As the years pass, not done yet

At the top of Acadia Mountian, summer 2011

From Longfellow's long poem for the 50th anniversary of his college class:  This is on Ronnie Barrett's blog, As Time Goes By this morning. Since it's my birthday and I'm thinking a lot about all the things I want to write in the next few years, it seems very appropriate: 

...But why, you ask me, should this tale be told
To men grown old, or who are growing old?
It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than fourscore years,
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had but begun his "Characters of Men."
Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,
At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;
Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust when eighty years were past.
These are indeed exceptions; but they show
How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow
Into the arctic regions of our lives,
Where little else than life itself survives.

No, I'll write nothing to compare with Oedipus -- to me the most perfect drama every written -- or The Canterbury Tales, but the ideas come thick and fast and I have a big project only begun.  With this verse in mind, I'm thinking it's time to get cracking.