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"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 ..."
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet, playwright. "At the Abbey Theatre." |
"The women that I picked spoke sweet and low
And yet gave tongue. "Hound voices" were they all."
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet, playwright. "Hound Voice." |
"But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks."
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet, playwright. "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen." |
""I weave the shoes of Sorrow:
Soundless shall be the footfall light
In all men's ears of Sorrow,
Sudden and light.""
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet, playwright. "The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes." |
"That God has laid His fingers on the sky,
That from those fingers glittering summer runs
Upon the dancer by the dreamless wave.
Why should those lovers that no lovers miss
Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss?
The man has found no comfort in the grave."
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet. The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland (l. 43-48). . .
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Richard J. Finneran, ed. (1989) Macmillan. |
""... So it's plain to be discerned
That the shades of holy men
Who have failed, being weak of will,
Pass the Door of Birth again,
And are plagued by crowds, until
They've passion to escape.""
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet, playwright. "The Three Hermits." |
"Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top."
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet and playwright. Under Ben Bulben, sct. 5, Last Poems (1939).
Written five months before Yeats's death. |
"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."
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet, playwright. letter, Feb. 27, 1895, to the editor of the Dublin Daily Express. Collected Letters, vol. 1, ed. John Kelly (1986). |
"I dream that I have brought
To such a pitch my thought
That coming time can say,
"He shadowed in a glass
What thing her body was.""
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet, playwright. "A Woman Homer Sung." |
"We picked each other from afar and knew
What hour of terror comes to test the soul,
And in that terror's name obeyed the call,
And understood, what none have understood,
Those images that waken in the blood."
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet, playwright. "Hound Voice." |
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William Butler Yeats
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