THE INTELLIGENT SENILE: a sonnet

THE INTELLIGENT SENILE: a sonnet


The young often say the old are senile.
But senility, does it come by age?
Russel’s mind was at ninety eight fertile
Whose bits of wisdom the wise now forage

It’s easy to give someone a bad name
And then hang him from the nearest lamp post.
Why should anyone stubbornly defame
In a manner that’s despicable most?

The old whom the young insult for their age,
In spite of having higher acumen,
Do not against such insult take umbrage.
They know better than spoil their tongue or pen.

Young men who don’t respect teachers, parents,
Are the ones whom society laments.


• Age is no bar for the mind to be agile. Russel is but one example. The young must respect the old, even the mentally crippled. Accusing or insulting a blind man for being blind or an old man for being old merely shows the mental depravity of the accuser. Youth is but ephemeral. It is closely trailed by old age.

• Bertrand Russel, 1872-1970, got the Nobel Prize at 78. According to Wikipedia,:

“On 31 January 1970, just a day prior to his death, Russell issued a statement which condemned Israeli aggression in the Middle East and called for Israeli withdrawal from territory occupied in 1967. The statement said that:
The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was "given" by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East. We are frequently told that we must sympathise with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. [...] What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.
—Bertrand Russell, 31 January 1970”


M C Gupta
13 April 2009