July 4, 2026

Firecrackers in the gathering dark. Spent the morning delving Yeats, trying to discover why he could write a political poem that is a great poem, and we cannot.  Part of the reason–and the part that cannot be amended–is that his opponents at some point believed what they were doing was right, and preserved some of that dignity. We are shooting hogs in a wallow. It is hard to make that matter. It is hard to give that dignity.