W. B. Yeats

“ A mimicry of youth. Can poet’s thought
That springs from body and in body falls
Like this pure jet, now lost amid blue sky
Now bathing lily leaf and fishes’ scale,
Be mimicry?’ ‘What matter if our souls
Are nearer to the surface of the body
Than souls that start no game and turn no rhyme!
The soul’s own youth and not the body’s youth
Shows through our lineaments. My candle’s bright,
My lantern is too loyal not to show
That it was made in your great father’s reign.’
‘And yet the jasmine season warms our blood.’
‘Great prince, forgive the freedom of my speech ”

“ 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. ”

“ When I wrote the lines about Plato and Plotinus I forgot that it is something in our own eyes that makes us see them as all transcendence. Has not Plotinus written: ‘Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun ”

“ While their great wooden dice beat on the board.
As I would question all, come all who can;
Come old, necessitous, half-mounted man;
And bring beauty’s blind rambling celebrant;
The red man the juggler sent
Through God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,
Gifted with so fine an ear;
The man drowned in a bog’s mire,
When mocking muses chose the country wench.
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 ”

“ Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man; Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain. ”

“ Stretch out your limbs and sleep a long Saturnian sleep;
I have loved you better than my soul for all my words,
And there is none so fit to keep a watch and keep
Unwearied eyes upon those horrible green birds.
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 history,
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. ”

“ When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
So the platonic year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of gong.
III
Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,
An image of its state ”

“ 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 ”

“ I have a ring with a hawk and a butterfly upon it, to symbolise the straight road of logic, and so of mechanism, and the crooked road of intuition: ‘For wisdom is a butterfly and not a gloomy bird of prey’. ”

“ Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;
And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
According to the wind, for all are blind.
But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks. ”

“ Owen Ahern and His Dancers
I
A strange thing surely that my heart when love had come unsought
Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,
Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.
It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.
The south wind brought it longing, and the east wind despair,
The west wind made it pitiful, and the north wind afraid.
It feared to give its love a hurt with all the tempest there;
It feared the hurt that she could give and therefore it went mad. ”

“ To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole. ”

“ And my sleep is gone.
His Memories
We should be hidden from their eyes,
Being but holy shows
And bodies broken like a thorn
Whereon the bleak north blows,
To think of buried Hector
And that none living knows. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked—and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.
VI
Violence upon the roads: violence of horses ”

“ The peasant beauty and the blind poet are Mary Hynes and Raftery, and the incident of the man drowned in Cloone Bog is recorded in my Celtic Twilight. Hanrahan’s pursuit of the phantom hare and hounds is from my Stories of Red Hanrahan. The ghosts have been seen at their game of dice in what is now my bedroom, and the old bankrupt man lived about a hundred years ago. ”

“ The country people see at times certain apparitions whom they name now ‘fallen angels’, now ‘ancient inhabitants of the country’, and describe as riding at whiles ‘with flowers upon the heads of the horses’. ”

“ They forbade us to leave the house, but were otherwise polite, even saying at last ‘Goodnight, thank you’ as though we had given them the bridge.
Section Six
In the West of Ireland we call a starling a stare, and during the civil war one built in a hole in the masonry by my bedroom window.
Section Seven, Stanza II
The cry ‘Vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay’, Grand Master of the Templars, seems to me fit symbol for those who labour from hatred, and so for sterility in various kinds. ”

“ CONTENTS Sailing to Byzantium The Tower Meditations in Time of Civil War Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen The Wheel Youth and Age The New Faces A Prayer for My Son Two Songs from a Play Wisdom Leda and the Swan On a Picture of a Black Centaur Among School Children Colonus’ Praise The Hero, The Girl, and The Fool Owen Ahern and His Dancers A Man Young and Old The Three Monuments From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid All Souls’ Night
Notes
Sailing to Byzantium
I
That is no country for old men. ”

“ 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 SAILING TO BYZANTIUM Stanza IV
I have read somewhere that in the Emperor’s palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang.
THE TOWER. Part II
The persons mentioned are associated by legend, story and tradition with the neighbourhood of Thoor Ballylee or Ballylee Castle, where the poem was written. Mrs. ”