William Butler Yeats – A Dialogue of Self and Soul

I

My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;

   Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,

   Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,

   Upon the breathless starlit air,

   Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;

   Fix every wandering thought upon

   That quarter where all thought is done:

   Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?

My Self. The consecrated blade upon my knees

   Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,

   Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass

   Unspotted by the centuries;

   That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn

   From some court-lady's dress and round

   The wooden scabbard bound and wound,

   Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.

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 its wandering

   To this and that and t'other thing,

   Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it

   Five hundred years ago, about it lie

   Flowers from I know not what embroidery—

   Heart's purple—and all these I set

   For emblems of the day against the tower

   Emblematical of the night,

   And claim as by a soldier's right

   A charter to commit the crime once more.

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.

II

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.

What matter if the ditches are impure?

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?

And what's the good of an escape

If honour find him in the wintry blast?

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.

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.

William Butler Yeats – 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-leggèd 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 wise;   

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.   

Oh, 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.

William Butler Yeats – The Wild Old Wicked Man

'Because I am mad about women

I am mad about the hills,'

Said that wild old wicked man

Who travels where God wills.

'Not to die on the straw at home,

Those hands to close the eyes,

That is all I ask, my dear,

From the old man in the skies.

                                Daybreak and a candle-end.

'Kind are all your words, my dear,

Do not the rest withhold.

Who can know the year, my dear,

When an old man's blood grows cold?

I have what no young man can have

Because he loves too much.

Words I have that can pierce the heart,

But what can he do but touch?'

                                Daybreak and a candle-end.

Then said she to that wild old man,

his stout stick under his hand,

'Love to give or to withhold

Is not at my command.

I gave it all to an older man:

That old man in the skies.

Hands that are busy with His beads

can never close those eyes.'

                                Daybreak and a candle-end.

'Go your ways, O go your ways,

I choose another mark,

Girls down on the seashore

Who understand the dark;

Bawdy talk for the fishermen;

A dance for the fisher-lads;

When dark hangs upon the water

They turn down their beds.

                                Daybreak and a candle-end.

'A young man in the dark am I,

But a wild old man in the light,

That can make a cat laugh, or

Can touch by mother wit

Things hid in their marrow-bones

From time long passed away,

Hid from all those warty lads

That by their bodies lay.

                                Daybreak and a candle-end.

'All men live in suffering,

I know as few can know,

Whether they take the upper road

Or stay content on the low,

Rower bent in his row-boat

Or weaver bent at his loom,

Horseman erect upon horseback

Or child hid in the womb.

                                Daybreak and a candle-end.

'That some stream of lightning

From the old man in the skies

Can burn out that suffering

No right-taught man denies.

But a coarse old man am I,

I choose the second-best,

I forget it all a while

Upon a woman's breast.'

                                Daybreak and a candle-end.

William Butler Yeats – When You Are Old

When you are old and grey 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.

William Butler Yeats – 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?