I was 20 years old, so that I knew that would never happen to me, but I filed it away, just in case.

Walking around downtown, aimlessly roaming because it is good exercise and because I just like to look at things, I see all the other people, most of them younger than me with a faster, more purposeful stride.  They have places to go to and things to do.  They are more involved, playing a part in the business of the world, than me walking around for exercise and looking at things just to be looking at them.

See in the poem even though he was a big time poet he also felt a bit out of the hurly burly of life because there was not so much hurly burly in him anymore.  What is a tattered coat upon a stick to do?

What to do?  What to do?  Well Big Bill is sailing to Byzantium.  The land of ideas.  Ideas like Plato's ideas, perfect and eternal, you know like art or wacky scientific experiments or maybe Beagles' music.  Why doesn't he take it up again?  Pick up his guitar or harmonica and belt out a tune every now and then?

Being a tattered coat on a stick you can no longer compete with those youngins with their streak of lighting cars and fancy clothes, but if you sail out to Byzantium you are dealing with stuff that never dies and never grows old.

Something like that.  Though I do get a little lost at perning in a gyre.

The phrase “perne in a gyre” refers to a spinning wheel such as those Yeats would have seen during his youth in Sligo.

Oh see.  So let's perne and sail on Beaglestonians.