W. B. (William Butler) Yeats

CUCHULAIN AND HIS CYCLE The Church when it was most powerful taught learned and unlearned to climb, as it were, to the great moral realities through hierarchies of Cherubim and Seraphim, through clouds of Saints and Angels who had all their precise duties and privileges. The story-tellers of Ireland, perhaps of every primitive country, imagined as fine a fellowship, only it was to the æsthetic... more...

THE WILD SWANS AT COOLEThe trees are in their autumn beauty,The woodland paths are dry,Under the October twilight the waterMirrors a still sky;Upon the brimming water among the stonesAre nine and fifty swans.The nineteenth Autumn has come upon meSince I first made my count;I saw, before I had well finished,All suddenly mountAnd scatter wheeling in great broken ringsUpon their clamorous wings.I have... more...

THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHEThe host is riding from KnocknareaAnd over the grave of Clooth-na-bare;Caolte tossing his burning hairAnd Niamh callingAway, come away: Empty your heart of its mortal dream. The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are a-gleam, Our arms are waving, our lips are apart; And if any gaze on our rushing... more...

At the end of the ’eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in a red-brick house with several mantelpieces of wood, copied from marble mantelpieces designed by the brothers Adam, a balcony and a little garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, when the crooked ostentatiously... more...

Why does my heart beat so?Did not a shadow pass?It passed but a moment ago.Who can have trod in the grass?What rogue is night-wandering?Have not old writers saidThat dizzy dreams can springFrom the dry bones of the dead?And many a night it seemsThat all the valley fillsWith those fantastic dreams.They overflow the hills,So passionate is a shade,Like wine that fills to the topA grey-green cup of jade,Or... more...

WHAT IS ‘POPULAR POETRY’? I think it was a Young Ireland Society that set my mind running on ‘popular poetry.’ We used to discuss everything that was known to us about Ireland, and especially Irish literature and Irish history. We had no Gaelic, but paid great honour to the Irish poets who wrote in English, and quoted them in our speeches. I could have told you at that time the dates of the... more...

ALL SOULS’ NIGHT ’Tis All Souls’ Night and the great Christ Church bell, And many a lesser bell, sound through the room, For it is now midnight; And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come, For it is a ghost’s right, His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine. I need... more...

REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH   y first memories are fragmentary and isolated and contemporaneous, as though one remembered vaguely some early day of the Seven Days. It seems as if time had not yet been created, for all are connected with emotion and place and without sequence. I remember sitting upon somebody’s knee, looking out of a window at a wall covered with cracked and falling plaster,... more...

ANIMA HOMINIS I When I come home after meeting men who are strange to me, and sometimes even after talking to women, I go over all I have said in gloom and disappointment. Perhaps I have overstated everything from a desire to vex or startle, from hostility that is but fear; or all my natural thoughts have been drowned by an undisciplined sympathy. My fellow-diners have hardly seemed of mixed humanity,... more...

Scene I. A Little Moorish Room in the Village of Azubia.In the centre of the room a chafing dish. Mosada. [alone] Three times the roses have grown less and less,As slowly Autumn climbed the golden throneWhere sat old Summer fading into song,And thrice the peaches flushed upon the walls,And thrice the corn around the sickles flamed,Since 'mong my people, tented on the hills,He stood a messenger. In... more...