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

by W. B. Yeats

  An image up, or anything

  Even to eyes that beauty had driven mad,

  But images to make me fonder?

  She. Now She has thrown her arms above her head;

  Whether she threw them up to flout me,

  Or but to find,

  Now that no fingers bind,

  That her hair streams upon the wind,

  I do not know, that know I am afraid

  Of the hovering thing night brought me.

  UNDER SATURN

  DO not because this day I have grown saturnine

  Imagine that lost love, inseparable from my thought

  Because I have no other youth, can make me pine;

  For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought,

  The comfort that you made? Although my wits have gone

  On a fantastic ride, my horse’s flanks are spurred

  By childish memories of an old cross Pollexfen,

  And of a Middleton, whose name you never heard,

  And of a red-haired Yeats whose looks, although he died

  Before my time, seem like a vivid memory.

  You heard that labouring man who had served my people. He said

  Upon the open road, near to the Sligo quay —

  No, no, not said, but cried it out — ‘You have come again,

  And surely after twenty years it was time to come.’

  I am thinking of a child’s vow sworn in vain

  Never to leave that valley his fathers called their home.

  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,

  And thought before I had done

  Of a mocking tale or a gibe

  To please a companion

  Around the fire at the club,

  Being certain that they and I

  But lived where motley is worn:

  All changed, changed utterly:

  A terrible beauty is born.

  That woman’s days were spent

  In ignorant good-will,

  Her nights in argument

  Until her voice grew shrill.

  What voice more sweet than hers

  When, young and beautiful,

  She rode to harriers?

  This man had kept a school

  And rode our winged horse;

  This other his helper and friend

  Was coming into his force;

  He might have won fame in the end,

  So sensitive his nature seemed,

  So daring and sweet his thought.

  This other man I had dreamed

  A drunken, vainglorious 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.

  Hearts with one purpose alone

  Through summer and winter seem

  Enchanted to a stone

  To trouble the living stream.

  The horse that comes from the road.

  The rider, the birds that range

  From cloud to tumbling cloud,

  Minute by minute they change;

  A shadow of cloud on the stream

  Changes minute by minute;

  A horse-hoof slides on the brim,

  And a horse plashes within it;

  The long-legged moor-hens dive,

  And hens to moor-cocks call;

  Minute by minute they live:

  The stone’s in the midst of all.

  Too long a sacrifice

  Can make a stone of the heart.

  O when may it suffice?

  That is Heaven’s part, our part

  To murmur name upon name,

  As a mother names her child

  When sleep at last has come

  On limbs that had run wild.

  What is it but nightfall?

  No, no, not night but death;

  Was it needless death after all?

  For England may keep faith

  For all that is done and said.

  We know their dream; enough

  To know they dreamed and are dead;

  And what if excess of love

  Bewildered them till they died?

  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.

  SIXTEEN DEAD MEN

  O BUT we talked at large before

  The sixteen men were shot,

  But who can talk of give and take,

  What should be and what not

  While those dead men are loitering there

  To stir the boiling pot?

  You say that we should still the land

  Till Germany’s overcome;

  But who is there to argue that

  Now Pearse is deaf and dumb?

  And is their logic to outweigh

  MacDonagh’s bony thumb?

  how could you dream they’d listen

  That have an ear alone

  For those new comrades they have found,

  Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone,

  Or meddle with our give and take

  That converse bone to bone?

  THE ROSE TREE

  ‘O WORDS are lightly spoken,’

  Said Pearse to Connolly,

  ‘Maybe a breath of politic words

  Has withered our Rose Tree;

  Or maybe but a wind that blows

  Across the bitter sea.’

  ‘It needs to be but watered,’

  James Connolly replied,

  ‘To make the green come out again

  And spread on every side,

  And shake the blossom from the bud

  To be the garden’s pride.’

  ‘But where can we draw water,’

  Said Pearse to Connolly,

  ‘When all the wells are parched away?

  O plain as plain can be

  There’s nothing but our own red blood

  Can make a right Rose Tree.’

  ON A POLITICAL PRISONER

  SHE that but little patience knew,

  From childhood on, had now so much

  A grey gull lost its fear and flew

  Down to her cell and there alit,

  And there endured her fingers’ touch

  And from her fingers ate its bit.

  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?

  When long ago I saw her ride

  Under Ben Bulben to the meet,

  The beauty of her country-side

  With all youth’s lonely wildness stirred,

  She seemed to have grown clean and sweet

  Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird:

  Sea-borne, or balanced on the air

  When first it sprang out of the nest

  Upon some lofty rock to stare

  Upon the cloudy canopy,

  While under its storm-beaten breast

  Cried out the hollows of the sea.

  THE LEADERS OF THE CROWD

  THEY must to keep their certainty accuse

  All that are different of a base intent;

  Pull down established honour; hawk for news

&nb
sp; Whatever their loose fantasy invent

  And murmur it with bated breath, as though

  The abounding gutter had been Helicon

  Or calumny a song. How can they know

  Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,

  And there alone, that have no Solitude?

  So the crowd come they care not what may come.

  They have loud music, hope every day renewed

  And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

  TOWARDS BREAK OF DAY

  WAS it the double of my dream

  The woman that by me lay

  Dreamed, or did we halve a dream

  Under the first cold gleam of day?

  I thought: ‘There is a waterfall

  Upon Ben Bulben side

  That all my childhood counted dear;

  Were I to travel far and wide

  I could not find a thing so dear.’

  My memories had magnified

  So many times childish delight.

  I would have touched it like a child

  But knew my finger could but have touched

  Cold stone and water. I grew wild.

  Even accusing Heaven because

  It had set down among its laws:

  Nothing that we love over-much

  Is ponderable to our touch.

  I dreamed towards break of day,

  The cold blown spray in my nostril.

  But she that beside me lay

  Had watched in bitterer sleep

  The marvellous stag of Arthur,

  That lofty white stag, leap

  From mountain steep to steep.

  DEMON AND BEAST

  FOR certain minutes at the least

  That crafty demon and that loud beast

  That plague me day and night

  Ran out of my sight;

  Though I had long perned in the gyre,

  Between my hatred and desire.

  I saw my freedom won

  And all laugh in the sun.

  The glittering eyes in a death’s head

  Of old Luke Wadding’s portrait said

  Welcome, and the Ormondes all

  Nodded upon the wall,

  And even Strafford smiled as though

  It made him happier to know

  I understood his plan.

  Now that the loud beast ran

  There was no portrait in the Gallery

  But beckoned to sweet company,

  For all men’s thoughts grew clear

  Being dear as mine are dear.

  But soon a tear-drop started up,

  For aimless joy had made me stop

  Beside the little lake

  To watch a white gull take

  A bit of bread thrown up into the air;

  Now gyring down and perning there

  He splashed where an absurd

  Portly green-pated bird

  Shook off the water from his back;

  Being no more demoniac

  A stupid happy creature

  Could rouse my whole nature.

  Yet I am certain as can be

  That every natural victory

  Belongs to beast or demon,

  That never yet had freeman

  Right mastery of natural things,

  And that mere growing old, that brings

  Chilled blood, this sweetness brought;

  Yet have no dearer thought

  Than that I may find out a way

  To make it linger half a day.

  O what a sweetness strayed

  Through barren Thebaid,

  Or by the Mareotic sea

  When that exultant Anthony

  And twice a thousand more

  Starved upon the shore

  And withered to a bag of bones!

  What had the Caesars but their thrones?

  THE SECOND COMING

  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: somewhere in sands of the desert

  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

  Reel 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?

  A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER

  ONCE more the storm is howling, and half hid

  Under this cradle-hood and coverlid

  My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle

  But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill

  Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind.

  Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;

  And for an hour I have walked and prayed

  Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

  I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour

  And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,

  And-under the arches of the bridge, and scream

  In the elms above the flooded stream;

  Imagining in excited reverie

  That the future years had come,

  Dancing to a frenzied drum,

  Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

  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.

  Helen being chosen found life flat and dull

  And later had much trouble from a fool,

  While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,

  Being fatherless could have her way

  Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man.

  It’s certain that fine women eat

  A crazy salad with their meat

  Whereby the Horn of plenty is undone.

  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 wisc.

  And many a poor man that has roved,

  Loved and thought himself beloved,

  From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

  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.

  O may she live like some green laurel

  Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

  My mind, because the minds that I have loved,

  The sort of beauty that I have approved,

  Prosper but little, has dried up of late,

  Yet knows that 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.

  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?

  Considering that, 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.

  And may her bridegroom bring her to a house

  Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;

  For arrogance and hatred are the wares

  Peddled in the thoroughfares.

  How but in custom and in ceremony

  Are innocence and beauty born?

  Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,

  And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

  A MEDITATION IN TIME OF WAR

  FOR one throb of the artery,

  While on that old grey stone I Sat

  Under the old wind-broken tree,

  I knew that One is animate,

  Mankind inanimate fantasy’.

  TO BE CARVED ON A STONE AT THOOR BALLYLEE

  I, THE poet William Yeats,

  With old mill boards and sea-green slates,

  And smithy work from the Gort forge,

  Restored this tower for my wife George;

  And may these characters remain

  When all is ruin once again.

  THE TOWER

  This book of poems was first published in 1928 and features some of Yeats’ most popular works, including Sailing to Byzantium, Leda and the Swan and Among School Children. The title of the collection refers to the Thoor Ballylee castle which Yeats purchased in 1916 for £35. He and his family lived in the Norman tower from 1921 to 1929. Many of the poems in the collection concern the poet’s confrontation with old age, often represented by the recurring image of the tower.

  The poem Sailing to Byzantium comprises four stanzas in ottava rima, each made up of eight ten-syllable lines. The poem portrays a voyage to Constantinople (Byzantium) as a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Yeats explores his thoughts and musings on how immortality, art and the human spirit may converge. Through the use of various poetic techniques, the poet depicts a metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own vision of eternal life and his conception of paradise.