Story I was on my way back to Brooklyn from a wake in Manhattan,late one night being a little syrupy with my reflexes, i tripped on a stack of books someone had left out on the street, I fumbled down and picked up a book of poems by yeats, and opened to this page, a really lyrical meditation on life. It haunted me for weeks until a melody kinda came all at once.
Lyrics
three old hermits took the air by a cold and desolate sea the first was muttering a prayer the second rummaged for a flea; on a windy stone, the third, giddy with his hundredth year, sang unnoticed like a bird la la la la la la
“Though the door of death is near and what waits behind the door, three times in a single day I slept upright on the shore” so the first but now the second, “We’re given but what we’ve earned so it’s plain to be discerned” la la la la la la “That the shades of holy men who have failed being weak of will, pass the door of birth again and are plagued by crowds until they have the passion to escape.” moaned the other, “they are thrown into some most fearful shape.” but the second mocked his moan: “They are not chained to anything having loved God once, but maybe, to a poet or a king or some witty lovely lady.”
he caught and cracked his flea, the third, giddy with his hundredth bird, sang unnoticed like a bird la la la la la la