THE time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
A. E. Houseman
Johnny Carson has died. Lots of other people in the blogosphere have commented see Wizbang and Dean’s World, for example.
I think there is something that people have missed. Carson did not die young. In a very real sense he outlived his fame. 25% of all Americans—everybody under about age 16—have never really seen him except in the occasional retrospective or re-run. They only know him as somebody the old people talk about. But like his idol, Jack Benny, or Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin, or Al Jolson, he was simply the best at what he did. And now he’s gone.
