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  • Farewell, My Muse
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Farewell, My Muse

Maurice Lindsay

Inextricably twinned, we’ve come a long way,
you and I. And yet, just like the soul,
a muse, however much it has to say,
can’t be identified; part of the whole
man. Though now a tattered kind of thing,
battered by critics, baffled by neglect,
you pick me up my pen when on the wing
and force me shape new poems I don’t expect,
flapping the old excitement I once felt
when lifted off in flights of fresh creation,
before I learnt how reputation dealt
out fashions to deflate exhilaration.
Though for the moment we may seem to lose,
who knows what pleasures years ahead may choose?


Maurice Lindsay

from Worlds Apart  (diehard, 2000)

Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Maurice Lindsay.

Tags:

muses writing poetry
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Maurice Lindsay1918 - 2009

As poet, writer and broadcaster, Maurice Lindsay was the foremost champion of Scottish culture in the second half of the twentieth century.
More about Maurice Lindsay

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