A Great Poem About the Sixties

My friend Bob once remarked that all poetry is about how things used to be better in the past than they are now. I read a wonderful poem by Robert Bly today on The Writer's Almanac which fits Bob's formulation: "Driving West in 1970" (it's really, I think, about the 1960s; perhaps, like the "long nineteenth century," that decade was the "long" 1960s).

*************************************

My dear children, do you remember the morning
When we climbed into the old Plymouth
And drove west straight toward the Pacific?

We were all the people there were.
We followed Dylan's songs all the way west.
It was Seventy; the war was over, almost;

And we were driving to the sea.
We had closed the farm, tucked in
The flap, and we were eating the honey

Of distance and the word "there."
Oh whee, we're gonna fly
Down into the easy chair. We sang that

Over and over. That's what the early
Seventies were like. We weren't afraid.
And a hole had opened in the world.

We laughed at Las Vegas.
There was enough gaiety
For all of us, and ahead of us was

The ocean. Tomorrow's
The day my bride's gonna come.
And the war was over, almost.

*************************************

I love the way that Bly begins the poem with innocence and hope, and ends it, masterfully, as a quasi-elegy with the repetition of the line "the war was over, almost." The crux of the poem is carried in that one line at the end, and it has, to me, almost the tragic weight of Homer in miniature.

Some of my commenters lived through the 1960s. If you are reading this, Maclin, I'd love to know if that sense of elegy was really in the air as the sixties turned to the seventies.