Delphi Complete Poetry and Plays of W. B. Yeats (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by W. B. Yeats

  I count my good and bad,

  Being wakeful for her sake,

  Remembering what she had,

  What eagle look still shows,

  While up from my heart’s root

  So great a sweetness flows

  I shake from head to foot.

  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.

  KING AND NO KING

  “Would it were anything but merely voice!”

  The No King cried who after that was King,

  Because he had not heard of anything

  That balanced with a word is more than noise;

  Yet Old Romance being kind, let him prevail

  Somewhere or somehow that I have forgot,

  Though he’d but cannon — Whereas we that had thought

  To have lit upon as clean and sweet a tale

  Have been defeated by that pledge you gave

  In momentary anger long ago;

  And 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.

  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?

  PEACE

  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 storm,

  Would not painters paint a form

  Of such noble lines” I said.

  “Such a delicate high head,

  So much sternness and such charm,

  Till they had changed us to like strength?”

  Ah, but peace that comes at length,

  Came when Time had touched her form.

  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,

  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.

  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 an 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.

  A DRINKING SONG

  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.

  THE COMING OF WISDOM WITH TIME

  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.

  ON HEARING THAT THE STUDENTS OF OUR NEW UNIVERSITY HAVE JOINED THE ANCIENT ORDER OF HIBERNIANS AND THE AGITATION AGAINST IMMORAL LITERATURE

  Where, where but here have Pride and Truth,

  That long to give themselves for wage,

  To shake their wicked sides at youth

  Restraining reckless middle-age.

  TO A POET, WHO WOULD HAVE ME PRAISE CERTAIN BAD POETS, IMITATORS OF HIS AND MINE

  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 where’s the wild dog that has praised his fleas?

  THE ATTACK ON THE “PLAY BOY”

  Once, when midnight smote the air,

  Eunuchs ran through Hell and met

  Round about Hell’s gate, to stare

  At great Juan riding by,

  And like these to rail and sweat,

  Maddened by that sinewy thigh.

  A LYRIC FROM AN UNPUBLISHED PLAY

  “Put off that mask of burning gold

  With emerald eyes.”

  “O no, my dear, you make so bold

  To find if hearts be wild and wise,

  And yet not cold.”

  “I would but find what’s there to find,

  Love or deceit.”

  “It was the mask engaged your mind,

  And after set your heart to beat,

  Not what’s behind.”

  “But lest you are my enemy,

  I must enquire.”

  “O no, my dear, let all that be,

  What matter, so there is but fire

  In you, in me?”

  UPON A HOUSE SHAKEN BY THE LAND AGITATION

  How should the worl
d be luckier if this house,

  Where passion and precision have been one

  Time out of mind, became too ruinous

  To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun?

  And the sweet laughing eagle thoughts that grow

  Where wings have memory of wings, and all

  That comes of the best knit to the best? Although

  Mean roof-trees were the sturdier for its fall,

  How should their luck run high enough to reach

  The gifts that govern men, and after these

  To gradual Time’s last gift, a written speech

  Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease?

  AT THE ABBEY THEATRE

  Imitated from Ronsard

  Dear Craoibhin Aoibhin, look into our case.

  When we are high and airy hundreds say

  That if we hold that flight they’ll leave the place,

  While those same hundreds mock another day

  Because we have made our art of common things,

  So bitterly, you’d dream they longed to look

  All their lives through into some drift of wings.

  You’ve dandled them and fed them from the book

  And know them to the bone; impart to us —

  We’ll keep the secret — a new trick to please.

  Is there a bridle for this Proteus

  That turns and changes like his draughty seas?

  Or is there none, most popular of men,

  But when they mock us that we mock again?

  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.

  AT GALWAY RACES

  Out yonder, where the race course is,

  Delight makes all of the one mind,

  Riders upon the swift horses,

  The field that closes in behind:

  We, too, had good attendance once,

  Hearers and hearteners of the work;

  Aye, horsemen for companions,

  Before the merchant and the clerk

  Breathed on the world with timid breath.

  Sing on: sometime, and at some new moon,

  We’ll learn that sleeping is not death,

  Hearing the whole earth change its tune,

  Its flesh being wild, and it again

  Crying aloud as the race course is,

  And we find hearteners among men

  That ride upon horses.

  A FRIEND’S ILLNESS

  Sickness brought me this

  Thought, in that scale of his:

  Why should I be dismayed

  Though flame had burned the whole

  World, as it were a coal,

  Now I have seen it weighed

  Against a soul?

  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.

  THE YOUNG MAN’S SONG

  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.

  Oh 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.

  RESPONSIBILITI ES

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTORY RHYMES

  THE GREY ROCK

  THE TWO KINGS

  TO A WEALTHY MAN WHO PROMISED A SECOND SUBSCRIPTION TO THE DUBLIN MUNICIPAL GALLERY IF IT WERE PROVED THE PEOPLE WANTED PICTURES

  SEPTEMBER 1913

  TO A FRIEND WHOSE WORK HAS COME TO NOTHING

  PAUDEEN

  TO A SHADE

  WHEN HELEN LIVED

  THE ATTACK ON ‘THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD,’ 1907

  THE THREE BEGGARS

  THE THREE HERMITS

  BEGGAR TO BEGGAR CRIED

  THE WELL AND THE TREE

  RUNNING TO PARADISE

  THE HOUR BEFORE DAWN

  THE PLAYER QUEEN

  THE REALISTS

  THE WITCH

  THE PEACOCK

  THE MOUNTAIN TOMB

  TO A CHILD DANCING IN THE WIND

  A MEMORY OF YOUTH

  FALLEN MAJESTY

  FRIENDS

  THE COLD HEAVEN

  THAT THE NIGHT COME

  AN APPOINTMENT

  THE MAGI

  THE DOLLS

  A COAT

  CLOSING RHYMES

  INTRODUCTORY RHYMES

  Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain

  Somewhere in ear-shot for the story’s end,

  Old Dublin merchant ‘free of ten and four’

  Or trading out of Galway into Spain;

  And country scholar, Robert Emmet’s friend,

  A hundred-year-old memory to the poor;

  Traders or soldiers who have left me blood

  That has not passed through any huxter’s loin,

  Pardon, and you that did not weigh the cost,

  Old Butlers when you took to horse and stood

  Beside the brackish waters of the Boyne

  Till your bad master blenched and all was lost;

  You merchant skipper that leaped overboard

  After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay,

  You most of all, silent and fierce old man

  Because you were the spectacle that stirred

  My fancy, and set my boyish lips to say

  ‘Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun’;

  Pardon that for a barren passion’s sake,

  Although I have come close on forty-nine

  I have no child, I have nothing but a book,

  Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.

  January 1914.

  THE GREY ROCK

  Poets with whom I learned my trade,

  Companions of the Cheshire Cheese,

  Here’s an old story I’ve re-made,

  Imagining ‘twould better please

  Your ears than stories now in fashion,

  Though you may think I waste my breath

  Pretending that there can be passion

  That has more life in it than death,

  And though at bottling of your wine

  The bow-legged Goban had no say;

  The moral’s yours because it’s mine.

  When cups went round at close of day —

  Is not that how good stories run? —

  Somewhere within some hollow hill,

  If books speak truth in Slievenamon,

  But let that be, the gods we
re still

  And sleepy, having had their meal,

  And smoky torches made a glare

  On painted pillars, on a deal

  Of fiddles and of flutes hung there

  By the ancient holy hands that brought them

  From murmuring Murias, on cups —

  Old Goban hammered them and wrought them,

  And put his pattern round their tops

  To hold the wine they buy of him.

  But from the juice that made them wise

  All those had lifted up the dim

  Imaginations of their eyes,

  For one that was like woman made

  Before their sleepy eyelids ran

  And trembling with her passion said,

  ‘Come out and dig for a dead man,

  Who’s burrowing somewhere in the ground,

  And mock him to his face and then

  Hollo him on with horse and hound,

  For he is the worst of all dead men.’

  We should be dazed and terror struck,

  If we but saw in dreams that room,

  Those wine-drenched eyes, and curse our luck

  That emptied all our days to come.

  I knew a woman none could please,

  Because she dreamed when but a child

  Of men and women made like these;

  And after, when her blood ran wild,

  Had ravelled her own story out,

  And said, ‘In two or in three years

  I need must marry some poor lout,’

  And having said it burst in tears.

  Since, tavern comrades, you have died,

  Maybe your images have stood,

  Mere bone and muscle thrown aside,

  Before that roomful or as good.

  You had to face your ends when young —

  ‘Twas wine or women, or some curse —

  But never made a poorer song

  That you might have a heavier purse,