Poem for Tuesday and Giant's Ring

The Giant's Ring 

By Robinson Jeffers 

Ballylesson, Near Belfast 

Whoever is able will pursue the plainly

False immortality of not having lived in vain but leaving some

mark in the world.

Secretly mocking at his own insanity

He labors the same, he knows that no dead man's lip was ever

curled in self-scorn,

And immortality is for the dead.

Jesus and Caesar out of the bricks of man's weakness, Washington

out of the brittle

Bones of man's strength built their memorials,

This nameless chief of a knot of forgotten tribes in the Irish darkness

used faithfuller

Simpler materials: to diadem a hilltop

That sees the long loughs and the Mourne Mountains, with a ring

of enormous embankment, and to build

In the center that great toad of a dolmen

Piled up of ponderous basalt that sheds the centuries like raindrops.

He drove the labor,

And has earmarked already some four millenniums.

His very presence is here, thick-bodied and brutish, a brutal and

senseless will-power.

Immortality? While Homer and Shakespeare are names,

Not of men but verses, and the elder has not lived nor the

younger will not, such treadings of time.

Conclude that secular like Christian immortality's

Too cheap a bargain: the name, the work or the soul: glass beads

are the trade for savages.

-------- 

To follow up the ophthalmologist on Monday, I had my semiannual dentist appointment on Tuesday. It was fairly uneventful other than he thinks I should think about using a bite guard so I don't end up needing crowns on my back teeth; I had one years ago and it kept me awake at night, so I stopped using it, and now I have to see if my insurance will pay for one of the newer thinner ones. I also worked on my Ireland photo book and started catching Pokemon for the Halloween event. 

My Voyager group watched "Repentance" which is quite didactic and doesn't care much about keeping the characters in character, but those are frequent sins of the franchise overall, so I probably shouldn't complain. I also watched a couple of Derry Girls episodes with Cheryl, this week's Arrested Development-tinged Only Murders in the Building, and the hilarious Lego Marvel Avengers: Mission Demolition. The nearly 5000-year-old Giant's Ring in Northern Ireland: