That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
---Those dying generations---at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Sailing to Byzantium - WB Yeats

Open letter to Pedro Ros, chairman of Taylor Nelson Sofres

Possibly you don't have cancer. So, you are not to be found a day after your fourth chemotherapy treatment, resting, your face bloated, your hair gone, no visible eyebrows, just a few eyelashes remaining, struggling to contain the rising nausea, with an urgent and overwhelming desire to empty the inside of your wretched being of the poison and humiliation of your condition.

Possibly, as you are no doubt a man capable of compassion, and even once had a mother who showed you tenderness, you would leave such suffering alone, to rest, to take what comfort can be taken from the warm and tranquil weekend afternoon. You, yourself, would not take kindly, would you, to the insistent knock of a ragged beggar on your tinted windows?

Possibly, you are unaware, although I doubt it given the exalted heights to which you have risen, with much effort and drive but very little responsibility, that daily, hourly, minute by minute, the company for which you are responsible knocks on the windows and the doors of those who exist under the misapprehension that their lives, their property, their home, their bedrooms are their own, private, available at invitation but not invasion.

Possibly, when you reflect on the dying embers of your life, when that time comes, you will not see a life of great achievement, you will not indulge in the satisfaction of having left the world a better place than the one to which your mother introduced you. Rather, you will realise that the barbed and lacerating arrows that you caused to travel to places where they were not sought, or welcomed, or justified, places of privacy, sometimes of torment, that those arrows, that disturbance, that dissemination of misery is your true legacy.

Possibly...