By Patrick F. Cannon

It’s interesting that I can remember the lyrics to songs from my youth – even stupid and silly ones – when I have forgotten poems I once could recite. It proves, I think, the theory that musical melody is an aid to memory. The success of music therapy in treating Alzheimer’s patients is only one example.

            I once knew many poems by heart, written by poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Poe, Keats, Coleridge, Whitman, Frost and Eliot. One special favorite was “To His Coy Mistress,” by the 17^th Century English poet and politician Andrew Marvell (1621-1678). Here are a few lines from various parts of the 46-line poem:

             Had we but world enough and time,

            Your coyness, lady, would be no crime.

            We would sit down, and think which way

            To walk, and pass our long love’s day…

            But at my back,  I always hear

            Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.

            And yonder all before us lie

            Deserts of vast eternity…

            The grave’s a fine and private place,

            But none, I think, do there embrace.

            Marvel managed to live to 57, which was about 20 years beyond the average life expectancy in England then. He wrote the poem when he was about 30 years old, when he would certainly have lost young friends and relatives to maladies that would now be easily cured. So, the urgency of seizing any chance for love was understandable.

            In the same vein is this short poem by the 12^th Century Persian poet Omar Khayyam (translated by Edward FitzGerald):

            Come fill the cup,

            For in the fires of Spring

            Your winter garment of repentance fling.

            The bird of time has but a little way to flutter,

            And the bird is on the wing.

            No matter what our age, it’s a good idea never to lose that urgency. I’ll be 87 soon, and I would hate to wake up in the morning with nothing to do. For example, the essay you’re now reading: it’s number 477 of a weekly series that started in the Fall of 2015,  and when Thursday rolls around, I’d better have one ready – and, so far, I have. Obviously, as Hemingway said about his short stories, “there are some good ones and some bum ones.” But I know every week has a Thursday. Sorry for the bum ones.

            Since 2004, I have always been working on a book. All of them were about Chicago architecture; and have been graced by the great photos of my partner and friend, Jim Caulfield. We are just now starting on number nine, which will explore in detail Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House in Chicago, one of the masterpieces of modern architecture. It should be out in the Spring of 2026, when I’ll be 88. Not to worry, though. The historian and social critic Jacques Barzin (1907-2012) published his magnificent work, From Dawn to Decadence, when he was 93 (and published his last work at 99!).

            Finally, and not strictly related, I was reading the obituary of the British novelist David Lodge, who died at 89 on New Year’s Day. I’ve never read any of his books, but something in the obit caught my eye. In one of his novels, the protagonist visits the local registry office to advise them that his father has died. He notices a list on the computer with the heading “Death Menu.” Later, he reflects: “I keep thinking of that header on the registry office computer screen, Death Menu, and wondered whimsically if such a thing were offered, like the a la carte in a restaurant, by the Angel of Death, what one would choose. Something painless, obviously, but not so sudden that you would not have time to take it in,  to say goodbye to life, to hold it in your hand, as it were, and let it go.”

Copyright 2025, Patrick F. Cannon