Saturday, March 09, 2013
One by One We Drop Away
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), "The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water," in Poetical Works, Vol. I: Lyrical Poems (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906), p. 294:
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I heard the old, old men say,Plato, Cratylus 402 A (tr. H.N. Fowler):
"Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away."
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn trees
By the waters.
I heard the old, old men say,
"All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters."
Heracleitus says, you know, that all things move and nothing remains still, and he likens the universe to the current of a river, saying that you cannot step twice into the same stream.
λέγει που Ἡράκλειτος ὅτι "πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει," καὶ ποταμοῦ ῥοῇ ἀπεικάζων τὰ ὄντα λέγει ὡς "δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης."
