William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish symbolist poet, dramatist and mystic. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He compiled the Oxford Book of Modern Verse.


 * See also: The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats

Quotes





 * The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
 * Letter to Frederick J. Gregg (undated, Sligo, late summer, 1886)


 * This melancholy London. I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
 * Letter to Katharine Tynan (25 August 1888)


 * I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all — the colleges I mean — like an opera.
 * Letter to Katharine Tynan (25 August 1888)


 * I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal, — that is they have ceased to be self-centered, have given up their individuality.... The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.
 * Letter to Katharine Tynan (30 August 1888)


 * Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses. Poets are the policemen of language; they are always arresting those old reprobates the words.
 * Letter to Ellen O'Leary (3 February 1889)


 * The years like great black oxen tread the world, And God the herdsman goads them on behind, And I am broken by their passing feet.
 * The Countess Cathleen, last lines (1892)


 * We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
 * "Earth, Fire and Water" from The Celtic Twilight (1893)


 * The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
 * Letter to the Editor, Dublin Daily Express (27 February 1895)


 * The friends that have it I do wrong Whenever I remake a song Should know what issue is at stake, It is myself that I remake.
 * The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, II, preliminary poem (1908)


 * In dreams begins responsibility.
 * Epigraph to the book Responsibilities (1914); this was later adapted as the title of the story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" (1937) by Delmore Schwartz.


 * Do what you will. I do not understand stops. I write my work so completely for the ear that I feel helpless when I have to measure pauses by stops & commas.
 * In letter, W.B. Yeats, Chiswell, Oxford, 13 July 1915 to Bridges


 * We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
 * Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918): Anima Hominis, part v


 * One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: "Hammer your thoughts into unity." For days I could think of nothing else, and for years I tested all I did by that sentence.
 * "If I Were Four-and-Twenty," printed in Irish Statesman (23 August 1919)


 * I agree about Shaw — he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.
 * Letter to George William Russell (1 July 1921)


 * This country will not always be an uncomfortable place for a country gentleman to live in, and it is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am afraid that Labour disagrees with me in that. On this matter I am a crusted Tory. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says "there is no wisdom without leisure."
 * Speech, (28 March 1923), Seanad Éireann (Irish Free Senate), on the Damage to Property (Compensation) Bill


 * I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
 * Speech (7 June 1923), Seanad Éireann (Irish Free Senate), on the Censorship of Films Bill.


 * The official designs of the Government, especially its designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage, may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors of national taste.
 * Speech (3 March 1926), Seanad Éireann (Irish Free Senate), on the Coinage Bill.


 * Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.
 * Letter to Olivia Shakespear (24 March 1927)


 * Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
 * Letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham (4 January 1939))


 * The Babylonian starlight brought A fabulous, formless darkness in; Odour of blood when Christ was slain Made all platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline.
 * Two Songs from a Play, as quoted from The Cycles of History

Crossways (1889)

 * 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.
 * Down By The Salley Gardens


 * 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. 
 * The Stolen Child, st. 1

The Song Of The Happy Shepherd

 * Full text online


 * 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.
 * l. 1–5.


 * Words alone are certain good.
 * l. 10.


 * Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
 * l. 57.

The Rose (1893)



 * 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;
 * To The Rose Upon The Rood Of Time


 * 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.
 * To The Rose Upon The Rood Of Time


 * 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.
 * To The Rose Upon The Rood Of Time


 *  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 honeybee, 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;
 * The Lake Isle of Innisfree, st. 1


 * I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,  I hear it in the deep heart's core.
 * The Lake Isle of Innisfree, st. 3


 * A pity beyond all telling Is hid in the heart of love: The folk who are buying and selling, The clouds on their journey above, The cold wet winds ever blowing, And the shadowy hazel grove Where mouse-grey waters are flowing, Threaten the head that I love.
 * The Pity Of Love; in recent years a statement which might have originated as a misquotation of the first lines of this has been attributed to Oscar Wilde: "To give and not expect return, that is what lies at the heart of love." — no occurrence prior to 1999 has yet been located.


 * 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.
 * The Sorrow Of Love, st. 1


 * When you are old and gray 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.
 * When You Are Old, st. 1–3

The Rose of the World

 * Full text online


 * 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.
 * St. 1


 * 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.
 * St. 2


 * 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.
 * St. 3

The Land of Heart's Desire (1894)



 * The Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
 * Lines 48–52


 * Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age bring the red flare again.


 * I would mould a world of fire and dew With no one bitter, grave, or over wise, And nothing marred or old to do you wrong.


 * Land of Heart's Desire, Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
 * Lines 373–375

The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)



 * 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 Lover Tells Of The Rose In His Heart, st. 1


 * And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight; And love is less kind than the grey twilight, And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
 * Into The Twilight, st. 4


 * 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.
 * The Song Of Wandering Aengus


 * Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with the golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams beneath your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
 * He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven


 * When I play on my fiddle in Dooney, Folk dance like a wave of the sea.
 * The Fiddler Of Dooney, st. 1

In The Seven Woods (1904)



 * 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 house to shoot, still hands A cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-lee.
 * In The Seven Woods


 * I thought of your beauty, and this arrow, Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow. There's no man may look upon her, no man, As when newly grown to be a woman, Tall and noble but with face and bosom Delicate in colour as apple blossom. This beauty's kinder, yet for a reason I could weep that the old is out of season.
 * The Arrow


 * One that is ever kind said yesterday: 'Your well-belovéd'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.
 * The Folly Of Being Comforted


 * 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 of 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.
 * Never Give All The Heart


 * I heard the old, old men say, 'Everything alters, And one by one we drop away.' They had hands like claws, and their knees Were twisted like the old thorn-trees By the waters. I heard the old, old men say, 'All that's beautiful drifts away Like the waters.'
 * The Old Men Admiring Themselves In The Water


 * O hurry where by water among the trees The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh, When they have but looked upon their images-- Would none had ever loved but you and I! Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky, When the sun looked out of his golden hood?-- O that none ever loved but you and I!  O hurry to the ragged wood, for there I will drive all those lovers out and cry— O my share of the world, O yellow hair! No one has ever loved but you and I.
 * The Ragged Wood


 * 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.
 * O Do Not Love Too Long

Adam's Curse



 * 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.
 * St. 1


 * 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.
 * St. 3


 * 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.
 * St. 5

The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)



 * 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?
 * No Second Troy


 * 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.
 * The Fascination Of What's Difficult


 * Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That's all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh.
 * A Drinking Song


 * Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth.
 * The Coming Of Wisdom With Time


 * I that have not your faith, how shall I know That in the blinding light beyond the grave We’ll find so good a thing as that we have lost? The hourly kindness, the day’s common speech, The habitual content of each with each When neither soul nor body has been crossed.
 * King and No King


 * I swayed upon the gaudy stern The butt-end of a steering-oar, And saw wherever I could turn A crowd upon a shore. And though I would have hushed the crowd, There was no mother's son but said, 'What is the figure in a shroud Upon a gaudy bed?' And after running at the brim Cried out upon that thing beneath --It had such dignity of a limb-- By the sweet name of Death. Though I'd my finger on my lip, What could I but take up the song? And running crowd and gaudy ship Cried out the whole night long, Crying amid the glittering sea, Naming it with the ecstatic breath, Because it had such dignity, By the sweet name of Death.
 * His Dream


 * 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.
 * Reconciliation


 * Ah, that Time could touch a form That could show what Homer's age Bred to be a hero's wage. 'Were not all her life but a storm, Would not painters pain a form Of such noble lines,' I said, 'Such a delicate high head, All that sternness amid charm, All that sweetness amid strength? Ah, but peace that comes at length, Came when Time had touched her form.
 * Peace


 * 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, So did she your strength renew, A dream that a lion had dreamed Till the wilderness cried aloud, A secret between you two, Between the proud and the proud. What, still you would have their praise! But here's a haughtier text, The labyrinth of her days That her own strangeness perplexed; And how what her dreaming gave Earned slander, ingratitude, From self-same dolt and knave; Aye, and worse wrong than these. Yet she, singing upon her road, Half lion, half child, is at peace.
 * Against Unworthy Praise


 * You say, as I have often given tongue In praise of what another's said or sung, 'Twere politic to do the like by these; But was there ever a dog that praised his fleas?
 * To A Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine


 * 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.
 * These Are The Clouds


 * 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.
 * Brown Penny

Responsibilities (1914)



 * Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain Somewhere in ear-shot for the story’s end.
 * Responsibilities - Introduction


 * While I, that reed-throated whisperer Who comes at need, although not now as once A clear articulation in the air, But inwardly, surmise companions Beyond the fling of the dull ass’s hoof —Ben Jonson’s phrase—and find when June is come At Kyle-na-no under that ancient roof A sterner conscience and a friendlier home, I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs, Those undreamt accidents that have made me —Seeing that Fame has perished that long while, Being but a part of ancient ceremony— Notorious, till all my priceless things Are but a post the passing dogs defile.
 * Responsibilities - Closing


 * 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.
 * September 1913, st. 3


 * Now all the truth is out, Be secret and take defeat From any brazen throat, For how can you compete, Being honour bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbours’ eyes? Bred to a harder thing Than Triumph, turn away And like a laughing string Whereon mad fingers play Amid a place of stone, Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.
 * To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing


 * 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 Magi


 * 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.
 * A Coat

The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)



 * I would be ignorant as the dawn That merely stood, rocking the glittering coach Above the cloudy shoulders of the horses; I would be — for no knowledge is worth a straw — Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.
 * The Dawn


 * The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky.
 * The Wild Swans At Coole, st. 1


 * Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold Companionable streams or climb the air; Their hearts have not grown old.
 * The Wild Swans At Coole, st. 4


 * Some burn damp faggots, others may consume The entire combustible world in one small room As though dried straw, and if we turn about The bare chimney is gone black out Because the work had finished in that flare. Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, As ’twere all life’s epitome. What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?
 * In Memory Of Major Robert Gregory, st. 11


 * I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved Or boyish intellect approved, With some appropriate commentary on each; Until imagination brought A fitter welcome; but a thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.
 * In Memory Of Major Robert Gregory, st. 12


 * 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 county 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 men, nor cheering 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.
 * An Irish Airman Forsees His Death


 * I know what wages beauty gives, How hard a life her servant lives, Yet praise the winters gone: There is not a fool can call me friend, And I may dine at journey’s end With Landor and with Donne.
 * To A Young Beauty, st. 3


 * 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?
 * The Scholars, st. 2


 * 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.
 * Lines Written In Dejection, st. 1


 * I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.
 * His Phoenix, refrain


 * Hands, do what you’re bid: Bring the balloon of the mind That bellies and drags in the wind Into its narrow shed.
 * The Balloon Of The Mind


 * We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create, Timid, entangled, empty and abashed, Lacking the countenance of our friends.
 * Ego Dominus Tuus, st. 4


 * Minnaloushe creeps through the grass Alone, important and wise, And lifts to the changing moon His changing eyes.
 * The Cat And The Moon

The Second Coming (1919)

 * First published in The Dial (November 1920) and The Nation (6 November 1920), later publisehed in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) - Online text with some notes on variant editions - online text and notes


 * 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: a waste of desert sand; 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 Wind 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?

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

 * Opinion is not worth a rush; In this altar-piece the knight, Who grips his long spear so to push That dragon through the fading light, Loved the lady; and it’s plain The half-dead dragon was her thought, That every morning rose again And dug its claws and shrieked and fought. Could the impossible come to pass She would have time to turn her eyes, Her lover thought, upon the glass And on the instant would grow wise.
 * Michael Robartes and the Dancer


 * They say such different things at school.
 * Michael Robartes and the Dancer


 * Nothing that we love over-much Is ponderable to our touch.
 * Towards Break of Day, st. 3

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.
 * St. 1


 * All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
 * St. 1


 * This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vain-glorious 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.
 * St. 2


 * Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter, seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream.
 * St. 3


 * Minute by minute they live: The stone's in the midst of all.
 * St. 3


 * Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart.
 * St. 4


 * O when may it suffice? That is heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name.
 * St. 4


 * 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.
 * St. 4.

A Prayer For My Daughter



 * Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
 * St. 2


 * 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.
 * St. 3


 * It’s certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat Whereby the Horn of plenty is undone.
 * St. 4


 * 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.
 * St. 5


 * 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.
 * St. 6


 * 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.
 * St. 7


 * 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?
 * St. 8


 * 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.
 * St. 9

The Tower (1928)

 * Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible.
 * The Tower, I


 * Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or woman lost?
 * The Tower, II, st. 13


 * Much did I rage when young, Being by the world oppressed, But now with flattering tongue It speeds the parting guest.
 * Youth And Age


 * Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.
 * Fragments, I


 * 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?
 * Leda and the Swan, st. 3


 * 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?
 * Among School Children, st. 8


 * The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary. Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeller.
 * Wisdom

Sailing to Byzantium



 * 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 unaging intellect.
 * St. 1
 * Cf. Nelson Algren's later, "That was no town for the aged or the aging."


 * 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.
 * St. 3


 * 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.
 * St. 4

Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen



 * Many ingenious lovely things are gone That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude, protected from the circle of the moon That pitches common things about.
 * I, st. 1


 * O what fine thought we had because we thought That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
 * I, st. 2


 * All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned, And a great army but a showy thing; What matter that no cannon had been turned Into a ploughshare?
 * I, st. 3


 * Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free.
 * I, st. 4


 * 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.
 * I, st. 4


 * But is there any comfort to be found? Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?
 * I, st. 5-6


 * O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.
 * III, st. 3


 * Come let us mock at the great That had such burdens on the mind And toiled so hard and late To leave some monument behind, Nor thought of the levelling wind.
 * V, st. 1


 * Come let us mock at the wise; With all those calendars whereon They fixed old aching eyes, They never saw how seasons run, And now but gape at the sun.
 * V, st. 2


 * 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?
 * V, st. 3


 * 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.
 * V, st. 4

Two Songs From a Play

 * Odour of blood when Christ was slain Made all platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline.
 * II, st. 1


 * Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love’s pleasure drives his love away, The painter’s brush consumes his dreams.
 * II, st. 2


 * Whatever flames upon the night Man’s own resinous heart has fed.
 * II, st. 2

The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)



 * Whether they knew or not, Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery? A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind That never looked out of the eye of a saint Or out of drunkard’s eye.
 * The Seven Sages


 * Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.
 * For Anne Gregory, st. 3


 * Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast. Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveller; he Served human liberty.
 * Swift's Epitaph.


 * 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.
 * The Choice, st. 1


 * 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.
 * Byzantium, st. 1


 * 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.
 * Byzantium, st. 4


 * Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.
 * Quarrel In Old Age, st. 2


 * ‘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.'
 * Crazy Jane Talks With The Bishop, st. 2


 * But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.
 * Crazy Jane Talks With The Bishop, st. 3


 * 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?
 * Lullaby, st. 1


 * Speech after long silence; it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead, Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade, The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night, That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young We loved each other and were ignorant.
 * After Long Silence


 * 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.
 * A Last Confession, St. 3 & 4

A Dialogue of Self and Soul



 * 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 is wandering To this and that and t'other thing, Deliver from the crime of death and birth.
 * I, st. 3


 * 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.
 * I, st. 4


 * 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?
 * II, st. 1


 * 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.
 * II, st. 3


 * 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. 
 * II, st. 4

Vacillation



 * 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.
 * III, st. 1


 * 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.
 * III, st. 2


 * 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 blessed and could bless.
 * IV


 * 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.
 * V, st. 2


 * Seek out reality, leave things that seem.
 * VII

A Full Moon in March (1935)



 * God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone; He that sings a lasting song Thinks in a marrow-bone.
 * A Prayer For Old Age, st. 1.


 * I pray — for word is out And prayer comes round again — That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.
 * A Prayer For Old Age, st. 3.

=== ''Parnell's Funeral and Other Poems (1935). Supernatural Songs '' ===
 * Whence had they come, The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?
 * Supernatural Songs, VIII, Whence Had They Come?
 * 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, IX, The Four Ages of Man

Last Poems (1936-1939)



 * All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia.
 * Lapis Lazuli, st. 2


 * 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.
 * Lapis Lazuli, st. 2


 * Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
 * Lapis Lazuli, st. 5


 * If soul may look and body touch, Which is the more blest?
 * The Lady's Second Song, st. 3


 * 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.
 * An Acre of Grass, st. 2


 * 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.
 * An Acre of Grass, st. 3


 * Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot! A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot. Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
 * The Great Day


 * You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?
 * The Spur


 * 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.
 * The Municipal Gallery Revisited, st. 7


 * Down the mountain walls From where pan’s cavern is Intolerable music falls. Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear, Belly, shoulder, bum, Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs Copulate in the foam.
 * News for the Delphic Oracle, st. 3


 * Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence.
 * Long-Legged Fly, refrain


 * A bloody and a sudden end, Gunshot or a noose, For Death who takes what man would keep, Leaves what man would lose.
 * ''John Kinsella’s Lament For Mrs. Mary Moore', st. 1


 * Because there is safety in derision I talked about an apparition, I took no trouble to convince, Or seem plausible to a man of sense.
 * The Apparitions, st. 1


 * I have found nothing half so good As my long-planned half solitude, Where I can sit up half the night With some friend that has the wit Not to allow his looks to tell When I am unintelligible.
 * The Apparitions, st. 2


 * Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.
 * The Circus Animals' Desertion, II, st. 3.


 * 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.
 * The Circus Animals' Desertion, III


 * Irish poets, earn 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.
 * Under Ben Bulben, V


 * Under bare Ben Bulben’s head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
 * Under Ben Bulben, VI


 * 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!

Quotes about Yeats

 * By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs. The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.  Now he is scattered over a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections; To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
 * W. H. Auden in "In Memory of W.B. Yeats' (1939)


 * Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress;  In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountains start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
 * W. H. Auden in "In Memory of W.B. Yeats' (1939)


 * Yeats was an inexhaustible source of delight. I’ve never known anyone so forgetful of little details. Whenever it came time for his lecture in on the campus, he seized his portfolio and marched over only to find after he arrived on the stage that he had brought the wrong lecture or no lecture at all in an empty portfolio. This was constantly happening.
 * 


 * I knew Yeats. He made a very strong impression. He wasn't an intimate friend, but I met him at Lady Ottoline Morrell's and he talked to me about how he lived very quietly just seeing a few friends and some witches... He was a very, very unexpected personality. Well, perhaps not unexpected. One might have expected it. But a very unusual personality. Because he was, I think, a very great poet... [H]e talked in this chanting, curious, Celtic voice... He read with his great chanting voice and then he beat time, you know.
 * Lord David Cecil, quoted in Tristram Powell, 'A Television Interview', in David Cecil: A Portrait by his Friends (1990), pp. 162-163


 * I wrote a quasi-Chinese verse entitled ‘Quiet the Dog, Tether the Pony’, in which I took away all the punctuations. It reads like a Chinese translation but it is also an elliptical, postmodern poem. I took the title from Yeats. Yet it is a very Chinese poem because of the eclipsed pronouns.
 * Marilyn Chin Interview with Asian Review of Books (2020)


 * An idea of art opposed to the idea of utility, an idea of an audience opposed to the idea of popularity, an idea of the peripheral becoming the central culture – in these three ideas Yeats provided Irish writing with a programme for action. But whatever its connection with Irish nationalism, it was not, finally, a programme of separation from the English tradition. His continued adherence to it led him to define the central Irish attitude as one of self-hatred... The pathology of literary unionism has never been better defined.
 * Seamus Deane, Small World: Ireland, 1798–2018 (2021), p. 138


 * Born into a world in which the doctrine of 'Art for Art's sake' was generally accepted, and living on into one in which art has been asked to be instrumental to social purposes, he held firmly to the right view which is between these, though not in any way a compromise between them, and showed that an artist, by serving his art with entire integrity, is at the same time rendering the greatest service he can to his own nation and to the world.
 * T. S. Eliot, 'Yeats' (1940), On Poetry and Poets (1957), p. 262


 * There are some poets whose poetry can be considered more or less in isolation, for experience and delight. There are others whose poetry, though giving equally experience and delight, has a larger historical importance. Yeats was one of the latter: he was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them. This is a very high position to assign him: but I believe that it is one which is secure.
 * T. S. Eliot, 'Yeats' (1940), On Poetry and Poets (1957), p. 262


 * When I went to college (from 1959 to 1963), there were no women's studies courses, no anthologies that stressed a female heritage, no public women's movement. Poetry meant Yeats, Lowell, James Dickey. Without even realizing it, I assumed that the voice of the poet had to be male.
 * Erica Jong "Blood and Guts: The Tricky Problem of Being a Woman Writer in the Late Twentieth Century" in The Writer on Her Work edited by Janet Sternburg (2000)


 * I read a lot of poetry. I keep up, as much as possible, with modern American poetry and I think that I'm very influenced by its rhythms. I like Walt Whitman, and I read all of Yeats a couple of months ago... I've read Galway Kinnell and Carolyn Kizer and Bob Hass, and some of the people who are sort of like poets but are prose writers like Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick.
 * 1980 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)


 * anybody who works in this business knows that after almost any two pages you know that something is going wrong. Your work is going wrong at all times. I mean, that's why writing is really so hard-it's really, like Yeats said, something like digging a ditch. Except it's worse than digging a ditch, because when you dig it, you dig it and there it is, but with writing, you've dug that ditch and it's in the wrong place. So you really have to go off someplace and have to dig it over there.
 * 1980 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley (1997)


 * I think more of Yeats sometimes when I write than I do of anything else.
 * 1986 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley (1997)


 * I think that I just drew a lot of nourishment from the poets that I then was aware of and able to be aware of, poets like William Blake, like Emily Dickinson, like Whitman, people whose—and then later, somewhat later, Yeats, who taught me in fact that poetry could be political and still be incredibly beautiful. And on and on, because one is always reading, one is always extending one’s range into the world of poetry translated from other languages, poetry from other centuries. All of that has been very important to me.
 * Adrienne Rich Interview with Democracy Now (1997)


 * I was easily entranced by pure sound and still am, no matter what it is saying: and any poet who mixes the poetry of the actual world with the poetry of sound interests and excites me more than I am able to say. In my student years, it was Yeats who seemed to do this better than anyone else. There were lines of Yeats that were to ring in my head for years: "Many times man lives and dies/Between his two eternities,/That of race and that of soul,/And ancient Ireland knew it all..../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?" I could hazard the guess that all the most impassioned, seductive arguments against the artist's involvement in politics can be found in Yeats. It was this dialogue between art and politics that excited me in his work, along with the sound of his language-never his elaborate mythological systems. I know I learned two things from his poetry, and those two things were at war with each other. One was that poetry can root itself in politics. Even if it defends privilege, even if it deplores political rebellion and revolution, it can, may have to, account for itself politically, consciously situate itself amid political conditions, without sacrificing intensity of language. The other, that politics leads to "bitterness" and "abstractness" of mind. makes women shrill and hysterical, and is finally a waste of beauty and talent: "Too long a sacrifice / can make a stone of the heart." There was absolutely nothing in the literary canon I knew to counter the second idea. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's anti-slavery and feminist poetry, H.D.'s anti-war and woman-identified poetry, like the radical-yes, revolutionary-work of Langston Hughes and Muriel Rukeyser, were still buried by the academic literary canon. But the first idea was extremely important to me: a poet-one who was apparently certified-could actually write about political themes, could weave the names of political activists into a poem: "MacDonagh and MacBride/And Connally and Pearce/Now and in time to come/Wherever green is worn/Are changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born."
 * Adrienne Rich Arts of the Possible (2001)


 * Barriers dissolve, too, when confronted by the Eastern poems: the poems of the sacred books, in Yeats' translation of the Upanishads, or Isherwood's of the Bhagavad-Gita, and such work as E. Powys Mathers' Black Marigolds and Robert Payne's The White Pony, a rich anthology of Chinese poetry.
 * Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)