W. B. Yeats

Selected Poems

Compiled by Emma Laybourn 2018

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Cover picture of Ben Bulben, County Sligo, Ireland, by Emma Laybourn.

Contents

To return to the Contents list at any time, click on the arrow  ↑  before each poem.

Introduction

From The Wanderings of Oisin and other poems  (1889)

The Song of the Happy Shepherd

The Indian upon God

The Indian to his Love

The Stolen Child

Down by the Salley Gardens

The Ballad of Moll Magee

The Wanderings of Oisin (extracts)

From The Rose  (1893)

To the Rose upon the Rood of Time

Fergus and the Druid

The Rose of the World

The Rose of Battle

A Faery Song

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

The Sorrow of Love

When You are Old

Who goes with Fergus?

The Man who dreamed of Faeryland

The Ballad of Father Gilligan

The Two Trees

From The Wind Among the Reeds  (1899)

The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart

The Host of the Air

The Unappeasable Host

The Song of Wandering Aengus

The Lover mourns for the Loss of Love

He mourns for the Change that has come upon Him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World

He remembers Forgotten Beauty

The Cap and Bells

The Valley of the Black Pig

The Secret Rose

The Travail of Passion

The Poet pleads with the Elemental Powers

He wishes his Beloved were Dead

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

From In the Seven Woods  (1904)

In the Seven Woods

The Folly of being Comforted

Never Give All the Heart

The Withering of the Boughs

Adam’s Curse

Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland

O do not Love Too Long

From The Green Helmet and Other Poems  (1910)

No Second Troy

Reconciliation

The Fascination of What’s Difficult

These are the Clouds

All Things can Tempt Me

Brown Penny

From Responsibilities  (1914)

September 1913

To a Shade

The Three Beggars

Running to Paradise

A Song from “The Player Queen”

The Mountain Tomb

The Cold Heaven

The Magi

The Dolls

A Coat

From The Wild Swans at Coole  (1919)

The Wild Swans at Coole

An Irish Airman Foresees his Death

The Collar-Bone of a Hare

Solomon to Sheba

A Song

The Scholars

Lines Written in Dejection

The Fisherman

Broken Dreams

Upon a Dying Lady (extract)

I: Her Courtesy

II: Certain Artists Bring her Dolls and Drawings

III She Turns the Dolls’ Faces to the Wall

The Phases of the Moon (extract)

The Cat and the Moon

Two Songs of a Fool

The Double Vision of Michael Robartes

From Michael Robartes and the Dancer  (1921)

Under Saturn

Easter 1916

The Rose Tree

On a Political Prisoner

The Leaders Of The Crowd

The Second Coming

A Prayer For My Daughter

From The Tower  (1928)

Sailing to Byzantium

The Tower (extracts)

Meditations in Time of Civil War

I: Ancestral Houses

II: My House

III: My Table

IV: My Descendants

V: The Road at My Door

VI: The Stare’s Nest by My Window

VII: I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness

Leda and the Swan

Among School Children

A Man Young and Old (extracts)

I: First Love

II: Human Dignity

III: The Mermaid

IV The Death of the Hare

All Souls’ Night (Epilogue to “A Vision”)

From The Winding Stair and Other Poems  (1933)

In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz

Death

A Dialogue of Self and Soul

The Crazed Moon

Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931

For Anne Gregory

The Choice

Byzantium

The Mother Of God

Vacillation

Words For Music Perhaps

Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman

Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

Lullaby

Those Dancing Days are Gone

A Woman Young and Old

Father And Child

Her Triumph

A Last Confession

From A Full Moon in March  (1935)

Parnell's Funeral

Three Songs to the Same Tune: part I

A Prayer for Old Age

Supernatural Songs IV: There

Supernatural Songs IX: The Four Ages of Man

Supernatural Songs XII: Meru

From Last Poems  (1936 – 1939)

The Gyres

Lapis Lazuli

An Acre of Grass

What Then?

The Ghost Of Roger Casement

Come Gather Round Me, Parnellites

Those Images

The Municipal Gallery Revisited

The Statues

Long-Legged Fly

A Bronze Head

Hound Voice

Why Should not Old Men be Mad?

The Circus Animals’ Desertion

Cuchulain Comforted

Under Ben Bulben

Other ebooks in this series

Introduction

William Butler Yeats was born in 1865 in London to an Anglo-Irish family. His father John Butler Yeats was a well-known painter, who had married Susan Pollexfen, from a wealthy family of County Sligo, in western Ireland. Educated in London and Dublin, Yeats spent childhood holidays in Co. Sligo. He studied for three years as an art student in Dublin, where he developed an interest in mysticism and the occult, and began a lifelong involvement with the Rosicrucian organisation, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Abandoning art for a literary career at the age of 21, Yeats edited William Blake’s poetry and began to write his own. His early work was influenced by Shelley and the Pre-Raphaelite poets, and drew on Irish mythology for subject matter.

In 1889 he met Maud Gonne, a beautiful Englishwoman and political revolutionary with whom he fell in love. He proposed marriage to her several times, but was turned down. She was to marry John McBride in 1903 and divorce him two years later.

In 1896 Yeats became friendly with Augusta, Lady Gregory, who had a strong interest in Gaelic culture and the theatre. Together they founded the Irish National Theatre company, later known as the Abbey Theatre, in Dublin. Yeats wrote plays in both prose and poetry while continuing to produce volumes of verse.

His later poetry developed a plainer style and often dealt with personal and political subjects; he was close to several republican figures and wrote about the struggle for Irish independence in poems such as Easter 1916. Maud Gonne’s ex-husband, John MacBride, was a leader in the Easter Uprising and was executed in 1916. After his death Yeats again proposed to Maud Gonne, and when rejected, proposed to her daughter Iseult, who also refused him.

That year he purchased Thoor Ballylee, a tower on Lady Gregory’s land at Coole Park in County Galway. Anxious to marry and have a family, in 1917 the 52 year old Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees, who was 27 years younger; they had two children during what seems to have been a successful marriage, and lived at the tower through the 1920’s. Georgie shared his interest in the supernatural, and her experiments with automatic writing influenced his work. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Yeats served as a senator of the new Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928. He  had romantic affairs with a number of younger women, and despite health problems, continued to write poetry, dramas and essays, as well as editing the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. He died in 1939 at the age of 73.

On this selection

Yeats revised much of his own work during his career; this selection is taken from various public domain sources including Project Gutenberg, but conforms to the poet’s later versions, as set out in the Collected Poems of 1933 (MacMillan, London). Other versions of some poems found online may differ if they are taken from earlier editions.

Any selection is bound to be idiosyncratic, but I have tried to include the most famous works of Yeats, and those that are generally regarded as the most important, as well as others that are less well-known. Poems are grouped by the volume in which they were first published, in chronological order.

Brief notes have been added after some poems, usually to clarify locations and mythological or political references. The notes are not intended to explain the poems themselves. In his Collected Poems, Yeats wrote his own notes to several works (sometimes at great length); these are also quoted on occasion.

For in-depth analyses of Yeats’s poetry, you may find the following books useful:

Nicholas Drake, Penguin Critical Studies: The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (London: Penguin Books, 1991)

A. Norman Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: MacMillan, 1968)

The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats, edited by Marjorie Howes and John Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Nicholas Grene, Yeats’s Poetic Codes (Oxford: OUP, 2008)

David A. Ross, A Critical Companion to William Butler Yeats: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (USA: Facts on File, 2009)

Emma Laybourn MA PGCE

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From The Wanderings of Oisin and other poems  (1889)

(This collection, minus the title poem, was also published as Crossways)

The Song of the Happy Shepherd

The woods of Arcady are dead,

And over is their antique joy;

Of old the world on dreaming fed;

Grey Truth is now her painted toy;

Yet still she turns her restless head:

But O, sick children of the world,

Of all the many changing things

In dreary dancing past us whirled,

To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,

Words alone are certain good.

Where are now the warring kings,

Word be-mockers? — By the Rood,

Where are now the warring kings?

An idle word is now their glory,

By the stammering schoolboy said,

Reading some entangled story:

The kings of the old time are dead;

The wandering earth herself may be

Only a sudden flaming word,

In clanging space a moment heard,

Troubling the endless reverie.

Then nowise worship dusty deeds,

Nor seek, for this is also sooth,

To hunger fiercely after truth,

Lest all thy toiling only breeds

New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth

Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then,

No learning from the starry men,

Who follow with the optic glass

The whirling ways of stars that pass—

Seek, then, for this is also sooth,

No word of theirs — the cold star-bane

Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,

And dead is all their human truth.

Go gather by the humming sea

Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,

And to its lips thy story tell,

And they thy comforters will be,

Rewarding in melodious guile

Thy fretful words a little while,

Till they shall singing fade in ruth

And die a pearly brotherhood;

For words alone are certain good:

Sing, then, for this is also sooth.

I must be gone: there is a grave

Where daffodil and lily wave,

And I would please the hapless faun,

Buried under the sleepy ground,

With mirthful songs before the dawn.

His shouting days with mirth were crowned;

And still I dream he treads the lawn,

Walking ghostly in the dew,

Pierced by my glad singing through,

My songs of old earth's dreamy youth:

But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou!

For fair are poppies on the brow:

Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

Notes

Arcady: in ancient Greek mythology, an idyllic wilderness, the home of the god Pan.

Chronos: the personification of Time in ancient Greece.

Rood: an old English word for the cross.

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The Indian upon God

I passed along the water’s edge below the humid trees,

My spirit rocked in evening light, the rushes round my knees,

My spirit rocked in sleep and sighs; and saw the moorfowl pace

All dripping on a grassy slope, and saw them cease to chase

Each other round in circles, and heard the eldest speak:

Who holds the world between His bill and made us strong or weak

Is an undying moorfowl, and He lives beyond the sky.

The rains are from His dripping wing, the moonbeams from His eye.

I passed a little further on and heard a lotus talk:

Who made the world and ruleth it, He hangeth on a stalk,

For I am in His image made, and all this tinkling tide

Is but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide.

A little way within the gloom a roebuck raised his eyes

Brimful of starlight, and he said: The Stamper of the Skies,

He is a gentle roebuck; for how else, I pray, could He

Conceive a thing so sad and soft, a gentle thing like me?

I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say:

Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay,

He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night

His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.

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The Indian to his Love

The island dreams under the dawn

And great boughs drop tranquillity;

The peahens dance on a smooth lawn,

A parrot sways upon a tree,

Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea.

Here we will moor our lonely ship

And wander ever with woven hands,

Murmuring softly lip to lip,

Along the grass, along the sands,

Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands:

How we alone of mortals are

Hid under quiet boughs apart,

While our love grows an Indian star,

A meteor of the burning heart,

One with the tide that gleams, the wings that gleam and dart,

The heavy boughs, the burnished dove

That moans and sighs a hundred days:

How when we die our shades will rove,

When eve has hushed the feathered ways,

With vapoury footsole by the water’s drowsy blaze.

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The Stolen Child

Where dips the rocky highland

Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,

There lies a leafy island

Where flapping herons wake

The drowsy water-rats;

There we’ve hid our faery vats,

Full of berries

And of reddest stolen cherries.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses

The dim grey sands with light,

Far off by furthest Rosses

We foot it all the night,

Weaving olden dances,

Mingling hands and mingling glances

Till the moon has taken flight;

To and fro we leap

And chase the frothy bubbles,

While the world is full of troubles

And is anxious in its sleep.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes

From the hills above Glen-Car,

In pools among the rushes

That scarce could bathe a star,

We seek for slumbering trout

And whispering in their ears

Give them unquiet dreams;

Leaning softly out

From ferns that drop their tears

Over the young streams.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he’s going,

The solemn-eyed:

He’ll hear no more the lowing

Of the calves on the warm hillside

Or the kettle on the hob

Sing peace into his breast,

Or see the brown mice bob

Round and round the oatmeal-chest.

For he comes, the human child,

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

Notes

Sleuth Wood and Rosses: places in County Sligo, in western Ireland.

Glen-car: a waterfall in County Leitrim, just north of Co. Sligo.

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Down by the Salley Gardens

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;

She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;

But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,

And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;

But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Note

The poem may refer to gardens of willow or sallow (Irish: saileach) which were located near the town of Sligo in north-west Ireland.

It has become well-known as a song, usually sung to a traditional Irish tune called The Maids of Mourne Shore.

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The Ballad of Moll Magee

Come round me, little childer;

There, don’t fling stones at me

Because I mutter as I go;

But pity Moll Magee.

My man was a poor fisher

With shore lines in the say;

My work was saltin’ herrings

The whole of the long day.

And sometimes from the saltin’ shed

I scarce could drag my feet,

Under the blessed moonlight,

Along the pebbly street.

I’d always been but weakly,

And my baby was just born;

A neighbour minded her by day,

I minded her till morn.

I lay upon my baby;

Ye little childer dear,

I looked on my cold baby

When the morn grew frosty and clear.

A weary woman sleeps so hard!

My man grew red and pale,

And gave me money, and bade me go

To my own place, Kinsale.

He drove me out and shut the door,

And gave his curse to me;

I went away in silence,

No neighbour could I see.

The windows and the doors were shut,

One star shone faint and green,

The little straws were turnin’ round

Across the bare boreen.

I went away in silence:

Beyond old Martin’s byre

I saw a kindly neighbour

Blowin’ her mornin’ fire.

She drew from me my story —

My money’s all used up,

And still, with pityin’, scornin’ eye,

She gives me bite and sup.

She says my man will surely come,

And fetch me home agin;

But always, as I’m movin’ round,

Without doors or within,

Pilin’ the wood or pilin’ the turf,

Or goin’ to the well,

I’m thinkin’ of my baby

And keenin’ to mysel’.

And sometimes I am sure she knows

When, openin’ wide His door,

God lights the stars, His candles,

And looks upon the poor.

So now, ye little childer,

Ye won’t fling stones at me;

But gather with your shinin’ looks

And pity Moll Magee.

Notes

Kinsale: a small town in County Cork, on the southern coast of Ireland.

boreen: Irish word for a narrow country lane.

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The Wanderings of Oisin (extracts)

This long narrative poem concerns Oisin, a great warrior and poet in Irish mythology, and his faery lover Niamh, who took him to the Immortal Islands.

…‘O Oisin, mount by me and ride

To shores by the wash of the tremulous tide,

Where men have heaped no burial-mounds,

And the days pass by like a wayward tune,

Where broken faith has never been known,

And the blushes of first love never have flown.

And there I will give you a hundred hounds;

No mightier creatures bay at the moon;

And a hundred robes of murmuring silk,

And a hundred calves and a hundred sheep

Whose long wool whiter than sea-froth flows,

And a hundred spears and a hundred bows,

And oil and wine and honey and milk,

And always never-anxious sleep;

While a hundred youths, mighty of limb,

But knowing nor tumult nor hate nor strife,

And a hundred ladies, merry as birds,

Who when they dance to a fitful measure

Have a speed like the speed of the salmon herds,

Shall follow your horn and obey your whim,

And you shall know the Danaan leisure:

And Niamh be with you for a wife.’

Then she sighed gently, ‘It grows late.

Music and love and sleep await,

Where I would be when the white moon climbs,

The red sun falls and the world grows dim…’

II

…I do not know if days

Or hours passed by, yet hold the morning rays

Shone many times among the glimmering flowers

Woven into her hair, before dark towers

Rose in the darkness, and the white surf gleamed

About them; and the horse of Faery screamed

And shivered, knowing the Isle of Many Fears,

Nor ceased until white Niamh stroked his ears

And named him by sweet names.

A foaming tide

Whitened afar with surge, fan-formed and wide,

Burst from a great door marred by many a blow

From mace and sword and pole-axe, long ago

When gods and giants warred. We rode between

The seaweed-covered pillars; and the green

And surging phosphorus alone gave light

On our dark pathway, till a countless flight

Of moonlit steps glimmered; and left and right

Dark statues glimmered over the pale tide

Upon dark thrones….

III

… And we rode on the plains of the sea’s edge; the sea’s edge barren and grey,

Grey sand on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,

Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away,

Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.

But the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark;

Dropping; a murmurous dropping; old silence and that one sound;

For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark:

Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground.

And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night,

For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and the sun,

Ceased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,

And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was one.

Till the horse gave a whinny; for, cumbrous with stems of the hazel and oak,

A valley flowed down from his hoofs, and there in the long grass lay,

Under the starlight and shadow, a monstrous slumbering folk,

Their naked and gleaming bodies poured out and heaped in the way.

And by them were arrow and war-axe, arrow and shield and blade;

And dew-blanched horns, in whose hollow a child of three years old

Could sleep on a couch of rushes, and all inwrought and inlaid,

And more comely than man can make them with bronze and silver and gold.

And each of the huge white creatures was huger than fourscore men;

The tops of their ears were feathered, their hands were the claws of birds,

And, shaking the plumes of the grasses and the leaves of the mural glen,

The breathing came from those bodies, long warless, grown whiter than curds.

Note

Yeats wrote: “The poem is founded upon the Middle Irish dialogues of S. Patrick and Oisin and a certain Gaelic poem of the last century… (it) mixes much that is medieval with much that is ancient.”

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From The Rose  (1893)

To the Rose upon the Rood of Time

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!

Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:

Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide;

The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,

Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;

And thine own sadness, whereof stars, grown old

In dancing silver-sandalled on the sea,

Sing in their high and lonely melody.

Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate,

I find under the boughs of love and hate,

In all poor foolish things that live a day,

Eternal beauty wandering on her way.

Come near, come near, come near — Ah, leave me still

A little space for the rose-breath to fill!

Lest I no more hear common things that crave;

The weak worm hiding down in its small cave,

The field-mouse running by me in the grass,

And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass;

But seek alone to hear the strange things said

By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,

And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.

Come near; I would, before my time to go,

Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.

Notes

Cuchulain: a warrior hero in Irish mythology, who fought from a chariot and defended Ulster against invaders including Queen Maebh.

Fergus: a mythological Irish king, and lover of Queen Maebh. He and Cuchulain yielded to each other on the battlefield.

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Fergus and the Druid

Fergus.

This whole day have I followed in the rocks,

And you have changed and flowed from shape to shape,

First as a raven on whose ancient wings

Scarcely a feather lingered, then you seemed

A weasel moving on from stone to stone,

And now at last you wear a human shape,

A thin grey man half lost in gathering night.

Druid.

What would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?

Fergus.

This would I say, most wise of living souls:

Young subtle Conchubar sat close by me

When I gave judgment, and his words were wise,

And what to me was burden without end,

To him seemed easy, so I laid the crown

Upon his head to cast away my sorrow.

Druid.

What would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?

Fergus.

A king and proud! and that is my despair.

I feast amid my people on the hill,

And pace the woods, and drive my chariot-wheels

In the white border of the murmuring sea;

And still I feel the crown upon my head.

Druid.

What would you, Fergus?

Fergus.

Be no more a king

But learn the dreaming wisdom that is yours.

Druid.

Look on my thin grey hair and hollow cheeks

And on these hands that may not lift the sword,

This body trembling like a wind-blown reed.

No woman’s loved me, no man sought my help.

Fergus.

A king is but a foolish labourer

Who wastes his blood to be another’s dream.

Druid.

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams;

Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

Fergus.

I see my life go drifting like a river

From change to change; I have been many things —

A green drop in the surge, a gleam of light

Upon a sword, a fir-tree on a hill,

An old slave grinding at a heavy quern,

A king sitting upon a chair of gold —

And all these things were wonderful and great;

But now I have grown nothing, knowing all.

Ah! Druid, Druid, how great webs of sorrow

Lay hidden in the small slate-coloured thing!

Notes

Red Branch: two houses of the kings of Ulster (Northern Ireland)

Conchubar: a king of Ulster

quern: grinding-stone for wheat

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The Rose of the World

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,

Mournful that no new wonder may betide,

Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,

And Usna’s children died.

We and the labouring world are passing by:

Amid men’s souls, that waver and give place

Like the pale waters in their wintry race,

Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,

Lives on this lonely face.

Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:

Before you were, or any hearts to beat,

Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;

He made the world to be a grassy road

Before her wandering feet.

Note

Usna: In Irish mythology, the three sons of Usna, or Usnach, were killed by Conchubar.

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The Rose of Battle

Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!

The tall thought-woven sails, that flap unfurled

Above the tide of hours, trouble the air,

And God’s bell buoyed to be the water’s care;

While hushed from fear, or loud with hope, a band

With blown, spray-dabbled hair gather at hand.

Turn if you may from battles never done,

I call, as they go by me one by one,

Danger no refuge holds, and war no peace,

For him who hears love sing and never cease,

Beside her clean-swept hearth, her quiet shade:

But gather all for whom no love hath made

A woven silence, or but came to cast

A song into the air, and singing passed

To smile on the pale dawn; and gather you

Who have sought more than is in rain or dew,

Or in the sun and moon, or on the earth,

Or sighs amid the wandering, starry mirth,

Or comes in laughter from the sea’s sad lips,

And wage God’s battles in the long grey ships.

The sad, the lonely, the insatiable,

To these Old Night shall all her mystery tell;

God’s bell has claimed them by the little cry

Of their sad hearts, that may not live nor die.

Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!

You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled

Upon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring

The bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing.

Beauty grown sad with its eternity

Made you of us, and of the dim grey sea.

Our long ships loose thought-woven sails and wait,

For God has bid them share an equal fate;

And when at last, defeated in His wars,

They have gone down under the same white stars,

We shall no longer hear the little cry

Of our sad hearts, that may not live nor die.

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A Faery Song

Sung by the people of Faery over Diarmuid and Grania, in their bridal sleep under a cromlech.

We who are old, old and gay,

O so old!

Thousands of years, thousands of years,

If all were told:

Give to these children, new from the world,

Silence and love;

And the long dew-dropping hours of the night,

And the stars above:

Give to these children, new from the world,

Rest far from men.

Is anything better, anything better?

Tell us it then:

Us who are old, old and gay,

O so old!

Thousands of years, thousands of years,

If all were told.

Notes

Diarmuid and Grania: In Irish mythology, Grania (or Gráinne), who was betrothed to the elderly Finn McCool (Fionn mac Cumhaill), ran away with his warrior Diarmuid.

cromlech: an ancient stone tomb, or dolmen.

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The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Note

Innisfree: a small island in Lough Gill, a lake in County Sligo.

↑

The Sorrow of Love

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,

The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,

And all that famous harmony of leaves,

Had blotted out man’s image and his cry.

A girl arose that had red mournful lips

And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,

Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships

And proud as Priam murdered with his peers;

Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,

A climbing moon upon an empty sky,

And all that lamentation of the leaves,

Could but compose man’s image and his cry.

Note

Priam: in Greek legend, King of Troy and father of Hector and Paris.

↑

When You are Old

When you are old and grey 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 loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

↑

Who goes with Fergus?

Who will go drive with Fergus now,

And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade,

And dance upon the level shore?

Young man, lift up your russet brow,

And lift your tender eyelids, maid,

And brood on hopes and fear no more.

And no more turn aside and brood

Upon love’s bitter mystery;

For Fergus rules the brazen cars,

And rules the shadows of the wood,

And the white breast of the dim sea

And all dishevelled wandering stars.

Notes

Fergus: in Irish mythology, a King of Ulster who was driven out by Conchobar, and allied with Queen Mebh (Maeve) in attempting to win back Ulster.

cars : chariots

↑

The Man who dreamed of Faeryland

He stood among a crowd at Dromahair;

His heart hung all upon a silken dress,

And he had known at last some tenderness,

Before earth took him to her stony care;

But when a man poured fish into a pile,

It seemed they raised their little silver heads,

And sang what gold morning or evening sheds

Upon a woven world-forgotten isle

Where people love beside the ravelled seas;

That Time can never mar a lover’s vows

Under that woven changeless roof of boughs:

The singing shook him out of his new ease.

He wandered by the sands of Lissadell;

His mind ran all on money cares and fears,

And he had known at last some prudent years

Before they heaped his grave under the hill;

But while he passed before a plashy place,

A lug-worm with its grey and muddy mouth

Sang that somewhere to north or west or south

There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race

Under the golden or the silver skies;

That if a dancer stayed his hungry foot

It seemed the sun and moon were in the fruit:

And at that singing he was no more wise.

He mused beside the well of Scanavin,

He mused upon his mockers: without fail

His sudden vengeance were a country tale,

When earthy night had drunk his body in;

But one small knot-grass growing by the pool

Sang where — unnecessary cruel voice —

Old silence bids its chosen race rejoice,

Whatever ravelled waters rise and fall

Or stormy silver fret the gold of day,

And midnight there enfold them like a fleece

And lover there by lover be at peace.

The tale drove his fine angry mood away.

He slept under the hill of Lugnagall;

And might have known at last unhaunted sleep

Under that cold and vapour-turbaned steep,

Now that the earth had taken man and all:

Did not the worms that spired about his bones

Proclaim with that unwearied, reedy cry

That God has laid His fingers on the sky,

That from those fingers glittering summer runs

Upon the dancer by the dreamless wave.

Why should those lovers that no lovers miss

Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss?

The man has found no comfort in the grave.

Notes

Dromahair: a small town in County Leitrim, Ireland.

Lissadell: an area on the shore of Sligo Bay; Lissadell House was the home of the Gore Booth family and Countess Constance Markievicz, who were known to Yeats.

Scanavin is apparently also known as Hawk’s Well or Tullaghan Hill Holy Well, in County Sligo. Yeats later wrote a drama titled At the Hawk’s Well (1916).

Lugnagall: a small rural area in Co. Sligo.

↑

The Ballad of Father Gilligan

The old priest Peter Gilligan

Was weary night and day;

For half his flock were in their beds,

Or under green sods lay.

Once, while he nodded on a chair,

At the moth-hour of eve,

Another poor man sent for him,

And he began to grieve.

‘I have no rest, nor joy, nor peace,

For people die and die’;

And after cried he, ‘God forgive!

My body spake, not I!’

He knelt, and leaning on the chair

He prayed and fell asleep;

And the moth-hour went from the fields,

And stars began to peep.

They slowly into millions grew,

And leaves shook in the wind;

And God covered the world with shade,

And whispered to mankind.

Upon the time of sparrow-chirp

When the moths came once more,

The old priest Peter Gilligan

Stood upright on the floor.

‘Mavrone, mavrone! the man has died

While I slept on the chair’;

He roused his horse out of its sleep,

And rode with little care.

He rode now as he never rode,

By rocky lane and fen;

The sick man’s wife opened the door:

‘Father! you come again!’

‘And is the poor man dead?’ he cried.

‘He died an hour ago.’

The old priest Peter Gilligan

In grief swayed to and fro.

‘When you were gone, he turned and died

As merry as a bird.’

The old priest Peter Gilligan

He knelt him at that word.

‘He Who hath made the night of stars

For souls who tire and bleed,

Sent one of His great angels down

To help me in my need.

‘He Who is wrapped in purple robes,

With planets in His care,

Had pity on the least of things

Asleep upon a chair.’

Note

In an early edition of his poems, Yeats wrote that this was “founded on the Kerry version of an old folk tale.”

mavrone : alas

↑

The Two Trees

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,

The holy tree is growing there;

From joy the holy branches start,

And all the trembling flowers they bear.

The changing colours of its fruit

Have dowered the stars with merry light;

The surety of its hidden root

Has planted quiet in the night;

The shaking of its leafy head

Has given the waves their melody,

And made my lips and music wed,

Murmuring a wizard song for thee.

There the Loves a circle go,

The flaming circle of our days,

Gyring, spiring to and fro

In those great ignorant leafy ways;

Remembering all that shaken hair

And how the wingèd sandals dart,

Thine eyes grow full of tender care:

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glass

The demons, with their subtle guile,

Lift up before us when they pass,

Or only gaze a little while;

For there a fatal image grows

That the stormy night receives,

Roots half hidden under snows,

Broken boughs and blackened leaves.

For all things turn to barrenness

In the dim glass the demons hold,

The glass of outer weariness,

Made when God slept in times of old.

There, through the broken branches, go

The ravens of unresting thought;

Flying, crying, to and fro,

Cruel claw and hungry throat,

Or else they stand and sniff the wind,

And shake their ragged wings; alas!

Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:

Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

↑

From The Wind Among the Reeds  (1899)

The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,

The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,

The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,

Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;

I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,

With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold

For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

↑

The Host of the Air

O’Driscoll drove with a song

The wild duck and the drake

From the tall and the tufted reeds

Of the drear Hart Lake.

And he saw how the reeds grew dark

At the coming of night-tide,

And dreamed of the long dim hair

Of Bridget his bride.

He heard while he sang and dreamed

A piper piping away,

And never was piping so sad,

And never was piping so gay.

And he saw young men and young girls

Who danced on a level place,

And Bridget his bride among them,

With a sad and a gay face.

The dancers crowded about him

And many a sweet thing said,

And a young man brought him red wine

And a young girl white bread.

But Bridget drew him by the sleeve

Away from the merry bands,

To old men playing at cards

With a twinkling of ancient hands.

The bread and the wine had a doom,

For these were the host of the air;

He sat and played in a dream

Of her long dim hair.

He played with the merry old men

And thought not of evil chance,

Until one bore Bridget his bride

Away from the merry dance.

He bore her away in his arms,

The handsomest young man there,

And his neck and his breast and his arms

Were drowned in her long dim hair.

O’Driscoll scattered the cards

And out of his dream awoke:

Old men and young men and young girls

Were gone like a drifting smoke;

But he heard high up in the air

A piper piping away,

And never was piping so sad,

And never was piping so gay.

Note

Hart Lake – apparently Lough Achree, a lake in Co. Sligo, said by some to be a faery portal.

Yeats wrote in his notes to the Collected Poems: “This poem is founded on an old Gaelic ballad that was sung and translated for me by a woman at Ballisodare in County Sligo.”

↑

The Unappeasable Host

The Danaan children laugh, in cradles of wrought gold,

And clap their hands together, and half close their eyes,

For they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies,

With heavy whitening wings, and a heart fallen cold:

I kiss my wailing child and press it to my breast,

And hear the narrow graves calling my child and me.

Desolate winds that cry over the wandering sea;

Desolate winds that hover in the flaming West;

Desolate winds that beat the doors of Heaven, and beat

The doors of Hell and blow there many a whimpering ghost;

O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host

Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary’s feet.

Notes

Danaan – a supernatural people in Irish mythology, the Tuatha Dé Danaan, also known as the Sidhe.

Ger-eagle – in one early version of the poem this was gier-eagle: possibly referring to a passage in the Bible, (King James version): Leviticus ch. 11 v. 18, which lists the gier eagle amongst birds that should not be eaten.

↑

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lads and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Note

Aengus: in Irish mythology, a god of youth, beauty and poetry, one of the supernatural people, the Tuatha Dé Danaan.

↑

The Lover mourns for the Loss of Love

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,

I had a beautiful friend

And dreamed that the old despair

Would end in love in the end:

She looked in my heart one day

And saw your image was there;

She has gone weeping away.

↑

He mourns for the Change that has come upon Him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World

Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns?

I have been changed to a hound with one red ear;

I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns,

For somebody hid hatred and hope and desire and fear

Under my feet that they follow you night and day.

A man with a hazel wand came without sound;

He changed me suddenly; I was looking another way;

And now my calling is but the calling of a hound;

And Time and Birth and Change are hurrying by.

I would that the Boar without bristles had come from the West

And had rooted the sun and moon and stars out of the sky

And lay in the darkness, grunting, and turning to his rest.

Note

Yeats wrote in his notes to the Collected Poems: “The man in my poem who has a hazel wand may have been Aengus, Master of Love; and I have made the boar without bristles come out of the West… (as a) place of symbolic darkness and death.”

↑

He remembers forgotten Beauty

When my arms wrap you round I press

My heart upon the loveliness

That has long faded from the world;

The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled

In shadowy pools, when armies fled;

The love-tales wrought with silken thread

By dreaming ladies upon cloth

That has made fat the murderous moth;

The roses that of old time were

Woven by ladies in their hair,

The dew-cold lilies ladies bore

Through many a sacred corridor

Where such grey clouds of incense rose

That only God’s eyes did not close:

For that pale breast and lingering hand

Come from a more dream-heavy land,

A more dream-heavy hour than this;

And when you sigh from kiss to kiss

I hear white Beauty sighing, too,

For hours when all must fade like dew,

But flame on flame, and deep on deep,

Throne over throne where in half sleep,

Their swords upon their iron knees,

Brood her high lonely mysteries.

↑

The Cap and Bells

The jester walked in the garden:

The garden had fallen still;

He bade his soul rise upward

And stand on her window-sill.

It rose in a straight blue garment,

When owls began to call:

It had grown wise-tongued by thinking

Of a quiet and light footfall;

But the young queen would not listen;

She rose in her pale night-gown;

She drew in the heavy casement

And pushed the latches down.

He bade his heart go to her,

When the owls called out no more;

In a red and quivering garment

It sang to her through the door.

It had grown sweet-tongued by dreaming

Of a flutter of flower-like hair;

But she took up her fan from the table

And waved it off on the air.

‘I have cap and bells,’ he pondered,

‘I will send them to her and die’;

And when the morning whitened

He left them where she went by.

She laid them upon her bosom,

Under a cloud of her hair,

And her red lips sang them a love-song

Till stars grew out of the air.

She opened her door and her window,

And the heart and the soul came through,

To her right hand came the red one,

To her left hand came the blue.

They set up a noise like crickets,

A chattering wise and sweet,

And her hair was a folded flower

And the quiet of love in her feet.

Note

Yeats wrote in his notes to the Collected Poems: “I dreamed this story exactly as I have written it, and dreamed another long dream after it, trying to make out its meaning… The first dream was more a vision than a dream, for it was beautiful and coherent… The poem has always meant a great deal to me.”

↑

The Valley of the Black Pig

The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears

Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes,

And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries

Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.

We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore,

The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew,

Being weary of the world’s empires, bow down to you,

Master of the still stars and of the flaming door.

Notes

Yeats wrote: “All over Ireland there are prophecies of the coming rout of the enemies of Ireland, in a certain Valley of the Black Pig.”

There is a Black Pigs Dyke (Claí na Muice Duibhe), a series of earthen ramparts leading from Sligo to Down, dated at about 300 – 400 BCE.

↑

The Secret Rose

Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose,

Enfold me in my hour of hours; where those

Who sought thee in the Holy Sepulchre,

Or in the wine-vat, dwell beyond the stir

And tumult of defeated dreams; and deep

Among pale eyelids, heavy with the sleep

Men have named beauty. Thy great leaves enfold

The ancient beards, the helms of ruby and gold

Of the crowned Magi; and the king whose eyes

Saw the Pierced Hands and Rood of elder rise

In Druid vapour and make the torches dim;

Till vain frenzy awoke and he died; and him

Who met Fand walking among flaming dew

By a grey shore where the wind never blew,

And lost the world and Emer for a kiss;

And him who drove the gods out of their liss,

And till a hundred morns had flowered red

Feasted, and wept the barrows of his dead;

And the proud dreaming king who flung the crown

And sorrow away, and calling bard and clown

Dwelt among wine-stained wanderers in deep woods;

And him who sold tillage, and house, and goods,

And sought through lands and islands numberless years,

Until he found, with laughter and with tears,

A woman of so shining loveliness

That men threshed corn at midnight by a tress,

A little stolen tress. I, too, await

The hour of thy great wind of love and hate.

When shall the stars be blown about the sky,

Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?

Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,

Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?

Notes

Fand: in Irish mythology, a sea goddess who at one time was lover of the hero Cuchulain.

Emer: wife of Cuchulain.

liss: grace, favour, rest.

men threshed corn at midnight by a tress: this story seems to have been Yeats’s own invention.

↑

The Travail of Passion

When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;

When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;

Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way

Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,

The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream;

We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,

That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,

Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.

Note

Kedron (or Kidron): river east of Jerusalem.

↑

The Poet pleads with the Elemental Powers

The Powers whose name and shape no living creature knows

Have pulled the Immortal Rose;

And though the Seven Lights bowed in their dance and wept,

The Polar Dragon slept,

His heavy rings uncoiled from glimmering deep to deep:

When will he wake from sleep?

Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire,

With your harmonious choir

Encircle her I love and sing her into peace,

That my old care may cease;

Unfold your flaming wings and cover out of sight

The nets of day and night.

Dim Powers of drowsy thought, let her no longer be

Like the pale cup of the sea,

When winds have gathered and sun and moon burned dim

Above its cloudy rim;

But let a gentle silence wrought with music flow

Whither her footsteps go.

↑

He wishes his Beloved were Dead

Were you but lying cold and dead,

And lights were paling out of the West,

You would come hither, and bend your head,

And I would lay my head on your breast;

And you would murmur tender words,

Forgiving me, because you were dead:

Nor would you rise and hasten away,

Though you have the will of the wild birds,

But know your hair was bound and wound

About the stars and moon and sun:

O would, beloved, that you lay

Under the dock-leaves in the ground,

While lights were paling one by one.

↑

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

↑

From In the Seven Woods  (1904)

In the Seven Woods

I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods

Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees

Hum in the lime-tree flowers; and put away

The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness

That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile

Tara uprooted, and new commonness

Upon the throne and crying about the streets

And hanging its paper flowers from post to post,

Because it is alone of all things happy.

I am contented, for I know that Quiet

Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart

Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer,

Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs

A cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-lee.

Notes

The seven woods are at Coole Park, County Galway, western Ireland, which was the home of Yeats’s friend Lady Gregory.

Tara – seat of the mythical Danaan people, and then of the High Kings of Ireland.

Pairc-na-lee: one of the seven woods at Coole Park.

↑

The Folly of being Comforted

One that is ever kind said yesterday:

‘Your well-belovèd’s hair has threads of grey,

And little shadows come about her eyes;

Time can but make it easier to be wise

Though now it seems impossible, and so

All that you need is patience.’

Heart cries, ‘No,

I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.

Time can but make her beauty over again:

Because of that great nobleness of hers

The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,

Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways

When all the wild summer was in her gaze.’

O heart! O heart! if she’d but turn her head,

You’d know the folly of being comforted.

↑

Never give all the Heart

Never give all the heart, for love

Will hardly seem worth thinking of

To passionate women if it seem

Certain, and they never dream

That it fades out from kiss to kiss;

For everything that’s lovely is

But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

O never give the heart outright,

For they, for all smooth lips can say,

Have given their hearts up to the play.

And who could play it well enough

If deaf and dumb and blind with love?

He that made this knows all the cost,

For he gave all his heart and lost.

↑

The Withering of the Boughs

I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds:

‘Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will,

I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words,

For the roads are unending, and there is no place to my mind.’

The honey-pale moon lay low on the sleepy hill,

And I fell asleep upon lonely Echtge of streams.

No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;

The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.

I know of the leafy paths that the witches take

Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool,

And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake;

I know where a dim moon drifts, where the Danaan kind

Wind and unwind their dances when the light grows cool

On the island lawns, their feet where the pale foam gleams.

No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;

The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.

I know of the sleepy country, where swans fly round

Coupled with golden chains, and sing as they fly.

A king and a queen are wandering there, and the sound

Has made them so happy and hopeless, so deaf and so blind

With wisdom, they wander till all the years have gone by;

I know, and the curlew and peewit on Echtge of streams.

No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;

The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.

Note

Echtge: the range of mountains between Counties Clare and Galway, known in English as Slieve Aughty (or Baughty). Legend links the mountains with Echthge, a lady of the supernatural people, the Tuatha Dé Danaan.

↑

Adam’s Curse

We sat together at one summer’s end,

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,

And you and I, and talked of poetry.

I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.’

And thereupon

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake

There’s many a one shall find out all heartache

On finding that her voice is sweet and low

Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know—

Although they do not talk of it at school—

That we must labour to be beautiful.’

I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing

Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.

There have been lovers who thought love should be

So much compounded of high courtesy

That they would sigh and quote with learned looks

Precedents out of beautiful old books;

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;

We saw the last embers of daylight die,

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell

Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:

That you were beautiful, and that I strove

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

↑

Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland

The old brown thorn-trees break in two high over Cummen Strand,

Under a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand;

Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies,

But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes

Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

The wind has bundled up the clouds high over Knocknarea,

And thrown the thunder on the stones for all that Maeve can say.

Angers that are like noisy clouds have set our hearts abeat;

But we have all bent low and low and kissed the quiet feet

Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

The yellow pool has overflowed high up on Clooth-na-Bare,

For the wet winds are blowing out of the clinging air;

Like heavy flooded waters our bodies and our blood;

But purer than a tall candle before the Holy Rood

Is Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

Notes

Red Hanrahan: a bardic character invented by Yeats as the supposed author of several poems.

Cummen Strand: a beach in County Sligo.

Cathleen the daughter of Houlihan (or Kathleen Ni Houlihan) is a symbol of Ireland, often portrayed as a homeless old woman.

Knocknarea: a hill in Co. Sligo. On its top is a megalithic tomb known as Queen Maeve’s grave.

Maeve (or Medb): warrior queen of Connacht in Irish mythology.

Clooth-na-Bare: it is uncertain where this is meant to be; it may be a fictitious place-name, based on the old woman of Beare, a figure in Irish myth.

↑

O do not Love Too Long

Sweetheart, do not love too long:

I loved long and long,

And grew to be out of fashion

Like an old song.

All through the years of our youth

Neither could have known

Their own thought from the other’s,

We were so much at one.

But O, in a minute she changed—

O do not love too long,

Or you will grow out of fashion

Like an old song.

↑

From The Green Helmet and Other Poems  (1910)

No Second Troy

Why should I blame her that she filled my days

With misery, or that she would of late

Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,

Or hurled the little streets upon the great,

Had they but courage equal to desire?

What could have made her peaceful with a mind

That nobleness made simple as a fire,

With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind

That is not natural in an age like this,

Being high and solitary and most stern?

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?

Was there another Troy for her to burn?

↑

Reconciliation

Some may have blamed you that you took away

The verses that could move them on the day

When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind

With lightning, you went from me, and I could find

Nothing to make a song about but kings,

Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things

That were like memories of you – but now

We’ll out, for the world lives as long ago;

And while we’re in our laughing, weeping fit,

Hurl helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit.

But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone,

My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.

↑

The Fascination of What’s Difficult

The fascination of what’s difficult

Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent

Spontaneous joy and natural content

Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt

That must, as if it had not holy blood

Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,

Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt

As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays

That have to be set up in fifty ways,

On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,

Theatre business, management of men.

I swear before the dawn comes round again

I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

↑

These are the Clouds

These are the clouds about the fallen sun,

The majesty that shuts his burning eye:

The weak lay hand on what the strong has done,

Till that be tumbled that was lifted high

And discord follow upon unison,

And all things at one common level lie.

And therefore, friend, if your great race were run

And these things came, so much the more thereby

Have you made greatness your companion,

Although it be for children that you sigh:

These are the clouds about the fallen sun,

The majesty that shuts his burning eye.

↑

All Things can Tempt Me

All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:

One time it was a woman’s face, or worse—

The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;

Now nothing but comes readier to the hand

Than this accustomed toil. When I was young,

I had not given a penny for a song

Did not the poet sing it with such airs

That one believed he had a sword upstairs;

Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,

Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.

↑

Brown Penny

I whispered, ‘I am too young,’

And then, ‘I am old enough’;

Wherefore I threw a penny

To find out if I might love.

‘Go and love, go and love, young man,

If the lady be young and fair.’

Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,

I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,

There is nobody wise enough

To find out all that is in it,

For he would be thinking of love

Till the stars had run away

And the shadows eaten the moon.

Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny.

One cannot begin it too soon.

↑

From Responsibilities  (1914)

September 1913

What need you, being come to sense,

But fumble in a greasy till

And add the halfpence to the pence

And prayer to shivering prayer, until

You have dried the marrow from the bone?

For men were born to pray and save:

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,

The names that stilled your childish play,

They have gone about the world like wind,

But little time had they to pray

For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,

And what, God help us, could they save?

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread

The grey wing upon every tide;

For this that all that blood was shed,

For this Edward Fitzgerald died,

And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,

All that delirium of the brave?

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,

And call those exiles as they were

In all their loneliness and pain,

You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair

Has maddened every mother’s son’;

They weighed so lightly what they gave.

But let them be, they’re dead and gone,

They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

Notes

Yeats (according to his own notes to Responsibilities) became disenchanted with Irish attitudes to three events: firstly, the maligning of the leading politician Charles Parnell because of a love affair, secondly, the scandalized reaction to Synge’s play The Playboy of the Western World, and thirdly, the Hugh Lane controversy, in which Yeats was heavily involved. Hugh Lane (Lady Gregory’s nephew) was an art collector who in 1908 set up a Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin in temporary premises. He proposed a new purpose-built gallery, but public reaction was sceptical and in 1913 – to Yeats’s disgust – his plans were turned down.

O’Leary: John O’Leary (1830 – 1907), an Irish republican who was imprisoned for treason.

Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone: Irish revolutionary figures who were active in the late 18th century. All died young (or were executed ) as a consequence of fighting for their cause.

↑

To a Shade

If you have revisited the town, thin Shade,

Whether to look upon your monument

(I wonder if the builder has been paid)

Or happier-thoughted when the day is spent

To drink of that salt breath out of the sea

When grey gulls flit about instead of men,

And the gaunt houses put on majesty:

Let these content you and be gone again;

For they are at their old tricks yet.

A man

Of your own passionate serving kind who had brought

In his full hands what, had they only known,

Had given their children’s children loftier thought,

Sweeter emotion, working in their veins

Like gentle blood, has been driven from the place,

And insult heaped upon him for his pains,

And for his open-handedness, disgrace;

Your enemy, an old foul mouth, had set

The pack upon him.

Go, unquiet wanderer,

And gather the Glasnevin coverlet

About your head till the dust stops your ear,

The time for you to taste of that salt breath

And listen at the corners has not come;

You had enough of sorrow before death—

Away, away! You are safer in the tomb.

Notes

To a shade: the shade represents that of Charles Parnell, the disgraced politician.

A man of your own passionate serving kind: this refers to Hugh Lane, the art collector. Yeats in his own notes related this poem to the Hugh Lane controversy (see notes to September 1913 above).

Glasnevin: a Dublin cemetery

↑

The Three Beggars

‘Though to my feathers in the wet,

I have stood here from break of day,

I have not found a thing to eat,

For only rubbish comes my way.

Am I to live on lebeen-lone?’

Muttered the old crane of Gort.

‘For all my pains on lebeen-lone?’

King Guaire walked amid his court

The palace-yard and river-side

And there to three old beggars said,

‘You that have wandered far and wide

Can ravel out what’s in my head.

Do men who least desire get most,

Or get the most who most desire?’

A beggar said, ‘They get the most

Whom man or devil cannot tire,

And what could make their muscles taut

Unless desire had made them so?’

But Guaire laughed with secret thought,

‘If that be true as it seems true,

One of you three is a rich man,

For he shall have a thousand pounds

Who is first asleep, if but he can

Sleep before the third noon sounds.’

And thereon, merry as a bird

With his old thoughts, King Guaire went

From river-side and palace-yard

And left them to their argument.

‘And if I win,’ one beggar said,

‘Though I am old I shall persuade

A pretty girl to share my bed’;

The second: ‘I shall learn a trade’;

The third: ‘I’ll hurry to the course

Among the other gentlemen,

And lay it all upon a horse’;

The second: ‘I have thought again:

A farmer has more dignity.’

One to another sighed and cried:

The exorbitant dreams of beggary,

That idleness had borne to pride,

Sang through their teeth from noon to noon;

And when the second twilight brought

The frenzy of the beggars’ moon

None closed his blood-shot eyes but sought

To keep his fellows from their sleep;

All shouted till their anger grew

And they were whirling in a heap.

They mauled and bit the whole night through;

They mauled and bit till the day shone;

They mauled and bit through all that day

And till another night had gone,

Or if they made a moment’s stay

They sat upon their heels to rail,

And when old Guaire came and stood

Before the three to end this tale,

They were commingling lice and blood.

‘Time’s up,’ he cried, and all the three

With blood-shot eyes upon him stared.

‘Time’s up,’ he cried, and all the three

Fell down upon the dust and snored.

‘Maybe I shall be lucky yet,

Now they are silent,’ said the crane.

‘Though to my feathers in the wet

I’ve stood as I were made of stone

And seen the rubbish run about,

It’s certain there are trout somewhere

And maybe I shall take a trout

If but I do not seem to care.’

Notes

Gort: a town in County Galway, in the west of Ireland.

Lebeen-lone: it has been suggested that this term was made up by Yeats from the Irish words leidhbín, meaning minnows, and lón, meaning food. (John Kelleher, Selected Writings, SIU Press 2002)

King Guaire: a king of Connacht who died in 663.

↑

Running to Paradise

As I came over Windy Gap

They threw a halfpenny into my cap,

For I am running to Paradise;

And all that I need do is to wish

And somebody puts his hand in the dish

To throw me a bit of salted fish:

And there the king is but as the beggar.

My brother Mourteen is worn out

With skelping his big brawling lout,

And I am running to Paradise;

A poor life, do what he can,

And though he keep a dog and a gun,

A serving-maid and a serving-man:

And there the king is but as the beggar.

Poor men have grown to be rich men,

And rich men grown to be poor again,

And I am running to Paradise;

And many a darling wit’s grown dull

That tossed a bare heel when at school,

Now it has filled an old sock full:

And there the king is but as the beggar.

The wind is old and still at play

While I must hurry upon my way

For I am running to Paradise;

Yet never have I lit on a friend

To take my fancy like the wind

That nobody can buy or bind:

And there the king is but as the beggar.

Note

Mourteen: a common peasant name = Martin.

↑

A Song from “The Player Queen”

My mother dandled me and sang,

‘How young it is, how young!’

And made a golden cradle

That on a willow swung.

‘He went away,’ my mother sang,

‘When I was brought to bed,’

And all the while her needle pulled

The gold and silver thread.

She pulled the thread and bit the thread

And made a golden gown,

And wept because she had dreamt that I

Was born to wear a crown.

‘When she was got,’ my mother sang,

‘I heard a sea-mew cry,

And saw a flake of the yellow foam

That dropped upon my thigh.’

How therefore could she help but braid

The gold into my hair,

And dream that I should carry

The golden top of care?

Note

The Player Queen was a one-act play by Yeats, first performed in 1919.

↑

The Mountain Tomb

Pour wine and dance if manhood still have pride,

Bring roses if the rose be yet in bloom;

The cataract smokes upon the mountain side,

Our Father Rosicross is in his tomb.

Pull down the blinds, bring fiddle and clarionet

That there be no foot silent in the room

Nor mouth from kissing, nor from wine unwet;

Our Father Rosicross is in his tomb.

In vain, in pain; the cataract still cries;

The everlasting taper lights the gloom;

All wisdom shut into his onyx eyes,

Our Father Rosicross sleeps in his tomb.

Note

Father Rosicross: Father Rosencreuz, supposedly a 14th century seeker of occult knowledge, was a major figure in Rosicrucian beliefs and the Order of the Golden Dawn, of which Yeats was a member. In an essay of 1895, The Body of the Father Christian Rosencrux, Yeats wrote that he was laid in a tomb with inextinguishable lamps, and that this was a metaphor for the imagination.

↑

The Cold Heaven

Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven

That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,

And thereupon imagination and heart were driven

So wild that every casual thought of that and this

Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season

With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;

And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,

Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,

Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,

Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent

Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken

By the injustice of the skies for punishment?

↑

The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,

In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones

Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky

With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,

And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,

And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,

Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

↑

The Dolls

A doll in the doll-maker’s house

Looks at the cradle and bawls:

‘That is an insult to us.’

But the oldest of all the dolls,

Who had seen, being kept for show,

Generations of his sort,

Out-screams the whole shelf: ‘Although

There’s not a man can report

Evil of this place,

The man and the woman bring

Hither, to our disgrace,

A noisy and filthy thing.’

Hearing him groan and stretch

The doll-maker’s wife is aware

Her husband has heard the wretch,

And crouched by the arm of his chair,

She murmurs into his ear,

Head upon shoulder leant:

‘My dear, my dear, O dear,

It was an accident.’

↑

A Coat

I made my song a coat

Covered with embroideries

Out of old mythologies

From heel to throat;

But the fools caught it,

Wore it in the world’s eyes

As though they’d wrought it.

Song, let them take it,

For there’s more enterprise

In walking naked.

↑

From The Wild Swans at Coole  (1919)

The Wild Swans at Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake’s edge or pool

Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?

Note

Coole House and Park, in County Galway, was the home of the Gregory family, Yeats’s friends. The park is now part of a wildfowl sanctuary notable for whooper swans.

↑

An Irish Airman Foresees his Death

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public man, nor angry crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

Note

Kiltartan is a civil parish in Co. Galway, in the same area as Coole Park.

↑

The Collar-Bone of a Hare

Would I could cast a sail on the water

Where many a king has gone

And many a king's daughter,

And alight at the comely trees and the lawn,

The playing upon pipes and the dancing,

And learn that the best thing is

To change my loves while dancing

And pay but a kiss for a kiss.

I would find by the edge of that water

The collar-bone of a hare

Worn thin by the lapping of water,

And pierce it through with a gimlet and stare

At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,

And laugh over the untroubled water

At all who marry in churches,

Through the white thin bone of a hare.

↑

Solomon to Sheba

Sang Solomon to Sheba,

And kissed her dusky face,

‘All day long from mid-day

We have talked in the one place,

All day long from shadowless noon

We have gone round and round

In the narrow theme of love

Like an old horse in a pound.’

To Solomon sang Sheba,

Planted on his knees,

‘If you had broached a matter

That might the learned please,

You had before the sun had thrown

Our shadows on the ground

Discovered that my thoughts, not it,

Are but a narrow pound.’

Said Solomon to Sheba,

And kissed her Arab eyes,

‘There’s not a man or woman

Born under the skies

Dare match in learning with us two,

And all day long we have found

There’s not a thing but love can make

The world a narrow pound.’

Note

According to the Bible, the Queen of Sheba (in present day Yemen) visited King Solomon in Jerusalem, bringing gifts and questions to test his wisdom.

↑

A Song

I thought no more was needed

Youth to prolong

Than dumb-bell and foil

To keep the body young.

O who could have foretold

That the heart grows old?

Though I have many words,

What woman’s satisfied,

I am no longer faint

Because at her side?

O who could have foretold

That the heart grows old?

I have not lost desire

But the heart that I had;

I thought ’twould burn my body

Laid on the death-bed,

For who could have foretold

That the heart grows old?

↑

The Scholars

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,

Old, learned, respectable bald heads

Edit and annotate the lines

That young men, tossing on their beds,

Rhymed out in love’s despair

To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;

All wear the carpet with their shoes;

All think what other people think;

All know the man their neighbour knows.

Lord, what would they say

Did their Catullus walk that way?

Note

Catullus: an ancient Roman poet of satirical and often scurrilous verse.

↑

Lines Written in Dejection

When have I last looked on

The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies

Of the dark leopards of the moon?

All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,

For all their broom-sticks and their tears,

Their angry tears, are gone.

The holy centaurs of the hills are banished;

I have nothing but the embittered sun;

Banished heroic mother moon and vanished,

And now that I have come to fifty years

I must endure the timid sun.

↑

The Fisherman

Although I can see him still,

The freckled man who goes

To a grey place on a hill

In grey Connemara clothes

At dawn to cast his flies,

It’s long since I began

To call up to the eyes

This wise and simple man.

All day I’d looked in the face

What I had hoped ’twould be

To write for my own race

And the reality;

The living men that I hate,

The dead man that I loved,

The craven man in his seat,

The insolent unreproved,

And no knave brought to book

Who has won a drunken cheer,

The witty man and his joke

Aimed at the commonest ear,

The clever man who cries

The catch-cries of the clown,

The beating down of the wise

And great Art beaten down.

Maybe a twelvemonth since

Suddenly I began,

In scorn of this audience,

Imagining a man

And his sun-freckled face,

And grey Connemara cloth,

Climbing up to a place

Where stone is dark under froth,

And the down-turn of his wrist

When the flies drop in the stream:

A man who does not exist,

A man who is but a dream;

And cried, ‘Before I am old

I shall have written him one

Poem maybe as cold

And passionate as the dawn.’

Note

Connemara: a rural, coastal area of Co. Galway, western Ireland, part of the Gaeltacht or Gaelic-speaking regions.

↑

Broken Dreams

There is grey in your hair.

Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath

When you are passing;

But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing

Because it was your prayer

Recovered him upon the bed of death.

For your sole sake – that all heart’s ache have known,

And given to others all heart’s ache,

From meagre girlhood’s putting on

Burdensome beauty – for your sole sake

Heaven has put away the stroke of her doom,

So great her portion in that peace you make

By merely walking in a room.

Your beauty can but leave among us

Vague memories, nothing but memories.

A young man when the old men are done talking

Will say to an old man, ‘Tell me of that lady

The poet stubborn with his passion sang us

When age might well have chilled his blood.’

Vague memories, nothing but memories,

But in the grave all, all, shall be renewed.

The certainty that I shall see that lady

Leaning or standing or walking

In the first loveliness of womanhood,

And with the fervour of my youthful eyes,

Has set me muttering like a fool.

You are more beautiful than any one,

And yet your body had a flaw:

Your small hands were not beautiful,

And I am afraid that you will run

And paddle to the wrist

In that mysterious, always brimming lake

Where those that have obeyed the holy law

Paddle and are perfect. Leave unchanged

The hands that I have kissed,

For old sake’s sake.

The last stroke of midnight dies.

All day in the one chair

From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged

In rambling talk with an image of air:

Vague memories, nothing but memories.

↑

Upon a Dying Lady (extracts)

I

Her Courtesy

With the old kindness, the old distinguished grace,

She lies, her lovely piteous head amid dull red hair

Propped upon pillows, rouge on the pallor of her face.

She would not have us sad because she is lying there,

And when she meets our gaze her eyes are laughter-lit,

Her speech a wicked tale that we may vie with her,

Matching our broken-hearted wit against her wit,

Thinking of saints and of Petronius Arbiter.

II

Certain Artists Bring her Dolls and Drawings

Bring where our Beauty lies

A new modelled doll, or drawing,

With a friend’s or an enemy’s

Features, or maybe showing

Her features when a tress

Of dull red hair was flowing

Over some silken dress

Cut in the Turkish fashion,

Or, it may be, like a boy’s.

We have given the world our passion,

We have naught for death but toys.

III

She Turns the Dolls’ Faces to the Wall

Because to-day is some religious festival

They had a priest say Mass, and even the Japanese,

Heel up and weight on toe, must face the wall

—Pedant in passion, learned in old courtesies,

Vehement and witty she had seemed–; the Venetian lady

Who had seemed to glide to some intrigue in her red shoes,

Her domino, her panniered skirt copied from Longhi;

The meditative critic; all are on their toes,

Even our Beauty with her Turkish trousers on.

Because the priest must have like every dog his day

Or keep us all awake with baying at the moon,

We and our dolls being but the world were best away.

Notes

Petronius Arbiter: Roman courtier to Nero, and author of the Satyricon.

Longhi: Pietro Longhi was an 18th century Venetian painter of contemporary scenes and people.

↑

The Phases of the Moon (extract)

Robartes. All thought becomes an image and the soul

Becomes a body: that body and that soul

Too perfect at the full to lie in a cradle,

Too lonely for the traffic of the world:

Body and soul cast out and cast away

Beyond the visible world.

Aherne.         All dreams of the soul

End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body.

Robartes. Have you not always known it?

Aherne.                    The song will have it

That those that we have loved got their long fingers

From death, and wounds, or on Sinai’s top,

Or from some bloody whip in their own hands.

They ran from cradle to cradle till at last

Their beauty dropped out of the loneliness

Of body and soul.

Robartes.         The lover’s heart knows that.

Aherne. It must be that the terror in their eyes

Is memory or foreknowledge of the hour

When all is fed with light and heaven is bare.

Robartes. When the moon's full those creatures of the full

Are met on the waste hills by countrymen

Who shudder and hurry by: body and soul

Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves,

Caught up in contemplation, the mind’s eye

Fixed upon images that once were thought;

For separate, perfect, and immovable

Images can break the solitude

Of lovely, satisfied, indifferent eyes.

Notes

Robartes: Michael Robartes was a character invented by Yeats who appears in a number of poems. In Yeats’s story of 1897, Rosa Alchemica, the narrator describes a meeting with Michael Robartes: he has “wild red hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough clothes” and looks “something between a debauchee, a saint and a peasant.” In that story Robartes leads the narrator to the Temple of the Alchemical Rose. He seems to represent the quest for mystical knowledge.

Aherne: Owen or John Aherne was another recurring character invented by Yeats; he seems to represent a more conventional Catholic viewpoint.

Of Robartes and Aherne, Yeats wrote in 1922: “They take their place in a phantasmagoria in which I endeavour to explain my philosophy of life and death.”

↑

The Cat and the Moon

The cat went here and there

And the moon spun round like a top,

And the nearest kin of the moon,

The creeping cat, looked up.

Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,

For, wander and wail as he would

The pure cold light in the sky

Troubled his animal blood.

Minnaloushe runs in the grass

Lifting his delicate feet.

Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?

When two close kindred meet,

What better than call a dance?

Maybe the moon may learn,

Tired of that courtly fashion,

A new dance turn.

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass

From moonlit place to place,

The sacred moon overhead

Has taken a new phase.

Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils

Will pass from change to change,

And that from round to crescent,

From crescent to round they range?

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass

Alone, important and wise,

And lifts to the changing moon

His changing eyes.

↑

Two Songs of a Fool

I

A speckled cat and a tame hare

Eat at my hearthstone

And sleep there;

And both look up to me alone

For learning and defence

As I look up to Providence.

I start out of my sleep to think

Some day I may forget

Their food and drink;

Or, the house door left unshut,

The hare may run till it’s found

The horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

I bear a burden that might well try

Men that do all by rule,

And what can I

That am a wandering-witted fool

But pray to God that He ease

My great responsibilities?

II

I slept on my three-legged stool by the fire,

The speckled cat slept on my knee;

We never thought to enquire

Where the brown hare might be,

And whether the door were shut.

Who knows how she drank the wind

Stretched up on two legs from the mat,

Before she had settled her mind

To drum with her heel and to leap?

Had I but awakened from sleep

And called her name, she had heard,

It may be, and had not stirred,

That now, it may be, has found

The horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

↑

The Double Vision of Michael Robartes

I

On the grey rock of Cashel the mind’s eye

Has called up the cold spirits that are born

When the old moon is vanished from the sky

And the new still hides her horn.

Under blank eyes and fingers never still

The particular is pounded till it is man.

When had I my own will?

O not since life began.

Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent

By these wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood,

Themselves obedient,

Knowing not evil and good;

Obedient to some hidden magical breath.

They do not even feel, so abstract are they,

So dead beyond our death,

Triumph that we obey.

II

On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw

A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,

A Buddha, hand at rest,

Hand lifted up that blest;

And right between these two a girl at play

That, it may be, had danced her life away,

For now being dead it seemed

That she of dancing dreamed.

Although I saw it all in the mind’s eye

There can be nothing solider till I die;

I saw by the moon’s light

Now at its fifteenth night.

One lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon

Gazed upon all things known, all things unknown,

In triumph of intellect

With motionless head erect.

That other’s moonlit eyeballs never moved,

Being fixed on all things loved, all things unloved,

Yet little peace he had,

For those that love are sad.

O little did they care who danced between,

And little she by whom her dance was seen

So she had outdanced thought.

Body perfection brought,

For what but eye and ear silence the mind

With the minute particulars of mankind?

Mind moved yet seemed to stop

As ’twere a spinning-top.

In contemplation had those three so wrought

Upon a moment, and so stretched it out

That they, time overthrown,

Were dead yet flesh and bone.

III

I knew that I had seen, had seen at last

That girl my unremembering nights hold fast

Or else my dreams that fly

If I should rub an eye,

And yet in flying fling into my meat

A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat

As though I had been undone

By Homer’s Paragon

Who never gave the burning town a thought;

To such a pitch of folly I am brought,

Being caught between the pull

Of the dark moon and the full,

The commonness of thought and images

That have the frenzy of our western seas.

Thereon I made my moan,

And after kissed a stone,

And after that arranged it in a song

Seeing that I, ignorant for so long,

Had been rewarded thus

In Cormac’s ruined house.

Notes

Michael Robartes: see note after The Phases of the Moon.

Rock of Cashel: a group of ancient buildings in Co. Tipperary, the traditional seat of the kings of Munster, and the supposed site of Saint Patrick’s conversion of the king of Munster in the 5th century.

Cormac: Cormac mac Airt was a legendary High King of Ireland who ruled sometime before the 4th century. He ruled at Tara in Co. Meath, where there is a fort and barrow known as Teach Chormaic (Cormac's House).

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From Michael Robartes and the Dancer  (1921)

Under Saturn

Do not because this day I have grown saturnine

Imagine that lost love, inseparable from my thought

Because I have no other youth, can make me pine;

For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought,

The comfort that you made? Although my wits have gone

On a fantastic ride, my horse’s flanks are spurred

By childish memories of an old cross Pollexfen,

And of a Middleton, whose name you never heard,

And of a red-haired Yeats whose looks, although he died

Before my time, seem like a vivid memory.

You heard that labouring man who had served my people. He said

Upon the open road, near to the Sligo quay–

No, no, not said, but cried it out– ‘You have come again,

And surely after twenty years it was time to come.’

I am thinking of a child’s vow sworn in vain

Never to leave that valley his fathers called their home.

Notes

Pollexfen: This may refer to Yeats’s maternal grandfather William Pollexfen. Along with other members of the Pollexfen family, he was described in Yeats’s poem of 1919, In Memory of Alfred Pollexfen (not included in this collection).

Middleton: the maiden name of William Pollexfen’s wife Elizabeth.

A red-headed Yeats: it’s generally agreed this refers to the poet’s paternal grandfather, William Butler Yeats.

↑

Easter 1916

I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done

Of a mocking tale or a gibe

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,

Being certain that they and I

But lived where motley is worn:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

That woman’s days were spent

In ignorant good-will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers

When, young and beautiful,

She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school

And rode our wingèd horse;

This other his helper and friend

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,

So sensitive his nature seemed,

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,

The rider, the birds that range

From cloud to tumbling cloud,

Minute by minute they change;

A shadow of cloud on the stream

Changes minute by minute;

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,

And a horse plashes within it;

The long-legged moor-hens dive,

And hens to moor-cocks call;

Minute by minute they live:

The stone’s in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven’s part, our part

To murmur name upon name,

As a mother names her child

When sleep at last has come

On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death;

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in a verse–

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Notes

Easter 1916 refers to the Easter Rising in Dublin: an Irish Republic was proclaimed on 24th April and the centre of Dublin was occupied by several hundred Republicans.  After five days they were overcome by British forces and sixteen of the leaders were court-martialled and executed. In all nearly 500 people were killed in the uprising. The harsh British reaction helped to win wider support in Ireland for republicanism, with the fallen leaders being regarded as martyrs. Ireland had been united with Britain since 1800, but (with the exception of six northern counties) was to gain its independence in 1922.

Thomas MacDonagh, John MacBride, James Connolly and Patrick Pearse were leaders of the uprising who were subsequently executed by firing squad.

↑

The Rose Tree

‘O words are lightly spoken,’

Said Pearse to Connolly,

‘Maybe a breath of politic words

Has withered our Rose Tree;

Or maybe but a wind that blows

Across the bitter sea.’

‘It needs to be but watered,’

James Connolly replied,

'To make the green come out again

And spread on every side,

And shake the blossom from the bud

To be the garden's pride.’

‘But where can we draw water,’

Said Pearse to Connolly,

‘When all the wells are parched away?

O plain as plain can be

There’s nothing but our own red blood

Can make a right Rose Tree.’

Note

James Connolly and Patrick Pearse were leaders of the Republican uprising of 1916 (see note to Easter 1916 above). Both were executed for their part in the rebellion – although Connolly was already fatally injured and could not even stand up.

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On a Political Prisoner

She that but little patience knew,

From childhood on, had now so much

A grey gull lost its fear and flew

Down to her cell and there alit,

And there endured her fingers’ touch

And from her fingers ate its bit.

Did she in touching that lone wing

Recall the years before her mind

Became a bitter, an abstract thing,

Her thought some popular enmity:

Blind and leader of the blind

Drinking the foul ditch where they lie?

When long ago I saw her ride

Under Ben Bulben to the meet,

The beauty of her country-side

With all youth’s lonely wildness stirred,

She seemed to have grown clean and sweet

Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird:

Sea-borne, or balanced in the air

When first it sprang out of the nest

Upon some lofty rock to stare

Upon the cloudy canopy,

While under its storm-beaten breast

Cried out the hollows of the sea.

Notes

The poem was probably inspired by Constance Markievicz, (born Constance Gore-Booth,) a friend of Yeats from childhood and an active Irish revolutionary who played a leading part in the Dublin rising of 1916 (see notes to Easter 1916). She was subsequently court-martialled and sentenced to death. This sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but after a year in an English jail she was released as part of an amnesty. In 1918 she was elected to the British House of Commons as the Sinn Féin candidate for a Dublin seat. She died in 1927.

Ben Bulben: (or Benbulbin) a large hill with a flat, ridged top, in County Sligo, Ireland.

↑

The Leaders Of The Crowd

They must to keep their certainty accuse

All that are different of a base intent;

Pull down established honour; hawk for news

Whatever their loose fantasy invent

And murmur it with bated breath, as though

The abounding gutter had been Helicon

Or calumny a song. How can they know

Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,

And there alone, that have no solitude?

So the crowd come they care not what may come.

They have loud music, hope every day renewed

And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

Note

Helicon: in Greek mythology, Mount Helicon and its Hippocrene Spring were symbols of poetic inspiration.

↑

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Note

Spiritus Mundi means spirit of the world. To Yeats it signified a collective or universal memory, a source of symbols to inspire poets.

↑

A Prayer For My Daughter

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid

Under this cradle-hood and coverlid

My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle

But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill

Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,

Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;

And for an hour I have walked and prayed

Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour

And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,

And under the arches of the bridge, and scream

In the elms above the flooded stream;

Imagining in excited reverie

That the future years had come,

Dancing to a frenzied drum,

Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not

Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,

Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,

Being made beautiful overmuch,

Consider beauty a sufficient end,

Lose natural kindness and maybe

The heart-revealing intimacy

That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull

And later had much trouble from a fool,

While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,

Being fatherless could have her way

Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.

It’s certain that fine women eat

A crazy salad with their meat

Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;

Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned

By those that are not entirely beautiful;

Yet many, that have played the fool

For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise,

And many a poor man that has roved,

Loved and thought himself beloved,

From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree

That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,

And have no business but dispensing round

Their magnanimities of sound,

Nor but in merriment begin a chase,

Nor but in merriment a quarrel.

O may she live like some green laurel

Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,

The sort of beauty that I have approved,

Prosper but little, has dried up of late,

Yet knows that to be choked with hate

May well be of all evil chances chief.

If there’s no hatred in a mind

Assault and battery of the wind

Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,

So let her think opinions are accursed.

Have I not seen the loveliest woman born

Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,

Because of her opinionated mind

Barter that horn and every good

By quiet natures understood

For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,

The soul recovers radical innocence

And learns at last that it is self-delighting,

Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,

And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;

She can, though every face should scowl

And every windy quarter howl

Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house

Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;

For arrogance and hatred are the wares

Peddled in the thoroughfares.

How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?

Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,

And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

Notes

Gregory’s wood: Lady Gregory’s estate at Coole had seven woods.

that great queen: the goddess Aphrodite, born from the sea, who married the god Hephaestus, a lame blacksmith.

Horn of Plenty (or cornucopia): a horn-shaped container filled with fruits, from ancient times a symbol of abundance and prosperity.

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From The Tower  (1928)

Sailing to Byzantium

I

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 unageing 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.

Notes

Byzantium: ancient city, a trading and cultural centre on the site of modern Istanbul: founded by the Greeks in 667 BCE, it was taken over by the Persians, Greeks (again) and Romans, before being renamed Constantinople in the 4th century CE.

perne: spool. In his notes to an earlier poem, Unpacks the Loaded Pern, Yeats wrote that as a child, on seeing a column of smoke from the pern mill, he was told that pern was another name for the spool on which thread was wound.

↑

The Tower (extracts)

I

What shall I do with this absurdity—

O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog’s tail?

Never had I more

Excited, passionate, fantastical

Imagination, nor an ear and eye

That more expected the impossible—

No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,

Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s back

And had the livelong summer day to spend.

It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,

Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend

Until imagination, ear and eye,

Can be content with argument and deal

In abstract things; or be derided by

A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

II

I pace upon the battlements and stare

On the foundations of a house, or where

Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;

And send imagination forth

Under the day’s declining beam, and call

Images and memories

From ruin or from ancient trees,

For I would ask a question of them all….

* * *

… Did all old men and women, rich and poor,

Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,

Whether in public or in secret rage

As I do now against old age?

But I have found an answer in those eyes

That are impatient to be gone;

Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan,

For I need all his mighty memories.

Old lecher with a love on every wind,

Bring up out of that deep considering mind

All that you have discovered in the grave,

For it is certain that you have

Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing

Plunge, lured by a softening eye,

Or by a touch or a sigh,

Into the labyrinth of another’s being;

Does the imagination dwell the most

Upon a woman won or woman lost?

If on the lost, admit you turned aside

From a great labyrinth out of pride,

Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought

Or anything called conscience once;

And that if memory recur, the sun’s

Under eclipse and the day blotted out.

Notes

Ben Bulben: hill in County Sligo

Plato and Plotinus: ancient philosophers, Plato being born in Greece in about 425 BCE and Plotinus in Egypt in about 205 CE.

Hanrahan: a character invented by Yeats (as in Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland)

↑

Meditations in Time of Civil War

I

Ancestral Houses

Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns,

Amid the rustle of his planted hills,

Life overflows without ambitious pains;

And rains down life until the basin spills,

And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains

As though to choose whatever shape it wills

And never stoop to a mechanical

Or servile shape, at others’ beck and call.

Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not sung

Had he not found it certain beyond dreams

That out of life’s own self-delight had sprung

The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems

As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung

Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,

And not a fountain, were the symbol which

Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.

Some violent bitter man, some powerful man

Called architect and artist in, that they,

Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone

The sweetness that all longed for night and day,

The gentleness none there had ever known;

But when the master’s buried mice can play,

And maybe the great-grandson of that house,

For all its bronze and marble, ’s but a mouse.

O what if gardens where the peacock strays

With delicate feet upon old terraces,

Or else all Juno from an urn displays

Before the indifferent garden deities;

O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways

Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease

And Childhood a delight for every sense,

But take our greatness with our violence?

What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,

And buildings that a haughtier age designed,

The pacing to and fro on polished floors

Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined

With famous portraits of our ancestors;

What if those things the greatest of mankind

Consider most to magnify, or to bless,

But take our greatness with our bitterness?

↑

II

My House

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,

A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,

An acre of stony ground,

Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,

Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,

The sound of the rain or sound

Of every wind that blows;

The stilted water-hen

Crossing stream again

Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;

A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,

A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,

A candle and written page.

Il Penseroso’s Platonist toiled on

In some like chamber, shadowing forth

How the daemonic rage

Imagined everything.

Benighted travellers

From markets and from fairs

Have seen his midnight candle glimmering.

Two men have founded here. A man-at-arms

Gathered a score of horse and spent his days

In this tumultuous spot,

Where through long wars and sudden night alarms

His dwindling score and he seemed castaways

Forgetting and forgot;

And I, that after me

My bodily heirs may find,

To exalt a lonely mind,

Befitting emblems of adversity.

↑

III

My Table

Two heavy trestles, and a board

Where Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,

By pen and paper lies,

That it may moralise

My days out of their aimlessness.

A bit of an embroidered dress

Covers its wooden sheath.

Chaucer had not drawn breath

When it was forged. In Sato’s house,

Curved like new moon, moon-luminous,

It lay five hundred years.

Yet if no change appears

No moon; only an aching heart

Conceives a changeless work of art.

Our learned men have urged

That when and where ’twas forged

A marvellous accomplishment,

In painting or in pottery, went

From father unto son

And through the centuries ran

And seemed unchanging like the sword.

Soul’s beauty being most adored,

Men and their business took

The soul’s unchanging look;

For the most rich inheritor,

Knowing that none could pass Heaven’s door

That loved inferior art,

Had such an aching heart

That he, although a country’s talk

For silken clothes and stately walk,

Had waking wits; it seemed

Juno’s peacock screamed.

↑

IV

My Descendants

Having inherited a vigorous mind

From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams

And leave a woman and a man behind

As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems

Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,

Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,

But the torn petals strew the garden plot;

And there’s but common greenness after that.

And what if my descendants lose the flower

Through natural declension of the soul,

Through too much business with the passing hour,

Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?

May this laborious stair and this stark tower

Become a roofless ruin that the owl

May build in the cracked masonry and cry

Her desolation to the desolate sky.

The Primum Mobile that fashioned us

Has made the very owls in circles move;

And I, that count myself most prosperous,

Seeing that love and friendship are enough,

For an old neighbour’s friendship chose the house

And decked and altered it for a girl’s love,

And know whatever flourish and decline

These stones remain their monument and mine.

↑

V

The Road at My Door

An affable Irregular,

A heavily-built Falstaffian man,

Comes cracking jokes of civil war

As though to die by gunshot were

The finest play under the sun.

A brown Lieutenant and his men,

Half dressed in national uniform,

Stand at my door, and I complain

Of the foul weather, hail and rain,

A pear tree broken by the storm.

I count those feathered balls of soot

The moor-hen guides upon the stream,

To silence the envy in my thought;

And turn towards my chamber, caught

In the cold snows of a dream.

↑

VI

The Stare’s Nest by My Window

The bees build in the crevices

Of loosening masonry, and there

The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

My wall is loosening; honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the state.

We are closed in, and the key is turned

On our uncertainty; somewhere

A man is killed, or a house burned,

Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;

Some fourteen days of civil war;

Last night they trundled down the road

That dead young soldier in his blood:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love; O honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

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VII

I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness

I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,

A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,

Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon

That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,

A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind

And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.

Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;

Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.

‘Vengeance upon the murderers,’ the cry goes up,

‘Vengeance for Jacques Molay.’ In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,

The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop,

Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,

Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide

For the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astray

Because of all that senseless tumult, all but cried

For vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.

Their legs long, delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,

Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs.

The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,

Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,

Have closed the ladies’ eyes, their minds are but a pool

Where even longing drowns under its own excess;

Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full

Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,

The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,

Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,

Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place

To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,

Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone,

Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency,

The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.

I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair

Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth

In something that all others understand or share;

But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth

A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,

It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,

The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,

Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.

Notes

Yeats wrote: “These poems were written at Thoor Ballylee (Yeats’ s tower in Coole Park) in 1922, during the civil war. Before they were finished the Republicans blew up our ‘ancient bridge’ one night. They forbade us to leave the house, but were otherwise polite, even saying at last ‘Good night, thank you,’ as though we had given them the bridge…”

The Irish civil war was waged in 1922-23 over the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the nature of the new Irish Free State, which Republicans saw as a betrayal of Ireland. There was fighting in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and other areas; in Yeats’s native County Sligo, 54 people died.

Il Penseroso’s Platonist: Il Penseroso is a long meditative poem about Melancholy by John Milton, whom Yeats is here labelling as a Platonist – a follower of the philosopher Plato, or one who believes that only ideas contain true knowledge.

Sato’s gift: in 1920 Yeats was given a 500 year old sword by a Japanese admirer, Junzo Sato: it was an heirloom of Sato’s family. In 2006 it was presented to the National Library in Dublin.

primum mobile: first moving thing, source of motion.

Irregular: unofficial soldier, not part of the regular army.

Falstaffian: Falstaff is a character in three of Shakespeare’s plays. Swaggering and cowardly, he is a soldier who avoids fighting.

stare: starling

Jacques Molay: Jacques de Molay was the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar; in 1314 he was arrested on the orders of King Philip IV of France, and burned to death.

↑

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Note

Leda: in Greek mythology, a princess who was seduced by the god Zeus in the shape of a swan; the resulting offspring included Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon.

Agamemnon: in Greek legend, a king of Mycenae who went to fight at Troy. On his return he was killed by his wife Clytemnestra.

↑

Among School Children

I

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;

A kind old nun in a white hood replies;

The children learn to cipher and to sing,

To study reading-books and histories,

To cut and sew, be neat in everything

In the best modern way — the children’s eyes

In momentary wonder stare upon

A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

II

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent

Above a sinking fire, a tale that she

Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event

That changed some childish day to tragedy —

Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent

Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,

Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,

Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage

I look upon one child or t’other there

And wonder if she stood so at that age—

For even daughters of the swan can share

Something of every paddler’s heritage—

And had that colour upon cheek or hair,

And thereupon my heart is driven wild:

She stands before me as a living child.

IV

Her present image floats into the mind—

Did Quattrocento finger fashion it

Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind

And took a mess of shadows for its meat?

And I though never of Ledaean kind

Had pretty plumage once — enough of that,

Better to smile on all that smile, and show

There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

V

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap

Honey of generation had betrayed,

And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape

As recollection or the drug decide,

Would think her son, did she but see that shape

With sixty or more winters on its head,

A compensation for the pang of his birth,

Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays

Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;

Solider Aristotle played the taws

Upon the bottom of a king of kings;

World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras

Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings

What a star sang and careless Muses heard:

Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,

But those the candles light are not as those

That animate a mother’s reveries,

But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

And yet they too break hearts — O Presences

That passion, piety or affection knows,

And that all heavenly glory symbolise—

O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

VIII

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Notes

Ledaean: like the mythical Leda (see note to Leda and the Swan).

Plato’s parable: Platonist philosophers posited that philosophy was like an egg: logic was the shell, ethics the white, and physics the yolk.

Quattrocento: the 15th century in Italy, a period when art and culture flourished.

Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras: all philosophers of ancient Greece.

Solider Aristotle played the taws: taws are marbles. The king of kings here is most likely Alexander the Great, who was Aristotle’s pupil.

↑

A Man Young and Old (extracts)

I

First Love

Though nurtured like the sailing moon

In beauty’s murderous brood,

She walked awhile and blushed awhile

And on my pathway stood

Until I thought her body bore

A heart of flesh and blood.

But since I laid a hand thereon

And found a heart of stone

I have attempted many things

And not a thing is done,

For every hand is lunatic

That travels on the moon.

She smiled and that transfigured me

And left me but a lout,

Maundering here, and maundering there,

Emptier of thought

Than the heavenly circuit of its stars

When the moon sails out.

II

Human Dignity

Like the moon her kindness is,

If kindness I may call

What has no comprehension in’t,

But is the same for all

As though my sorrow were a scene

Upon a painted wall.

So like a bit of stone I lie

Under a broken tree.

I could recover if I shrieked

My heart’s agony

To passing bird, but I am dumb

From human dignity.

III

The Mermaid

A mermaid found a swimming lad,

Picked him for her own,

Pressed her body to his body,

Laughed; and plunging down

Forgot in cruel happiness

That even lovers drown.

IV

The Death of the Hare

I have pointed out the yelling pack,

The hare leap to the wood,

And when I pass a compliment

Rejoice as lover should

At the drooping of an eye,

At the mantling of the blood.

Then suddenly my heart is wrung

By her distracted air

And I remember wildness lost

And after, swept from there,

Am set down standing in the wood

At the death of the hare.

↑

All Souls’ Night

Epilogue to “A Vision”

Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell

And many a lesser bell sound through the room;

And it is All Souls’ Night.

And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel

Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;

For it is a ghost’s right,

His element is so fine

Being sharpened by his death,

To drink from the wine-breath

While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

I need some mind that, if the cannon sound

From every quarter of the world, can stay

Wound in mind’s pondering

As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;

Because I have a marvellous thing to say,

A certain marvellous thing

None but the living mock,

Though not for sober ear;

It may be all that hear

Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

Horton’s the first I call. He loved strange thought

And knew that sweet extremity of pride

That’s called platonic love,

And that to such a pitch of passion wrought

Nothing could bring him, when his lady died,

Anodyne for his love.

Words were but wasted breath;

One dear hope had he:

The inclemency

Of that or the next winter would be death.

Two thoughts were so mixed up I could not tell

Whether of her or God he thought the most,

But think that his mind’s eye,

When upward turned, on one sole image fell;

And that a slight companionable ghost,

Wild with divinity,

Had so lit up the whole

Immense miraculous house

The Bible promised us,

It seemed a gold-fish swimming in a bowl.

On Florence Emery I call the next,

Who finding the first wrinkles on a face

Admired and beautiful,

And knowing that the future would be vexed

With ’minished beauty, multiplied commonplace,

Preferred to teach a school

Away from neighbour or friend,

Among dark skins, and there

Permit foul years to wear

Hidden from eyesight to the unnoticed end.

Before that end much had she ravelled out

From a discourse in figurative speech

By some learned Indian

On the soul’s journey. How it is whirled about,

Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,

Until it plunge into the sun;

And there, free and yet fast,

Being both Chance and Choice,

Forget its broken toys

And sink into its own delight at last.

And I call up MacGregor from his grave,

For in my first hard springtime we were friends,

Although of late estranged.

I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,

And told him so, but friendship never ends;

And what if mind seem changed,

And it seem changed with the mind,

When thoughts rise up unbid

On generous things that he did

And I grow half contented to be blind!

He had much industry at setting out,

Much boisterous courage, before loneliness

Had driven him crazed;

For meditations upon unknown thought

Make human intercourse grow less and less;

They are neither paid nor praised.

But he’d object to the host,

The glass because my glass;

A ghost-lover he was

And may have grown more arrogant being a ghost.

But names are nothing. What matter who it be,

So that his elements have grown so fine

The fume of muscatel

Can give his sharpened palate ecstasy

No living man can drink from the whole wine.

I have mummy truths to tell

Whereat the living mock,

Though not for sober ear,

For maybe all that hear

Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

Such thought — such thought have I that hold it tight

Till meditation master all its parts,

Nothing can stay my glance

Until that glance run in the world’s despite

To where the damned have howled away their hearts,

And where the blessed dance;

Such thought, that in it bound

I need no other thing,

Wound in mind’s wandering

As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.

Notes

Christ Church Bell: Christ Church is a college at Oxford University, where Yeats wrote the poem.

All Souls’ Night: 2nd November, when dead relatives and friends are remembered.

Horton: William Horton, an artist who died in 1919.

Florence Emery: an actress, writer and occultist who died in 1917. Like Horton, she was a friend of Yeats.

MacGregor: Samuel MacGregor Mathers was a British occultist and a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which Yeats was a member. He died in 1918.

↑

From The Winding Stair and Other Poems  (1933)

In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz

The light of evening, Lissadell,

Great windows open to the south,

Two girls in silk kimonos, both

Beautiful, one a gazelle.

But a raving autumn shears

Blossom from the summer’s wreath;

The older is condemned to death,

Pardoned, drags out lonely years

Conspiring among the ignorant.

I know not what the younger dreams –

Some vague Utopia – and she seems,

When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,

An image of such politics.

Many a time I think to seek

One or the other out and speak

Of that old Georgian mansion, mix

Pictures of the mind, recall

That table and the talk of youth,

Two girls in silk kimonos, both

Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Dear shadows, now you know it all,

All the folly of a fight

With a common wrong or right.

The innocent and the beautiful

Have no enemy but time;

Arise and bid me strike a match

And strike another till time catch;

Should the conflagration climb,

Run till all the sages know.

We the great gazebo built,

They convicted us of guilt;

Bid me strike a match and blow.

Note

Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markievicz were sisters; the Gore-Booth family lived in a large country house called Lissadell, near Yeats’s home in County Sligo. Eva Gore-Booth was a poet and suffragist who was active on behalf of working women in Lancashire. She died in 1926. For details about Constance, see notes to On a Political Prisoner.

↑

Death

Nor dread nor hope attend

A dying animal;

A man awaits his end

Dreading and hoping all;

Many times he died,

Many times rose again.

A great man in his pride

Confronting murderous men

Casts derision upon

Supersession of breath;

He knows death to the bone –

Man has created death.

↑

A Dialogue of Self and Soul

I

My Soul.  I summon to the winding ancient stair;

Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,

Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,

Upon the breathless starlit air,

Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;

Fix every wandering thought upon

That quarter where all thought is done:

Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?

My Self.  The consecrated blade upon my knees

Is Sato’s ancient blade, still as it was,

Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass

Unspotted by the centuries;

That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn

From some court-lady’s dress and round

The wooden scabbard bound and wound,

Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.

My Soul.  Why should the imagination of a man

Long past his prime remember things that are

Emblematical of love and war?

Think of ancestral night that can,

If but imagination scorn the earth

And intellect its wandering

To this and that and t’other thing,

Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

My Self.  Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it

Five hundred years ago, about it lie

Flowers from I know not what embroidery—

Heart’s purple – and all these I set

For emblems of the day against the tower

Emblematical of the night,

And claim as by a soldier’s right

A charter to commit the crime once more.

My Soul.  Such fullness in that quarter overflows

And falls into the basin of the mind

That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,

For intellect no longer knows

Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known—

That is to say, ascends to Heaven;

Only the dead can be forgiven;

But when I think of that my tongue’s a stone.

↑

II

My Self.

A living man is blind and drinks his drop.

What matter if the ditches are impure?

What matter if I live it all once more?

Endure that toil of growing up;

The ignominy of boyhood; the distress

Of boyhood changing into man;

The unfinished man and his pain

Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

The finished man among his enemies?—

How in the name of Heaven can he escape

That defiling and disfigured shape

The mirror of malicious eyes

Casts upon his eyes until at last

He thinks that shape must be his shape?

And what's the good of an escape

If honour find him in the wintry blast?

I am content to live it all again

And yet again, if it be life to pitch

Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch,

A blind man battering blind men;

Or into that most fecund ditch of all,

The folly that man does

Or must suffer, if he woos

A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

I am content to follow to its source

Every event in action or in thought;

Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!

When such as I cast out remorse

So great a sweetness flows into the breast

We must laugh and we must sing,

We are blest by everything,

Everything we look upon is blest.

Notes

Sato’s ancient blade: a Japanese sword which was given to Yeats – see also notes to Meditations in Time of Civil War.

Montashigi: may refer to ‘Osafune Motoshigé’ – not a person but a Japanese sword-making tradition from the 14th Century onwards. (Information is from http://adilegian.com/yeats.htm)

↑

The Crazed Moon

Crazed through much child-bearing

The moon is staggering in the sky;

Moon-struck by the despairing

Glances of her wandering eye

We grope, and grope in vain,

For children born of her pain.

Children dazed or dead!

When she in all her virginal pride

First trod on the mountain’s head

What stir ran through the countryside

Where every foot obeyed her glance!

What manhood led the dance!

Fly-catchers of the moon,

Our hands are blenched, our fingers seem

But slender needles of bone;

Blenched by that malicious dream

They are spread wide that each

May rend what comes in reach.

↑

Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931

Under my window-ledge the waters race,

Otters below and moor-hens on the top,

Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven’s face

Then darkening through ‘dark’ Raftery’s ‘cellar’ drop,

Run underground, rise in a rocky place

In Coole demesne, and there to finish up

Spread to a lake and drop into a hole.

What’s water but the generated soul?

Upon the border of that lake’s a wood

Now all dry sticks under a wintry sun,

And in a copse of beeches there I stood,

For Nature’s pulled her tragic buskin on

And all the rant’s a mirror of my mood:

At sudden thunder of the mounting swan

I turned about and looked where branches break

The glittering reaches of the flooded lake.

Another emblem there! That stormy white

But seems a concentration of the sky;

And, like the soul, it sails into the sight

And in the morning’s gone, no man knows why;

And is so lovely that it sets to right

What knowledge or its lack had set awry,

So arrogantly pure, a child might think

It can be murdered with a spot of ink.

Sound of a stick upon the floor, a sound

From somebody that toils from chair to chair;

Beloved books that famous hands have bound,

Old marble heads, old pictures everywhere;

Great rooms where travelled men and children found

Content or joy; a last inheritor

Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame

Or out of folly into folly came.

A spot whereon the founders lived and died

Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,

Or gardens rich in memory glorified

Marriages, alliances and families,

And every bride’s ambition satisfied.

Where fashion or mere fantasy decrees

We shift about – all that great glory spent –

Like some poor Arab tribesman and his tent.

We were the last romantics – chose for theme

Traditional sanctity and loveliness;

Whatever’s written in what poets name

The book of the people; whatever most can bless

The mind of man or elevate a rhyme;

But all is changed, that high horse riderless,

Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode

Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.

Notes

Coole Park was the home of the Gregory family, a few miles from Yeats's home at Thoor Ballylee (see also the notes to The Wild Swans at Coole).

‘dark’ Raftery’s ‘cellar’: Anthony Raftery was a blind Irish poet and singer. In a radio broadcast of 1937, Yeats said: “The river that passed my window sank into the earth in a round pool which the blind, or dark, poet Raftery called a cellar, then rose again and fell into a lake in Lady Gregory’s park.”

↑

For Anne Gregory

‘Never shall a young man,

Thrown into despair

By those great honey-coloured

Ramparts at your ear,

Love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.’

‘But I can get a hair-dye

And set such colour there,

Brown, or black, or carrot,

That young men in despair

May love me for myself alone

And not my yellow hair.’

‘I heard an old religious man

But yesternight declare

That he had found a text to prove

That only God, my dear,

Could love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.’

↑

The Choice

The intellect of man is forced to choose

Perfection of the life, or of the work,

And if it take the second must refuse

A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

When all that story's finished, what’s the news?

In luck or out the toil has left its mark:

That old perplexity an empty purse,

Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

↑

Byzantium

The unpurged images of day recede;

The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;

Night resonance recedes, night walkers’ song

After great cathedral gong;

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

All that man is,

All mere complexities,

The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,

Shade more than man, more image than a shade;

For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth

May unwind the winding path;

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

Breathless mouths may summon;

I hail the superhuman;

I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,

More miracle than bird or handiwork,

Planted on the star-lit golden bough,

Can like the cocks of Hades crow,

Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud

In glory of changeless metal

Common bird or petal

And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit

Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,

Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,

Where blood-begotten spirits come

And all complexities of fury leave,

Dying into a dance,

An agony of trance,

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,

Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood.

The golden smithies of the Emperor!

Marbles of the dancing floor

Break bitter furies of complexity,

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget,

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

Notes

Byzantium – see notes to Sailing to Byzantium.

Hades: in Greek mythology, the god of the underworld and of the dead; also used as a name for the land of the dead.

↑

The Mother Of God

The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare

Through the hollow of an ear;

Wings beating about the room;

The terror of all terrors that I bore

The Heavens in my womb.

Had I not found content among the shows

Every common woman knows,

Chimney corner, garden walk,

Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes

And gather all the talk?

What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,

This fallen star my milk sustains,

This love that makes my heart’s blood stop

Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones

And bids my hair stand up?

↑

Vacillation

I

Between extremities

Man runs his course;

A brand, or flaming breath,

Comes to destroy

All those antinomies

Of day and night;

The body calls it death,

The heart remorse.

But if these be right

What is joy?

II

A tree there is that from its topmost bough

Is half all glittering flame and half all green

Abounding foliage moistened with the dew;

And half is half and yet is all the scene;

And half and half consume what they renew,

And he that Attis’ image hangs between

That staring fury and the blind lush leaf

May know not what he knows, but knows not grief.

III

Get all the gold and silver that you can,

Satisfy ambition, animate

The trivial days and ram them with the sun,

And yet upon these maxims meditate:

All women dote upon an idle man

Although their children need a rich estate;

No man has ever lived that had enough

Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.

No longer in Lethean foliage caught

Begin the preparation for your death

And from the fortieth winter by that thought

Test every work of intellect or faith,

And everything that your own hands have wrought,

And call those works extravagance of breath

That are not suited for such men as come

Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

IV

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessèd and could bless.

V

Although the summer sunlight gild

Cloudy leafage of the sky,

Or wintry moonlight sink the field

In storm-scattered intricacy,

I cannot look thereon,

Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.

VI

A rivery field spread out below,

An odour of the new-mown hay

In his nostrils, the great lord of Chou

Cried, casting off the mountain snow,

‘Let all things pass away.’

Wheels by milk-white asses drawn

Where Babylon or Nineveh

Rose; some conqueror drew rein

And cried to battle-weary men,

‘Let all things pass away.’

From man’s blood-sodden heart are sprung

Those branches of the night and day

Where the gaudy moon is hung.

What’s the meaning of all song?

‘Let all things pass away.’

VII

The Soul.  Seek out reality, leave things that seem.

The Heart.  What, be a singer born and lack a theme?

The Soul.  Isaiah’s coal, what more can man desire?

The Heart.  Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!

The Soul.  Look on that fire, salvation walks within.

The Heart.  What theme had Homer but original sin?

VIII

Must we part, Von Hügel, though much alike, for we

Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?

The body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb,

Bathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come,

Healing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands perchance

Eternalised the body of a modern saint that once

Had scooped out Pharaoh’s mummy.  I – though heart might find relief

Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief

What seems most welcome in the tomb – play a predestined part.

Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said?

So get you gone, Von Hügel, though with blessings on your head.

Notes

Attis’ image: Attis was a god in ancient Greek and Phrygian mythology, and the centre of a cult.

Lethean: in Greek mythology, Lethe was the river of forgetfulness in the underworld. Its waters caused the dead to forget their former lives.

lord of Chou: possibly Zhōu Gōng, an exemplary ruler from China in the 11th century BCE, who is supposed to have written the I Ching. He was also known as the First Sage and the God of Dreams.

Babylon or Nineveh: these were important cities in ancient Mesopotamia (in modern-day Iraq) until about 600 BCE.

Isaiah’s coal: Isaiah was a Biblical prophet. The Book of Isaiah (ch. 6) contains these verses:

‘Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.’

Von Hügel: Friedrich von Hügel, a Roman Catholic theologian (1852 - 1925).

Saint Teresa: Saint Teresa of Ávila, a 16th century Carmelite nun and mystic.

The lion and the honeycomb: a Biblical story from Judges ch. 14, in which Samson, having killed a lion, returned later to find bees and a honeycomb inside the corpse. He set this riddle to the Philistines: ‘Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.’

↑

Words For Music Perhaps

Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman

I know, although when looks meet

I tremble to the bone,

The more I leave the door unlatched

The sooner love is gone,

For love is but a skein unwound

Between the dark and dawn.

A lonely ghost the ghost is

That to God shall come;

I – love’s skein upon the ground,

My body in the tomb –

Shall leap into the light lost

In my mother’s womb.

But were I left to lie alone

In an empty bed,

The skein so bound us ghost to ghost

When he turned his head

passing on the road that night,

Mine must walk when dead.

Note

Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman were fictional characters created by Yeats.

↑

Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

I met the Bishop on the road

And much said he and I.

‘Those breasts are flat and fallen now

Those veins must soon be dry;

Live in a heavenly mansion,

Not in some foul sty.’

‘Fair and foul are near of kin,

And fair needs foul,’ I cried.

‘My friends are gone, but that's a truth

Nor grave nor bed denied,

Learned in bodily lowliness

And in the heart's pride.

‘A woman can be proud and stiff

When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.’

↑

Lullaby

Beloved, may your sleep be sound

That have found it where you fed.

What were all the world’s alarms

To mighty Paris when he found

Sleep upon a golden bed

That first dawn in Helen’s arms?

Sleep, beloved, such a sleep

As did that wild Tristram know

When, the potion’s work being done,

Roe could run or doe could leap

Under oak and beechen bough,

Roe could leap or doe could run;

Such a sleep and sound as fell

Upon Eurotas’ grassy bank

When the holy bird, that there

Accomplished his predestined will,

From the limbs of Leda sank

But not from her protecting care.

Notes

Wild Tristram: Tristram (or Tristan) was a figure in Celtic legend, who took a love potion and fell in love with Iseult (or Isolde), wife of the King of Cornwall.

Eurotas: a river in Greece, here used as the scene of Leda’s rape by the god Zeus in the form of a swan.

↑

Those Dancing Days are Gone

Come, let me sing into your ear;

Those dancing days are gone,

All that silk and satin gear;

Crouch upon a stone,

Wrapping that foul body up

In as foul a rag:

I carry the sun in a golden cup.

The moon in a silver bag.

Curse as you may I sing it through;

What matter if the knave

That the most could pleasure you,

The children that he gave,

Are somewhere sleeping like a top

Under a marble flag?

I carry the sun in a golden cup.

The moon in a silver bag.

I thought it out this very day.

Noon upon the clock,

A man may put pretence away

Who leans upon a stick,

May sing, and sing until he drop,

Whether to maid or hag:

I carry the sun in a golden cup,

The moon in a silver bag.

↑

A Woman Young and Old

Father And Child

She hears me strike the board and say

That she is under ban

Of all good men and women,

Being mentioned with a man

That has the worst of all bad names;

And thereupon replies

That his hair is beautiful,

Cold as the March wind his eyes.

↑

Her Triumph

I did the dragon’s will until you came

Because I had fancied love a casual

Improvisation, or a settled game

That followed if I let the kerchief fall:

Those deeds were best that gave the minute wings

And heavenly music if they gave it wit;

And then you stood among the dragon-rings.

I mocked, being crazy, but you mastered it

And broke the chain and set my ankles free,

Saint George or else a pagan Perseus;

And now we stare astonished at the sea,

And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us.

Note

Saint George or else a pagan Perseus: Saint George killed a dragon, in some versions of the legend saving a princess who was intended as a sacrifice to it; and Perseus killed the sea serpent Cetus and rescued the princess Andromeda who was chained to a rock nearby.

↑

A Last Confession

What lively lad most pleasured me

Of all that with me lay?

I answer that I gave my soul

And loved in misery,

But had great pleasure with a lad

That I loved bodily.

Flinging from his arms I laughed

To think his passion such

He fancied that I gave a soul

Did but our bodies touch,

And laughed upon his breast to think

Beast gave beast as much.

I gave what other women gave

That stepped out of their clothes.

But when this soul, its body off,

Naked to naked goes,

He it has found shall find therein

What none other knows,

And give his own and take his own

And rule in his own right;

And though it loved in misery

Close and cling so tight,

There’s not a bird of day that dare

Extinguish that delight.

↑

From A Full Moon in March  (1935)

Parnell’s Funeral

I

Under the Great Comedian’s tomb the crowd.

A bundle of tempestuous cloud is blown

About the sky; where that is clear of cloud

Brightness remains; a brighter star shoots down;

What shudders run through all that animal blood?

What is this sacrifice? Can someone there

Recall the Cretan barb that pierced a star?

Rich foliage that the starlight glittered through,

A frenzied crowd, and where the branches sprang

A beautiful seated boy; a sacred bow;

A woman, and an arrow on a string;

A pierced boy, image of a star laid low.

That woman, the Great Mother imaging,

Cut out his heart. Some master of design

Stamped boy and tree upon Sicilian coin.

An age is the reversal of an age:

When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone,

We lived like men that watch a painted stage.

What matter for the scene, the scene once gone:

It had not touched our lives. But popular rage,

Hysterica passio dragged this quarry down.

None shared our guilt; nor did we play a part

Upon a painted stage when we devoured his heart.

Come, fix upon me that accusing eye.

I thirst for accusation. All that was sung,

All that was said in Ireland is a lie

Bred out of the contagion of the throng,

Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.

Leave nothing but the nothings that belong

To this bare soul, let all men judge that can

Whether it be an animal or a man.

II

The rest I pass, one sentence I unsay.

Had de Valera eaten Parnell’s heart

No loose-lipped demagogue had won the day.

No civil rancour torn the land apart.

Had Cosgrave eaten Parnell’s heart, the land’s

Imagination had been satisfied,

Or lacking that, government in such hands,

O’Higgins its sole statesman had not died.

Had even O’Duffy – but I name no more–

Their school a crowd, his master solitude;

Through Jonathan Swift’s dark grove he passed, and there

Plucked bitter wisdom that enriched his blood.

Notes

Parnell: Charles Stewart Parnell was a prominent and popular Irish Nationalist politician who fell from power when his long adulterous affair was revealed, creating a huge scandal that divided public opinion. He married his lover Catherine O’Shea in 1891, but died later the same year at the age of 45. His funeral in Dublin was attended by more than 200,000 mourners. (This poem was written over 40 years later.)

Great Comedian’s tomb: the tomb of Daniel O’Connell, an earlier Irish political reformer, who was buried at Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

Cretan barb: this seems to relate to a personal vision of Yeats’s, and may be linked to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Sicilian Coin: this does not seem to refer to a particular coin; but Yeats had visited Sicily with the poet Ezra Pound in the 1920’s, and there became interested in the design of coins. He suggested that the new Irish coinage should be modelled on ancient Greek/Sicilian designs.

Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone:  Robert Emmet was an Irish Republican executed in 1803 for high treason. Michael Fitzgerald helped to form the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and was jailed at Cork, where he died in a hunger strike in 1920. Wolfe Tone was a revolutionary who enlisted the help of Napoleon in planning an Irish rebellion in 1798. The rebellion failed, Tone was court-martialled and sentenced to death by hanging; however he killed himself (or some say was killed) in jail first.

Hysterica passio: panic, hysteria

de Valera: Eamon de Valera (b. 1882) was a leading Irish republican politician, who played a part in the Easter Rising of 1916 and was imprisoned. He led the political party Sinn Fein, and in 1921 became first President of the new Irish Republic. In 1926 he formed a new party, Fianna Fail, and remained active in politics until his death in 1975.

Cosgrave: William Cosgrave was a republican politician who split with de Valera in 1921 over the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which Cosgrave supported although it did not offer Ireland full independence from Britain. In the Civil War that followed he ordered prisoners to be executed without trial. From 1922 to 1932 he was President of the Executive Council. He died in 1965.

O’Higgins: Kevin O’Higgins was Cosgrave’s vice-president when he was assassinated by the IRA in 1927.

O’Duffy: Eoin O’Duffy (b. Owen Duffy) was a supporter of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, who had links with fascism. In 1933 he was dismissed by de Valera from his post as Commissioner of the Garda (Police).

Jonathan Swift’s dark grove: Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was an Anglo-Irish author best known for Gulliver’s Travels, but also a scathing political satirist.

↑

Three Songs to the Same Tune: part I

Grandfather sang it under the gallows:

‘Hear, gentlemen, ladies, and all mankind:

Money is good and a girl might be better,

But good strong blows are delights to the mind.’

There, standing on the cart,

He sang it from his heart.

Those fanatics all that we do would undo;

Down the fanatic, down the clown;

Down, down, hammer them down,

Down to the tune of O’Donnell Abu.

‘A girl I had, but she followed another,

Money I had, and it went in the night,

Strong drink I had, and it brought me to sorrow,

But a good strong cause and blows are delight.’

All there caught up the tune:

‘On, on, my darling man’.

Those fanatics all that we do would undo;

Down the fanatic, down the clown;

Down, down, hammer them down,

Down to the tune of O’Donnell Abu.

‘Money is good and a girl might be better,

No matter what happens and who takes the fall,

But a good strong cause’ – the rope gave a jerk there,

No more sang he, for his throat was too small;

But he kicked before he died,

He did it out of pride.

Those fanatics all that we do would undo;

Down the fanatic, down the clown;

Down, down, hammer them down,

Down to the tune of O’Donnell Abu.

Note

Tune of O’Donnell Abu: ‘O’Donnell Abu’ was a traditional song with lyrics written in 1843, about the 16th Century Gaelic lord Red Hugh O’Donnell. Abu is a Gaelic war cry.

↑

A Prayer for Old Age

God guard me from those thoughts men think

In the mind alone;

He that sings a lasting song

Thinks in a marrow-bone;

From all that makes a wise old man

That can be praised of all;

O what am I that I should not seem

For the song's sake a fool?

I pray – for fashion’s word is out

And prayer comes round again–

That I may seem, though I die old,

A foolish, passionate man.

↑

Supernatural Songs IV:

There

There all the barrel-hoops are knit,

There all the serpent-tails are bit,

There all the gyres converge in one,

There all the planets drop in the Sun.

↑

Supernatural Songs IX:

The Four Ages of Man

He with body waged a fight,

But body won; it walks upright.

Then he struggled with the heart;

Innocence and peace depart.

Then he struggled with the mind;

His proud heart he left behind.

Now his wars on God begin;

At stroke of midnight God shall win.

↑

Supernatural Songs XII:

Meru

Civilisation is hooped together, brought

Under a rule, under the semblance of peace

By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought,

And he, despite his terror, cannot cease

Ravening through century after century,

Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come

Into the desolation of reality:

Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!

Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,

Caverned in night under the drifted snow,

Or where that snow and winter’s dreadful blast

Beat down upon their naked bodies, know

That day bring round the night, that before dawn

His glory and his monuments are gone.

Note

Meru: Mount Meru is a sacred five-peaked mountain, and the centre of the spiritual universe, in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology.

↑

From Last Poems  (1936 – 1939)

The Gyres

The gyres! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;

Things thought too long can be no longer thought,

For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,

And ancient lineaments are blotted out.

Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;

Empedocles has thrown all things about;

Hector is dead and there’s a light in Troy;

We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.

What matter though numb nightmare ride on top,

And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?

What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop,

A greater, a more gracious time has gone;

For painted forms or boxes of make-up

In ancient tombs I sighed, but not again;

What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,

And all it knows is that one word ‘Rejoice!’

Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul,

What matter? Those that Rocky Face holds dear,

Lovers of horses and of women, shall,

From marble of a broken sepulchre,

Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,

Or any rich, dark nothing disinter

The workman, noble and saint, and all things run

On that unfashionable gyre again.

Notes

gyres: spirals or spiralling systems; vortices

Old Rocky Face: it is uncertain what this alludes to: possibly the Delphic Oracle, or it may be just a symbol of elemental power.

↑

Lapis Lazuli

I have heard that hysterical women say

They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,

Of poets that are always gay,

For everybody knows or else should know

That if nothing drastic is done

Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,

Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in

Until the town lie beaten flat.

All perform their tragic play,

There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,

That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;

Yet they, should the last scene be there,

The great stage curtain about to drop,

If worthy their prominent part in the play,

Do not break up their lines to weep.

They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;

Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.

All men have aimed at, found and lost;

Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:

Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.

Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,

And all the drop-scenes drop at once

Upon a hundred thousand stages,

It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,

Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,

Old civilisations put to the sword.

Then they and their wisdom went to rack:

No handiwork of Callimachus,

Who handled marble as if it were bronze,

Made draperies that seemed to rise

When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;

His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem

Of a slender palm, stood but a day;

All things fall and are built again,

And those that build them again are gay.

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,

Are carved in lapis lazuli,

Over them flies a long-legged bird,

A symbol of longevity;

The third, doubtless a serving-man,

Carries a musical instrument.

Every discoloration of the stone,

Every accidental crack or dent,

Seems a water-course or an avalanche,

Or lofty slope where it still snows

Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch

Sweetens the little half-way house

Those Chinamen climb towards, and I

Delight to imagine them seated there;

There, on the mountain and the sky,

On all the tragic scene they stare.

One asks for mournful melodies;

Accomplished fingers begin to play.

Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,

Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

Notes

King Billy: the British King William III who defeated the deposed Catholic King James II in 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne in Co. Meath.

Callimachus: sculptor in ancient Greece, famous for his draped figures; his works survive only in Roman copies.  He designed a golden lamp with a bronze palm branch hung above it.

↑

An Acre of Grass

Picture and book remain,

An acre of green grass

For air and exercise,

Now strength of body goes;

Midnight, an old house

Where nothing stirs but a mouse.

My temptation is quiet.

Here at life’s end

Neither loose imagination,

Nor the mill of the mind

Consuming its rag and bone,

Can make the truth known.

Grant me an old man's frenzy,

Myself must I remake

Till I am Timon and Lear

Or that William Blake

Who beat upon the wall

Till Truth obeyed his call;

A mind Michael Angelo knew

That can pierce the clouds,

Or inspired by frenzy

Shake the dead in their shrouds;

Forgotten else by mankind,

An old man’s eagle mind.

↑

What Then?

His chosen comrades thought at school

He must grow a famous man;

He thought the same and lived by rule,

All his twenties crammed with toil;

‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost. ‘What then?’

Everything he wrote was read,

After certain years he won

Sufficient money for his need,

Friends that have been friends indeed;

‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost. ‘What then?’

All his happier dreams came true –

A small old house, wife, daughter, son,

Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,

Poets and Wits about him drew;

‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost. ‘What then?’

‘The work is done,’ grown old he thought,

‘According to my boyish plan;

Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,

Something to perfection brought’;

But louder sang that ghost, ‘What then?’

Note

Plato: ancient Greek philosopher and pupil of Socrates, much concerned with the nature of the Good and how to live a good life, with reason, appetite and spirit in balance.

↑

The Ghost Of Roger Casement

O what has made that sudden noise?

What on the threshold stands?

It never crossed the sea because

John Bull and the sea are friends;

But this is not the old sea

Nor this the old seashore.

What gave that roar of mockery,

That roar in the sea’s roar?

The ghost of Roger Casement

Is beating on the door.

John Bull has stood for Parliament,

A dog must have his day,

The country thinks no end of him,

For he knows how to say,

At a beanfeast or a banquet,

That all must hang their trust

Upon the British Empire,

Upon the Church of Christ.

The ghost of Roger Casement

Is beating on the door.

John Bull has gone to India

And all must pay him heed,

For histories are there to prove

That none of another breed

Has had a like inheritance,

Or sucked such milk as he,

And there’s no luck about a house

If it lack honesty.

The ghost of Roger Casement

Is beating on the door.

I poked about a village church

And found his family tomb

And copied out what I could read

In that religious gloom;

Found many a famous man there;

But fame and virtue rot.

Draw round, beloved and bitter men,

Draw round and raise a shout;

The ghost of Roger Casement

Is beating on the door.

Note

Roger Casement: a British civil servant who was Consul in several African countries before retiring to Ireland in 1912. There he became sympathetic with Irish nationalists and tried unsuccessfully to enlist the aid of the German army in helping the nationalist cause. In 1916 he was arrested and executed for treason.

John Bull: a symbolic English character invented in the 18th Century and adopted by numerous authors and cartoonists: though often portrayed as a stout, middle-aged, jovial man, he was also satirized as stupid and narrow-minded.

↑

Come Gather Round Me, Parnellites

Come gather round me, Parnellites,

And praise our chosen man;

Stand upright on your legs awhile,

Stand upright while you can,

For soon we lie where he is laid,

And he is underground;

Come fill up all those glasses

And pass the bottle round.

And here’s a cogent reason,

And I have many more,

He fought the might of England

And saved the Irish poor,

Whatever good a farmer’s got

He brought it all to pass;

And here’s another reason,

That Parnell loved a lass.

And here’s a final reason,

He was of such a kind

Every man that sings a song

Keeps Parnell in his mind.

For Parnell was a proud man,

No prouder trod the ground,

And a proud man’s a lovely man,

So pass the bottle round.

The Bishops and the Party

That tragic story made,

A husband that had sold his wife

And after that betrayed;

But stories that live longest

Are sung above the glass,

And Parnell loved his country,

And Parnell loved his lass.

Note

Parnell: see notes to Parnell’s Funeral

↑

Those Images

What if I bade you leave

The cavern of the mind?

There’s better exercise

In the sunlight and wind.

I never bade you go

To Moscow or to Rome.

Renounce that drudgery,

Call the Muses home.

Seek those images

That constitute the wild,

The lion and the virgin,

The harlot and the child.

Find in middle air

An eagle on the wing,

Recognise the five

That make the Muses sing.

↑

The Municipal Gallery Revisited

I

Around me the images of thirty years:

An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side;

Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars,

Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride;

Kevin O’Higgins’ countenance that wears

A gentle questioning look that cannot hide

A soul incapable of remorse or rest;

A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed;

II

An Abbot or Archbishop with an upraised hand

Blessing the Tricolour. ‘This is not,’ I say,

‘The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland

The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.’

Before a woman’s portrait suddenly I stand,

Beautiful and gentle in her Venetian way.

I met her all but fifty years ago

For twenty minutes in some studio.

III

Heart-smitten with emotion I sink down,

My heart recovering with covered eyes;

Wherever I had looked I had looked upon

My permanent or impermanent images:

Augusta Gregory’s son; her sister’s son,

Hugh Lane, ‘onlie begetter’ of all these;

Hazel Lavery living and dying, that tale

As though some ballad-singer had sung it all;

IV

Mancini’s portrait of Augusta Gregory,

‘Greatest since Rembrandt,’ according to John Synge;

A great ebullient portrait certainly;

But where is the brush that could show anything

Of all that pride and that humility?

And I am in despair that time may bring

Approved patterns of women or of men

But not that selfsame excellence again.

V

My mediaeval knees lack health until they bend,

But in that woman, in that household where

Honour had lived so long, all lacking found.

Childless I thought, ‘My children may find here

Deep-rooted things,’ but never foresaw its end,

And now that end has come I have not wept;

No fox can foul the lair the badger swept–

VI

(An image out of Spenser and the common tongue).

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought

All that we did, all that we said or sang

Must come from contact with the soil, from that

Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

We three alone in modern times had brought

Everything down to that sole test again,

Dream of the noble and the beggar-man.

VII

And here’s John Synge himself, that rooted man,

‘Forgetting human words,’ a grave deep face.

You that would judge me, do not judge alone

This book or that, come to this hallowed place

Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;

Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,

And say my glory was I had such friends.

Notes

Municipal Gallery: The Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin was founded by art collector, Sir Hugh Lane in 1908 (see also notes to September 1913). It is now called the Hugh Lane Gallery.

Casement: see note to The Ghost of Roger Casement.

Griffith: Arthur Griffith, member of the IRA and leader of Sinn Fein, who died in 1922.

Kevin O’Higgins: Republican politician assassinated by the IRA in 1927.

Hazel Lavery: wife of the artist Sir John Lavery; she figured in over 400 portraits by him. One, showing her as a personification of Ireland, was used on Irish banknotes from 1928 onwards. She was a friend of several republicans including Kevin O’Higgins.

Mancini’s portrait of Augusta Gregory: Antonio Mancini (1852 – 1930) was an Italian artist who painted Lady Gregory in 1907.

No fox can foul the lair the badger swept: this is a reference to Edmund Spenser’s poem of 1591, The Ruines of Time, about the transience of earthly glory. A stanza about the death of the Earl of Leicester contains the lines:

“He now is dead, and with him all is dead,

Save what in heavens storehouse he uplaid:

His hope is faild, and come to passe his dread,

And evill men, now dead, his deeds upbraid:

Spite bites the dead, that living never baid.

He now is gone, the whiles the Fox is crept

Into the hole, the which the Badger swept.”

Yeats had edited an selection of Spenser’s verse in 1906.

John Synge: John Millington Synge was an Irish playwright and friend of Yeats and Lady Gregory. He helped co-found the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where his best-known play, The Playboy of the Western World, caused riots during its first performances in 1907. He died in 1909.

Antaeus: in Greek mythology, the son of the gods Poseidon and Gaea (Earth). His immense strength made him invincible until he was defeated by Heracles.

↑

The Statues

Pythagoras planned it. Why did the people stare?

His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move

In marble or in bronze, lacked character.

But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love

Of solitary beds, knew what they were,

That passion could bring character enough,

And pressed at midnight in some public place

Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.

No! Greater than Pythagoras, for the men

That with a mallet or a chisel modelled these

Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down

All Asiatic vague immensities,

And not the banks of oars that swam upon

The many-headed foam at Salamis.

Europe put off that foam when Phidias

Gave women dreams and dreams their looking-glass.

One image crossed the many-headed, sat

Under the tropic shade, grew round and slow,

No Hamlet thin from eating flies, a fat

Dreamer of the Middle Ages. Empty eyeballs knew

That knowledge increases unreality, that

Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.

When gong and conch declare the hour to bless

Grimalkin crawls to Buddha’s emptiness.

When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side.

What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect,

What calculation, number, measurement, replied?

We Irish, born into that ancient sect

But thrown upon this filthy modern tide

And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,

Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace

The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.

Notes

Pythagoras: philosopher and mathematician of ancient Greece: he influenced Greek sculptors and architects who believed that a mathematical formula could be found for aesthetic perfection.

plummet: plumb-line

Salamis: in the naval battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, the Greeks repelled the invading Persians.

Phidias: a major Greek sculptor and architect of the 5th Century BCE.

Grimalkin: an old name for a cat, sometimes a witch’s cat.

Pearse: Patrick Pearse was one of the leaders of the Easter Uprising of 1916, when he read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic outside the General Post Office. He was later executed by firing squad.

Cuchulain: warrior-hero in Irish mythology.

↑

Long-Legged Fly

That civilisation may not sink,

Its great battle lost,

Quiet the dog, tether the pony

To a distant post;

Our master Caesar is in the tent

Where the maps are spread,

His eyes fixed upon nothing,

A hand upon his head.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence.

That the topless towers be burnt

And men recall that face,

Move most gently if move you must

In this lonely place.

She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,

That nobody looks; her feet

Practise a tinker shuffle

Picked up on a street.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

Her mind moves upon silence.

That girls at puberty may find

The first Adam in their thought,

Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,

Keep those children out.

There on that scaffolding resides

Michael Angelo.

With no more sound than the mice make

His hand moves to and fro.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence.

Note

Topless towers: Troy. The phrase was used by Christopher Marlowe in his play Doctor Faustus, in which Faustus says of Helen, “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” (Ilium is another name for Troy.)

↑

A Bronze Head

Here at right of the entrance this bronze head,

Human, superhuman, a bird’s round eye,

Everything else withered and mummy-dead.

What great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky

(Something may linger there though all else die;)

And finds there nothing to make its terror less

Hysterica passio of its own emptiness?

No dark tomb-haunter once; her form all full

As though with magnanimity of light,

Yet a most gentle woman; who can tell

Which of her forms has shown her substance right?

Or maybe substance can be composite,

Profound McTaggart thought so, and in a breath

A mouthful held the extreme of life and death.

But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,

I saw the wildness in her and I thought

A vision of terror that it must live through

Had shattered her soul. Propinquity had brought

Imagination to that pitch where it casts out

All that is not itself: I had grown wild

And wandered murmuring everywhere, ‘My child, my child!’

Or else I thought her supernatural;

As though a sterner eye looked through her eye

On this foul world in its decline and fall;

On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,

Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,

Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave,

And wondered what was left for massacre to save.

Notes

A bronze head: the poem refers to a plaster head of Maud Gonne, painted bronze, by Lawrence Campbell; it was in the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art.

Hysterica passio: hysteria, panic.

McTaggart: John M. E. McTaggart (1866 – 1925) was a distinguished Hegelian philosopher, noted for his books The Unreality of Time and Human Immortality and Pre-existence.

↑

Hound Voice

Because we love bare hills and stunted trees

And were the last to choose the settled ground,

Its boredom of the desk or of the spade, because

So many years companioned by a hound,

Our voices carry; and though slumber-bound,

Some few half wake and half renew their choice,

Give tongue, proclaim their hidden name – ‘Hound Voice.’

The women that I picked spoke sweet and low

And yet gave tongue. ‘Hound Voices’ were they all.

We picked each other from afar and knew

What hour of terror comes to test the soul,

And in that terror’s name obeyed the call,

And understood, what none have understood,

Those images that waken in the blood.

Some day we shall get up before the dawn

And find our ancient hounds before the door,

And wide awake know that the hunt is on;

Stumbling upon the blood-dark track once more,

Then stumbling to the kill beside the shore;

Then cleaning out and bandaging of wounds,

And chants of victory amid the encircling hounds.

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Why Should not Old Men be Mad?

Why should not old men be mad?

Some have known a likely lad

That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist

Turn to a drunken journalist;

A girl that knew all Dante once

Live to bear children to a dunce;

A Helen of social welfare dream,

Climb on a wagonette to scream.

Some think it a matter of course that chance

Should starve good men and bad advance,

That if their neighbours figured plain,

As though upon a lighted screen,

No single story would they find

Of an unbroken happy mind,

A finish worthy of the start.

Young men know nothing of this sort,

Observant old men know it well;

And when they know what old books tell,

And that no better can be had,

Know why an old man should be mad.

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The Circus Animals’ Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last, being but a broken man,

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show,

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes?

First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose

Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,

Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,

Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,

That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;

But what cared I that set him on to ride,

I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride?

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,

The Countess Cathleen was the name I gave it;

She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,

But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.

I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,

So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough

This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread

Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;

Heart- mysteries there, and yet when all is said

It was the dream itself enchanted me:

Character isolated by a deed

To engross the present and dominate memory.

Players and painted stage took all my love,

And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start,

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Notes

Oisin (or Ossian): mythological Irish warrior-poet, about whom Yeats had written his long dramatic poem of 1889, The Wanderings of Oisin.

The Countess Cathleen was Yeats’s first play, written in 1892: it tells a fable of poor peasants aided by a generous countess who signs away her soul to save them.

Fool and Blind Man, Cuchulain: all characters in Yeats’s play of 1903, On Baile’s Strand, in which the mythical Irish hero Cuchulain dies in battle with the sea.

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Cuchulain Comforted

A man that had six mortal wounds, a man

Violent and famous, strode among the dead;

Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.

Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head

Came and were gone.  He leant upon a tree

As though to meditate on wounds and blood.

A Shroud that seemed to have authority

Among those bird-like things came, and let fall

A bundle of linen.  Shrouds by two and three

Came creeping up because the man was still.

And thereupon that linen-carrier said:

‘Your life can grow much sweeter if you will

‘Obey our ancient rule and make a shroud;

Mainly because of what we only know

The rattle of those arms makes us afraid.

‘We thread the needles’ eyes, and all we do

All must together do.’ That done, the man

Took up the nearest and began to sew.

‘Now must we sing and sing the best we can,

But first you must be told our character:

Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain

‘Or driven from home and left to die in fear.’

They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,

Though all was done in common as before;

They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.

Note

Cuchulain: mythical Irish hero who figured in many of Yeats’s poems and plays.

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Under Ben Bulben

I

Swear by what the Sages spoke

Round the Mareotic Lake

That the Witch of Atlas knew,

Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.

Swear by those horsemen, by those women

Complexion and form prove superhuman,

That pale, long-visaged company

That air in immortality

Completeness of their passions won;

Now they ride the wintry dawn

Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.

Here’s the gist of what they mean.

II

Many times man lives and dies

Between his two eternities,

That of race and that of soul,

And ancient Ireland knew it all.

Whether man die in his bed

Or the rifle knocks him dead,

A brief parting from those dear

Is the worst man has to fear.

Though grave-diggers’ toil is long,

Sharp their spades, their muscles strong

They but thrust their buried men

Back in the human mind again.

III

You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard,

‘Send war in our time, O Lord!’

Know that when all words are said

And a man is fighting mad,

Something drops from eyes long blind,

He completes his partial mind,

For an instant stands at ease,

Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.

Even the wisest man grows tense

With some sort of violence

Before he can accomplish fate,

Know his work or choose his mate.

IV

Poet and sculptor, do the work,

Nor let the modish painter shirk

What his great forefathers did,

Bring the soul of man to God,

Make him fill the cradles right.

Measurement began our might:

Forms a stark Egyptian thought,

Forms that gentler Phidias wrought.

Michael Angelo left a proof

On the Sistine Chapel roof,

Where but half-awakened Adam

Can disturb globe-trotting Madam

Till her bowels are in heat,

Proof that there’s a purpose set

Before the secret working mind:

Profane perfection of mankind.

Quattrocento put in paint

On backgrounds for a God or Saint

Gardens where a soul’s at ease;

Where everything that meets the eye,

Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,

Resemble forms that are or seem

When sleepers wake and yet still dream,

And when it’s vanished still declare,

With only bed and bedstead there,

That heavens had opened.

Gyres run on;

When that greater dream had gone

Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,

Prepared a rest for the people of God,

Palmer’s phrase, but after that

Confusion fell upon our thought.

V

Irish poets, learn your trade,

Sing whatever is well made,

Scorn the sort now growing up

All out of shape from toe to top,

Their unremembering hearts and heads

Base-born products of base beds.

Sing the peasantry, and then

Hard-riding country gentlemen,

The holiness of monks, and after

Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter;

Sing the lords and ladies gay

That were beaten into the clay

Through seven heroic centuries;

Cast your mind on other days

That we in coming days may be

Still the indomitable Irishry.

VI

Under bare Ben Bulben’s head

In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.

An ancestor was rector there

Long years ago, a church stands near,

By the road an ancient cross.

No marble, no conventional phrase;

On limestone quarried near the spot

By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by!

Notes

Ben Bulben: a large hill with a flat, ridged top, in County Sligo, Ireland.

Mareotic Lake: Lake Mariout, in Egypt. Philo, an Alexandrian philosopher of the 1st Century, wrote in his De Vita Contemplativa about a Jewish sect of hermits called the Therapeutae who lived beyond the Mareotic Lake.

Witch of Atlas: character from a fantasy poem of the same name (1824) by Shelley; a mysterious and beautiful witch, she travelled through Egypt and told humans that death was not to be feared.

Mitchel’s prayer: John Mitchel (1815 – 1875) was a Irish nationalist who advocated the taking up of arms against the state.

Phidias: pre-eminent sculptor of ancient Greece in the 5th Century BCE.

Quattrocento: 15th Century in Italy, the start of the Renaissance.

Calvert and Wilson: may refer to painters Edward Calvert (1799 – 1883) and Richard Wilson (1714 – 1782).

Blake and Claude: The visionary artist and writer William Blake, and the 17th Century landscape artist Claude Lorrain.

Palmer: Samuel Palmer (1805 – 1881) landscape artist and follower of Blake.

Drumcliff (or Drumcliffe): a village in County Sligo, western Ireland. Yeats died in France in 1939, but in 1948 his remains were brought to Ireland and re-interred in Drumcliff churchyard (although it has been reported that this bones were mixed up with someone else’s.) His headstone at Drumcliff bears this inscription, taken from the last lines of the poem:

Cast a cold Eye

On Life, on Death.

Horseman, pass by!

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Other poetry ebooks which are free to download from

www.englishliteratureebooks.com:

English Poetry of Landscape: An Anthology 1370 – 1928

The Poetry of Sleep: An Anthology 1370 – 1930

Tennyson – Selected Poems

John Clare – Selected Poems

John Keats – Selected Poems

John Donne – Selected Poems

These poetry collections are based on works in the public domain. They are created as labours of love; you are welcome to share or copy them for any non-commercial purpose.

At the same website you will also find abridged classic novels, downloadable as free ebooks.

Ebooks are compiled and edited by Emma Laybourn MA, PGCE.

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