Yeats and His Ladder

I feel a little like W.B. Yeats who wrote after feeling that so much of his life had been a failure:

Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all my ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Many of the ladders of my life seemed to lie broken on the ground by the 1990s and, were in not for the 'fragrances which were wafted over all created things' all I would have had, too, would have been that rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
___________________

And so here is some of that ripening fruit.....One poem is about those earliest years of Baha'i experience and another is a more philosophico-historical piece. Often, as Hugh Davies suggests, the soil in which poetry grows is characterized by intellectual confusion. I like to think this is not true of my own poetry, embedded in this autobiography. I like to think that I express in poetry a body of beliefs that grows out of real intellectual work. This is not to say that my behaviour is always consistent with the ideals and ideas, the standards and models, set out in the writings of the Baha'i Faith. Sometimes the gap is a cause of anxiety, discouragement and disappointment. As readers assess the extent of my success as a writer, I assess the success of my 'living the life.'