In the last season of The Sopranos suicidal A.J. is enrolled in a literature class. One episode shows the teacher in front of the class reading this poem by Wordsworth, which I recently thought of while viewing reports about traffic jams at shopping malls in the wee hours of the morning after Thanksgiving.
But Wordsworth does not make on A.J. the same impression as does this poem by Yeats. His mother later attributes his suicide attempt to the school curriculum. "What kind of poem is that to be teaching college students?" she says, to no one in particular.
A.J., I think, makes his own poetry when his parents are pressing him about his depression. He says this and that, his troubled boyhood and so on, eliciting his father's scorn until he quotes what his late grandmother told him when, prodded by his mother, he went to visit her in the nursing home before she died. "It's all a big nothing," Grandma Livia had told him. A.J. remembers her words exactly. "She said in the end your friends and family let you down. That you die in your own arms." When he finishes relating that memory, no one says anything.
Poetry, said Auden, is nothing more than "memorable speech."
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