No country for old men

I'm bound for Ireland, and I recently made a post about the poetry of crime. Imagine, then, my surprise when I opened a book of Yeats' poetry and found these lines from "John Kinsella's Lament for Mrs. Mary Moore":

A bloody and a sudden end,
From gunshot or a noose,
For death who takes what man could keep,
Or leaves what man would lose.
He might have had my sister
My cousins by the score,
But nothing satisfied the old fool
But my dear Mary Moore."

As it happens, the poem is not narrative, and there is no indication that bawdy Mary Moore met her death in anything but a natural fashion. But those eight opening lines evoke the atmosphere of comically grim or grimly comic crime fiction. Since Ireland produces so much crime fiction of that description, maybe the passage will turn up as an epigraph to a crime novel one day. Maybe it has already.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008