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W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats

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.

#Irish #NobelPrize #XIXCentury #XXCentury

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A Bronze Head

HERE at right of the entrance th… Human, superhuman, a bird’s round… Everything else withered and mummy… What great tomb-haunter sweeps the… (Something may linger there though…
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We, who seven years ago Talked of honour and of truth, Shriek with pleasure if we show The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s t…
The Folly of Being Comforted

ONE that is ever kind said yester… ‘Your well-beloved’s hair has thre… And little shadows come about her… Time can but make it easier to be… Though now it seems impossible, an…
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Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. T… In one another’s arms, birds in th… —Those dying generations—at their… The salmon—falls, the mackerel—cro… Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all…
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Against Unworthy Praise

O heart, be at peace, because Nor knave nor dolt can break What’s not for their applause, Being for a woman’s sake. Enough if the work has seemed,
Chosen

The lot of love is chosen. I lea… Struggling for an image on the tra… Of the whirling Zodiac. Scarce did he my body touch, Scarce sank he from the west
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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 he…
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The Ballad of Father Gilligan

The old priest Peter Gilligan Was weary night and day For half his flock were in their b… Or under green sods lay. Once, while he nodded in a chair
Adam’s Curse

WE sat together at one summer’s e… That beautiful mild woman, your cl… And you and I, and talked of poet… I said, 'A line will take us hour… Yet if it does not seem a moment’s…
Leda and the Swan, by Peter Paul Rubens
Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings bea… Above the staggering girl, her thi… By the dark webs, her nape caught… He holds her helpless breast upon… How can those terrified vague fing…
 9
A Man Young and Old: IV. the Death of the Hare

I have pointed out the yelling pac… The hare leap to the wood, And when I pass a compliment Rejoice as lover should At the drooping of an eye,
The Witch

TOIL and grow rich, What’s that but to lie With a foul witch And after, drained dry, To be brought
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,
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From the 'Antigone’

Overcome—O bitter sweetness, Inhabitant of the soft cheek of a… The rich man and his affairs, The fat flocks and the fields’ fat… Mariners, rough harvesters;
On Hearing That the Students of Our New University Have Joined the Agitation Against Immoral Literature

Where, where but here have pride a… That long to give themselves for w… To shake their wicked sides at you… Restraining reckless middle-age?



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