ENDOCRINE LYRIC Poem by Damir Šodan

ENDOCRINE LYRIC



In 1934, having lost his patroness
who for forty years supported his writing
and political engagement, W. B. Yeats,
the Nobel Prize winner, old and alone,
began suffering from high blood pressure
and failing heart to the point
that his creativity almost waned.

But Yeats, that mystic
who would frown upon
any form of impersonal science
had heard somewhere about the latest
rejuvenation treatment and to the horror
of his friends found an Australian sexologist
on Harley Street in London who in the spring
of the same year performed on him
the so-called Steinach operation.
(A kind of vasectomy, first tested in Vienna,
which allegedly restored dormant drive).

The operation appeared successful,
judging by letters to his friends
wherein William proudly claimed
that had he regained his sexual desire
and fallen in love with a young and talented
poetess Margaret Ruddock
who was then all of 27,
in contrast to his ripe 69.

The cynical Dubliners immediately began
calling him a "gland old man",
but W. B. set out writing poetry again
and that was what mattered the most.
One of those new poems entitled ‘The Spur'
goes like this:

You think it horrible that lust and rage
should dance attention upon my old age.
They were not such a plague when I was young;
What else have I to spur me into song.

William soon compiled
The Oxford Book of Modern Verse
and began working on a new edition of his Collected Poems
so intensely "as if " - said witnesses -
"he was given a new lease on life".
Five long years later he died
of heart failure on the French Riviera,
of all places
Imaginez?!

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Julia Luber 12 February 2019

romantic, poetic, interesting tie bit of literary facts, if true, I don't know- nothing I ever heard about before- poetic license to invent?

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