All Is Vanity, Saith the Preacher by Lord Byron

I.
Fame, wisdom, love, and power were mine,
And health and youth possess'd me;
My goblets blush'd from every vine,
And lovely forms caress'd me;
I sunn'd my heart in beauty's eyes,
And felt my soul grow tender:
All earth can give, or mortal prize,
Was mine of regal splendour.

II.
I strive to number o'er what days
Remembrance can discover,
Which all that life or earth displays
Would lure me to live over.
There rose no day, there roll'd no hour
Of pleasure unembitter'd;
And not a trapping deck'd my power
That gall'd not while it glitter'd.

III.
The serpent of the field, by art
And spells, is won from harming;
But that which coils around the heart,
Oh! who hath power of charming?
It will not list to wisdom's lore,
Nor music's voice can lure it;
But there it stings for evermore
The soul that must endure it.

Today is National Poetry Day, one of those arbitrary events which paradoxically engenders in the beholder a sense both of hope and futility. Hope because it is at least heartening that poetry has not been entirely forgotten, but overwhelmingly a sense of futility in that poetry's standing in the world necessitates such a ridiculous gesture to begin with. Where does one begin? It is like having a national day for roller skating, or digressing excessively, or eating cheese. It almost means nothing. Those who would roller skate if left to their own devices (we can assume roller skates to have a place among these devices) will roller skate regardless of the day, and those who do not will hardly take up the activity simply because of some misplaced allegiance to nominal, calendrical rubbish. The day would simply serve as some kind of generator of strife between those who roller skate and say, 'That's a nice idea,' and those who do not roller skate and say, 'That's not a nice idea.' I like to think humans are not so shallow as to be swayed by such nonsense, but perhaps I speak too highly of my fellow bipedal primates. 

I think I would be a little more sanguine were it not for the absolute conspicuity of the fact that poetry is dead. Like rock and roll, it simply is not made anymore. Of course there are people who brand themselves as poets, and I'm sure there are people who brand themselves as supporters of the rock and roll movement, but let us not pretend that this is anything more than a token gesture. These movements are impossible to wilfully resurrect, and I cannot imagine any sort of new Romantic age unless there was a colossal coincidence of talent. It would not occur because some children had seen the hashtag #NationalPoetryDay on Twitter. Certainly, it seems nobody has been much inspired, all tweets containing fragments of prose nonsense demarcated by that oh-so-poetic line break. Please. Modern poetry is to me indistinguishable from rap lyrics, and this is naturally a cause for great regret. There is nothing poetic in the anaemia of modern poetry. One can almost imagine the Muses sitting on Mount Parnassus, passing a joint and watching episodes of The Only Way is Essex in their onesies. 

But this poem! Shitting Norah! It is perhaps tragic and certainly conceited to say that Byron is one of the people with whom I most sympathise, but there you have it. I've just mocked the state of all modern poetry, my conceit is already exposed. But seriously, I cannot say whether Byron had some supernal knowledge of the human character, or whether he had some supernal knowledge of my character, for I can only speak for myself, but he had some supernal knowledge of something. Who can say that they have not at times experienced a feeling of futility, of persecution even? Byron seems to summarise these feelings in a way unlike any other, he has a way of speaking not to academic fustiness but to the soul; Will Self writes of Byron that: 'I've always found George Gordon (Lord Byron) to be the most proximate of those literary and historical figures whose towering eminence and temporal removal should, by rights, place them at a distance.' So perhaps it is not just me. I think this proximate quality to his work can be attributed to its overriding candour. 

The title of this poem seems to come from Ecclesiastes: 'Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.' This is doubly interesting because it is precisely Ecclesiastes and Byron that Bertrand Russell synthesises in a chapter on 'Byronic Unhappiness' in The Conquest of Happiness, and whilst he makes an elegant attempt I'm not sure he wholly mollifies my pessimism. That's probably quite bad, isn't it? One of the biggest geniuses of the past 100 years cannot inculcate some optimism in me. 

Anyway, that's all folks. I keep reciting the first four lines of the third stanza in my head over and over again at the moment - much like a pop song but without the brain expungement. I think this is one of the lost and unappreciated charms of poetry - it has great music. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining poetry's demise, for music is far more accessible now than in previous centuries. It is now possible for the unwashed masses to gain a similar effect through the far less forbidding medium of pop music. Just a thought.