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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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Other works by W. B. Yeats...
A Drunken Man’s Praise of Sobriety

COME swish around, my pretty punk, And keep me dancing still That I may stay a sober man Although I drink my fill. Sobriety is a jewel

The Nineteenth Century and After

Though the great song return no more There’s keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave.

#1933 #TheWindingStairAndOtherPoems

The Man and the Echo

Man IN a cleft that’s christened Alt Under broken stone I halt At the bottom of a pit That broad noon has never lit,

 2
The Blessed

Cumhal called out, bending his head, Till Dathi came and stood, With a blink in his eyes, at the cave-mo… Between the wind and the wood. And Cumhal said, bending his knees,

#1899 #TheWindAmongTheReeds

 1
The Realists

HOPE that you may understand! What can books of men that wive In a dragon-guarded land, paintings of the dolphin-drawn Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons

 2
 1
To a Shade

IF you have revisited the town, thin Sh… Whether to look upon your monument (I wonder if the builder has been paid) Or happier-thoughted when the day is spe… To drink of that salt breath out of the…

When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound

When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enw… A shining web, a floating ribbon of clot… It seemed that a dragon of air Had fallen among dancers, had whirled th… Or hurried them off on its own furious p…

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 hurl… In shadowy pools, when armies fled;

#1899 #TheWindAmongTheReeds

Shepherd and Goatherd

Shepherd. That cry’s from the first cuc… I wished before it ceased. Goatherd. Nor bird nor bea… Could make me wish for anything this day… Being old, but that the old alone might…

The Magi

NOW as at all times I can see in the m… In their stiff, painted clothes, the pal… Appear and disappear in the blue depth o… With all their ancient faces like rain-b… And all their helms of silver hovering s…

 1
High Talk

PROCESSIONS that lack high stilts h… What if my great-granddad had a pair tha… And mine were but fifteen foot, no moder… Some rogue of the world stole them to pa… Because piebald ponies, led bears, caged…

Man and the Echo

Man. In a cleft that’s christened Alt Under broken stone I halt At the bottom of a pit That broad noon has never lit, And shout a secret to the stone.

 1
Before the World Was Made

If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror,

Hanrahan Reproves the Curlew

O, curlew, cry no more in the air, Or only to the waters in the West; Because your crying brings to my mind Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair That was shaken out over my breast:

A Nativity

WHAT woman hugs her infant there? Another star has shot an ear. What made the drapery glisten so? Not a man but Delacroix. What made the ceiling waterproof?




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