I stand poetically corrected

I believe it was just yesterday that I was talking to Sherman and I claimed that a man's knowledge of and/or ability to analyze poetry did little or nothing to woo me; it was a bonus, at best. And I stood by that claim from long ago, right up until today.

Today, in the middle of our regular, fun, and light lecture, my professor noted that Gertrude Stein's "Picasso" is "almost hypnotic when you read it out loud to yourself," at which point he lowered and softened his voice to read...

"This one was one who was working and certainly this one was needing to be working so as to be one being working. This one was one having something coming out of him. This one would be one all his living having something coming out of him. This one was working and then this one was working and this one was needing to be working, not to be one having something coming out of him something having meaning, but was needing to be working so as to be one working."

...and then I was a hypnotized puddle of goo in my chair. Had I not been goo, I might have run up and offered to have his babies for him just so that they could read to me like that when I got old. And it's not like it was a particularly entrancing poem either--it was prosimetric writing! Prose! As in everyday, regular writing! So, I've changed my mind. Not only is it hot for a man to read poetry (which has always been a good woo factor for me), but it is even HOTTER if he knows how to read it, and if he knows why he's reading it that way overall. *sigh*
...

"When You Are Old" - William Butler Yeats

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
    And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
    And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
    And loved your beauty with love false or true;
    But one man love the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars
    Murmur, a little sad, From us fled Love;
    He paced upon the mountains far above,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
...

One day a stranger--whose face will seem familiar but not quite recognizable--will approach me and recite this poem to me mournfully with tears in his eyes; and after having recited it to me, he will walk away and out of my life once more, leaving me to shed a tear for him in bewilderment.
...

p.s. Happy Birthday, Squiggly.