WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

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 womans 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 stones in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is Heavens 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 worn.

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 the 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?

Sailing  to Byzantium

I

That is no country for old men. The young

In one anothers arms, birds in the trees

-Those dying generations at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school bur studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in Gods holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Among  School Children

I

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;

A kind old nun in a white hood replies;

The children learn to cipher and to sing,

To study reading-books and history,

To cut and sew, be neat in everything

In the best modern way the childrens eyes

In momentary stare upon

A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

II

I dream of a Laedean body, bent

Above a sinking fire, a tale that she

Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event

That changed some childish day to tragedy

Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent

Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,

Or else, to alter Platos parable,

Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage

I look upon one child or tother there

And wonder if she stood so at that age

For even daughters of the swan can share

Something of every paddlers heritage

And had that colour upon cheek or hare,

And thereupon my heart is driven wild;

She stands before me as a living child.

IV

Her present image floats into the mind

Did Quattrocento finger fashion it

Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind

And took a mess of shadows for its meat?

And I though never of Laedean kind

Had pretty plumage once enough of that,

Better to smile on all that smile, and show

There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

V

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap

Honey of generation had betrayed,

And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape

A recollection or the drug decide,

Would think her son, did she but see that shape

With sixty or more winters on its head,

A compensation for the pang of his birth,

Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays

Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;

Soldier Aristotle played the taws

Upon the bottom of a king of kings;

World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras

Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings

What a star sang and careless Muses heard:

Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,

But those the candles light are not as those

That animate a mothers reveries,

But keep a marble or o bronze repose.

And yet they too break hearts O Presences

That passion, piety or affection knows,

And that all heavenly glory symbolise

O self-born mockers of mans enterprise;

VIII

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossoms or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

The  Gyres

The gyres! The gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;

Things thought too long can be no longer thought,

For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,

And ancient lineaments are blotted out.

Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;

Empedocles has thrown all things about;

Hector is dead and there is a light in Troy;

We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.

What matter though numb nightmare ride on top,

And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?

What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop,

A greater, a more gracious time has gone;

For painted forms or boxes of make-up

In ancient tombs I sighed, but not again;

What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,

And all it knows is that one word Rejoice!

Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul,

What matter? Those that Rocky Face holds dear,

Lovers of horses and of women, shall,

From marble of a broken sepulchre,

Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,

Or any rich, dark nothing disinter

The workman, noble and saint, and all things run

On that unfashionable gyre again.

Leda  and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still,

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

SEAMUS  HEANEY

Bogland

We have no prairies

To slice a big sun at evening -

Everywhere the eye concedes to

Encroaching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops eye

Of a tarn. Our unfenced country

Is bog that keeps crusting

Between the sights of the sun.

Theyve taken the skeleton

Of the Great Irish Elk

Out of the peat, set it up

An astounding crate full of air.

Butter sunk under

More than a hundred years

Was recovered salty and white.

The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,

Missing its last definition

By millions of years.

Theyll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks

Of great firs, soft as pulp.

Our pioneers keep striking

Inwards and downwards,

Every layer they strip

Seems camped on before.

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.

The wet centre is bottomless.

Anahorish

My place of clear water,

The first hill in the world

Where springs washed into

The shiny grass

and darkened cobbles

in the bed of the lane.

Anahorish, soft gradient

of consonant, vowel-meadow,

after-image of lamps

swang through the yards

on winter evenings.

With pails and barrows

Those mound-dwellers

Go waist-deep in mist

To break the light ice

At wells and dunghills.

The Tollund Man

I

Some day I will go to Aarhus

To see his peat-brown head,

The mild pods of his eye-lids,

His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country nearby

Where they dug him out,

His last gruel of winter seeds

Caked in his stomach,

Naked except for

The cap, noose and girdle,

I will stand a long time.

Bridegroom to the goddess

She tightened her torc on him

And opened her fen,

Those dark juices working

Him to a saints kept body,

Trove of the turfcutters

Honeycombed workings.

Now his stained face

Reposes at Aarhus.

2

I could risk blasphemy,

Consecrate the cauldron bog

Our holy ground and pray

Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed

Flesh of labourers,

Stockinged corpses

Laid out in the farmyards,

Tell-tale skin and teeth

Flecking the sleepers

Of our young brothers, trailed

For miles along the lines.

3

Something of his sad freedom

As he rode the tumbril

Should come to me, driving,

Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,

Watching the pointing hands

Of country people,

Not knowing their tongue.

Out there in Jutland

In the old man-killing parishes

I will feel lost,

Unhappy and at home.

Punishment

I can feel the tug

of the halter at the nape

of her neck, the wind

on her naked front.

It blows her nipples

to amber beads,

it shakes the frail rigging

of her ribs.

I can see her drowned

body in the bog,

the weighing stone,

the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first

she was a barked sapling

that is dug up

oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head

like a stubble of black corn,

her blindfold a soiled bandage,

her noose a ring

to store

the memories of love.

Little adulteress,

Before they punished you

You were flaxen-haired,

Undernourished, and your

Tar-black face was beautiful.

My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you

But would have cast, I know,

The stones of silence.

I am the artful voyeur

Of your brains exposed

And darkened combs,

Your muscles webbing

And your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb

When your betraying sisters,

Cauled in tar,

Wept by the railings,

Who would connive

In civilized outrage

Yet understand the exact

And tribal, intimate revenge.

Funeral Rites

I

I shouldered a kind of manhood

stepping in to lift the coffins

of dead relations.

They had been laid out

in tainted rooms,

their eyelids glistening,

their dough-white hands

shackled in rosary beads.

Their puffed knuckles

had unwrinkled, the nails

were darkened, the wrists

obediently sloped.

The dulse-brown shroud,

the quilted satin cribs:

I knelt courteously

admiring it all

as wax melted down

and veined the candles,

the flames hovering

to the women hovering

behind me.

And always, in a corner,

the coffin lid,

its nail-heads dressed

with little gleaming crosses.

dear soapstone masks,

kissing their igloo brows

had to suffice

before the nails were sunk

and the black glacier

of each funeral

pushed away.

II

Now as news comes in

of each neighbourly murder

we pine for ceremony,

customary rhythms:

the temperate footsteps

of a cortege, winding past

each blinded home.

I would restore

the great chambers of Boyne,

prepare the sepulchre

under the cupmarked stones.

out of side-streets and by-roads

purring family cars

nose into line,

the whole country tunes

to the muffled drumming

of ten thousand engines.

Somnambulant women,

left behind, move

through emptied kitchens

imagining our slow triumph

towards the mounds.

Quiet as a serpent

in its grassy boulevard

the procession drags its tail

out of the Gap of the North

as its head already enters

the megalithic doorway.

III

When they have put the stone

back in its mouth

we will drive north again

past Strang and Carling fjords

the cud of memory

allayed for once, arbitration

of the feud placated,

imagining those under the hill

disposed like Gunnar

who lay beautiful

inside his burial mound,

though dead by violence

and unavenged.

Men said that he was chanting

Verses about honour

And that four lights burned

In corners of the chamber:

Which opened then, as he turned

With a joyful face

To look at the moon.

from Station Island

I had come to the edge of the water,

soothed by just looking, idling over it

as if it were a clear barometer

or a mirror, when his reflection

did not appear but I sensed a presence

entering into my concentration

on not being concentrated as he spoke

my name. And though I was reluctant

I turned to meet his face and the shock

is still in me at what I saw. His brow

was blown open above the eye and blood

had dried on his neck and cheek. Easy now,

he said, its only me. Youve seen me as raw

after a football matchWhat time it was

when I was wakened up I still dont know

but I heard this knocking, and it

scared me, like the phone in the small hours,

so I had the sense not to put on the light

but looked out from behind the curtain.

I saw two customers on the doorstep

and an old landrover with the doors open

parked on the street so I let the curtain drop;

but they must have been waiting for it to move

for they shouted to come down into the shop.

She started to cry then and roll round the bed,

lamenting and lamenting to herself,

not even asking who it was. Is your head

astray, or whats come over you? I roared, more

to bring myself to my senses

than out of any real anger at her

for the knocking shook me, the way they kept it up,

and her whingeing and half-screeching made it worse.

All the time they were shouting, Shop!

Shop! so I pulled on my shoes and a sportscoat

and went back to the window and called out,

What do you want? Could you quieten the racket

or Ill not come down at all. Theres a child not well.

Open up and see what you have got pills

or a powder or something in a bottle,

one of them said. He stepped back off the footpath

so I could see his face in the street lamp

and when the other moved I knew them both.

But bad and all as the knocking was, the quiet

Hit me worse. She was quiet herself now,

Lying dead still, whispering to watch out.

At the bedroom door I switched on the light.

Its odd they didnt look for a chemist.

Who are they anyway at this time of the night?

She asked me, with the eyes standing in her head.

I know them to see, I said, but something

made me reach and squeeze her hand across the bed

before I went downstairs into the aisle

of the shop. I stood there, going weak

in the legs. I remember the stale smell

of cooked meat or something coming through

as I opened up. From then on

you know as much about it as I do.

Did they say nothing? Nothing. What would they say?

Were they in uniform? Not masked in any way?

They were barefaced as they would be in the day,

shites thinking they were the be-all and the end-all.

Not that it is my consolation,

but they were caught, I told him and got jail.

Big-limbed, decent, open-faced, he stood

Forgetful of everything now except

Whatever was welling up in his spoiled head,

Beginning to smile. Youve put on weight

since you did your courting in that big Austin

you got the loan of on a Sunday night.

Through life and death he had hardly aged.

There always was an athletes cleanliness

Shining off him and except for the ravaged

Forehead and the blood, he was still the same

Rangy midfielder in a blue jersey

And starched pants, the one stylist on the team,

The perfect, clean, unthinkable victim.

Forgive the way I have lived indifferent

forgive my timid circumspect involvement,

I surprised myself by saying. Forgive

My eye, he said, all thats above my head.

And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him

And he trembled like a heatwave and faded..