"Unless soul clap its hands and sing" a man
More great than many I could name
Once said. What soul is there in tin or can,
When flesh is iron, bone is steel - the same?
Call me a coward if you wish, to not
Embrace the whirring of the cog for heart -
Does metal cry at you from its small cot,
Does it possess a love for light and art?
Perhaps I am too hard upon a bot
That only has the crime of being made
And not created by a self professing God.
What could that man, by fairest chance, have said?
Unless soul clap its hands and sing. Well, ring
Your bell, unstop your cogs, but can you sing?
I quite like this one.
I'm not sure about the use of "bot", due to being a shortened version of robot but it'd mess up the pacing to usse the full word.
"Unless soul clap its hands and sing" in the second last line doesn't make too much sense to me. Is it missing something?
Thanks for commenting!
The line came from Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.
Sailing to Byzantium
W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
By using that line I was sort of talking about passion, and art, and mortality. And I agree - bot's not the best. I couldn't think of anything else, though. Any suggestions?
Unfortunately, I can't think of anything to replace bot.
Hmm. The soul line I'm not sure fits entirely.
As a interesting little factoid, I do actually have a properly published poem.
Unfortunately, it was as part of an anthology of children's poems, so not exactly a glamorous achievement. I haven't done anything with poetry in a long time...
Yeah okay, that point could be a bit clearer. The original pass just had the Godhead, the idea of a sibling was added a lot later, but I like the idea of the Dream-To-Be and The Nothing fusing to form the Godhead. I rewrote the first paragraph slightly:
In the beginning, there was only The Dream-To-Be and The Nothing. Seeing the endless torture of possibilities, The The Dream-To-Be commissioned their beloved sibling to split their joint-divinity asunder and become the collective Dream-That-Is: Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. The Godhead was born of the fusion, and sung seven ways into seven aspects of seven shapes.
In ES lore (and it's a fairly obscure concept, mostly comes from out-of-game writings of Michael Kirkbride anwyay), the Godhead is the sleeper that dreams reality. I quite like the idea of reality being a dream of a being, and everyone who exists just a split personality of that being so stole it
Out of personal preference, I'd say don't capitalise the 'The' part of the The Nothing, etc. Also, careful, you've got an extra The in "..torture of possibilities,
The The Dream-To-Be commissioned".
Still, I do love me some mythology.
The notion of reality being a dream of a greater being is always nice. I planned games based on that idea before, but they never got very far.
Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening had a similiar plot, with the island being a dream of the god-like being called the Wind Fish; the game is based on gathering the instruments needed to wake it so you can leave the island. The final boss' death quote is even about how "This island is going to disappear... our world is going to disappear... our... world..."
And when you wake the Wind Fish, the island does indeed disappear. So really you remove all the characters you meet from existence. Way to go, hero.