Two songs from a play

I

I saw a staring virgin stand

Where holy Dionysus died,

And tear the heart out of his side.

And lay the heart upon her hand

And bear that beating heart away;

Of Magnus Annus at the spring,

As though God's death were but a play.

Another Troy must rise and ser,

Another lineage feed the crow,

Another Argo's painted prow

Drive to a flashier bauble yet.

The Roman Empire stood appalled:

It dropped the reins of peace and war

When that fierce virgin and her Star

Out of the fabulous darkness called.

II

In pity for man's darkening thought

He walked that room and issued thence

In Galilean turbulence;

The Babylonian starlight brought

A fabulous, formless darkness in;

Odour of blood when Christ was slain

Made all platonic tolerance vain

And vain all Doric discipline.

Everything that man esteems

Endures a moment or a day.

Love's pleasure drives his love away,

The painter's brush consumes his dreams;

The herald's cry, the soldier's tread

Exhaust his glory and his might:

Whatever flames upon the night

Man's own resinous heart has fed.

-- William Butler Yeats

Let a gentle silence wrought with music flow

The Poet Pleads With The Elemental Powers

The Powers whose name and shape no living creature knows

Have pulled the Immortal Rose;

And though the Seven Lights bowed in their dance and wept,

The Polar Dragon slept,

His heavy rings uncoiled from glimmering deep to deep:

When will he wake from sleep?

Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire,

With your harmonious choir

Encircle her I love and sing her into peace,

That my old care may cease;

Unfold your flaming wings and cover out of sight

The nets of day and night.

Dim Powers of drowsy thought, let her no longer be

Like the pale cup of the sea,

When winds have gathered and sun and moon burned dim

Above its cloudy rim;

But let a gentle silence wrought with music flow

Whither her footsteps go.

-- W. B. Yeats

Long-legged Fly

That civilisation may not sink,

Its great battle lost,

Quiet the dog, tether the pony

To a distant post;

Our master Caesar is in the tent

Where the maps are spread,

His eyes fixed upon nothing,

A hand under his head.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence.

That the topless towers be burnt

And men recall that face,

Move most gently if move you must

In this lonely place.

She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,

That nobody looks; her feet

Practise a tinker shuffle

Picked up on a street.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

Her mind moves upon silence.

That girls at puberty may find

The first Adam in their thought,

Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,

Keep those children out.

There on that scaffolding reclines

Michael Angelo.

With no more sound than the mice make

His hand moves to and fro.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence.

-- W. B. Yeats

because all life has the same root

At the enquiry which preceded the granting of a patent to the Abbey Theatre I was asked if Cathleen ni Houlihan was not written to affect opinion. Certainly it was not. I had a dream one night which gave me a story, and I had certain emotions about this country, and I gave those emotions expression for my own pleasure. if I had written to convince others I would have asked myself, not 'Is that exactly what I think and feel?' but 'How would that strike so-and-so? How will they think and feel when they have read it?' And all would be oratorical and insincere. If we understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter themselves through our minds, we move others, not because we have understood or thought about those others, but because all life has the same root. Coventry Patmore has said, "The end of art is peace," and the following of art is little different from the following of religion in the intense preoccupation it demands. Somebody has said "God asks nothing of the highest soul except attention;" and so necessary is attention to mastery in any art, that there are moments when one thinks that nothing else is necessary, and nothing else so difficult.

- W.B. Yeats (Samhain: 1905)

Meru

Civilization is hooped together, brought

Under a rule, under the semblance of peace

By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought

And he, despite his terror, cannot cease

Ravening through century after century,

Ravening, raging and uprooting that he may come

Into the desolation of reality:

Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome.

Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest

Caverned in night under the drifted snow,

Or where that snow and winter's dreadful blast

Beat down upon their naked bodies, know

That day brings round the night, that before dawn

His glory and his monuments are gone.

- W.B. Yeats

both expansiveness and containment

 Seamus Heaney on W.B. Yeats:

"Reading Yeats, we are under the sway of a voice that offers both expansiveness and containment, and this is as true of the early work as it is of a magnificient late set-piece such as 'A Dialogue of Self and Soul.' The expansiveness arises from a confidence that the mind is its own place and within it great distances can be imagined and traversed at will. The containment is present as a sensation of strong emotional and intellectual pressure coming up against formal limits and straining within them."

Beautiful Lofty Things

Beautiful lofty things: O'Leary's noble head; 

My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd:

'This Land of Saints,' and then as the applause died out,
'Of plaster Saints'; his beautiful mischievous head thrown

    back.

Standish O'Grady supporting himself between the tables

Speaking to a srunken audience high nonsensical words;

Augusta Gregory seated at her ormolu table,

Her eightieth winter approaching: 'Yesterday he threatened

    my life.

I told him that nightly from six to seven I sat at this table,

The blinds drawn up'; Maud Gonne at Howth station

    waiting a train,

Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head:

All the Olympians; a thing never known again.

- W.B. Yeats

Myself must I remake

An Acre of Grass

Picture and book remain,
An acre of green grass

For air and exercise.

Now strength of body goes;

Midnight, an old house,

Where nothing stirs but a mouse.

My temptation is quiet

Here at life's end

Neither loose imagination,

Nor the mill of the mind

Consuming its rag and bone,

Can make the truth known.

Grant me an old man's frenzy,

Myself must I remake

Till I am Timon and Lear

Or that William Blake

Who beat upon the wall

Till truth obeyed his call;

A mind Michael Angelo knew

That can pierce the clouds,

Or inspired by frenzy

Shake the dead in their shrouds;

Forgotten else by mankind

An old man's eagle mind.

- W.B. Yeats

He set his chisel to the hardest stone

Ego Dominus Tuus

Hic. 

On the grey sand beside the shallow stream

Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still

A lamp burns on beside the open book

That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon,

And, though you have passed the best of life, still trace,

Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion,

Magical shapes.

Ille.

                            By the help of an image

I call to my own opposite, summon all

That I have handled least, least looked upon.

Hic.

And I would find myself and not an image.

Ille.

That is our modern hope, and by its light

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind

And lost the old nonchalance of the hand;

Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush,

We are but critics, or but half create,

Timid, entangled, empty and abashed,

Lacking the countenance of our friends.

Hic.

                                                    And yet

The chief imagination of Christendom,

Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself

That he has made that hollow face of his

More plain to the mind's eye than any face

But that of Christ.

Ille.

                            And did he find himself

Or was the hunger that had made it hollow

A hunger for the apple on the bough

Most out of reach? and is that spectral image

The man that Lapo and that Guido knew?

I think he fashioned from his opposite

An image that might have been a stony face

Staring upon a Bedouin's horse-hair roof

From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned

Among the coarse grass and the camel-dung.

He set his chisel to the hardest stone.

Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life,

Derided and deriding, driven out

To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread,

He found the unpersuadable justice, he found

The most exalted lady loved by a man.

Hic.

Yet surely there are men who have made their art

Out of no tragic war, lovers of life,

Impulsive men that look for happiness

And sing when they have found it.

Ille.

                                                No, not sing,

For those that love the world serve it in action,

grow rich, popular and full of influence,

And should they paint or write, still it is action:

The struggle of the fly in marmalade.

The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,

The sentimentalist himself; while art

Is but a vision of reality.

What portion in the world can the artist have

Who has awakened from the common dream

But dissipation and despair?

Hic.

                                        And yet

No one denies to Keats love of the world;

Remember his deliberate happiness.

Ille.

His art is happy, but who knows his mind?

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,

With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,

For certainly he sank into his grave

His senses and his heart unsatisfied,

And made - being poor, ailing and ignorant,

Shut out from all the luxury of the world,

The coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper -

Luxuriant song.

Hic.

                    Why should you leave the lamp

Burning alone beside an open book,

And trace these characters upon the sands?

A style is found by sedentary toil

And by the imitation of great masters.

Ille.

Because I seek an image, not a book.

Those men that in their writings are most wise

Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.

I call to the mysterious one who yet

Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream

And look most like me, being indeed my double,

And prove of all imaginable things

The most unlike, being my anti-self,

And, standing by these characters, disclose

All that I seek; and whisper it as though

He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud

Their momentary cries before it is dawn,

Would carry it away to blasphemous men.

- W.B. Yeats

He made the world to be a grassy road

The Rose of the World


Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,

Mournful that no new wonder may betide,

Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,

And Usna's children died.

We and the labouring world are passing by:

Amid men's souls, that waver and give place

Like the pale waters in their wintry race,

Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,

Lives on this lonely face.

Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:

Before you were, or any hearts to beat,

Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;

He made the world to be a grassy road

Before her wandering feet.

- W.B. Yeats

for peace comes dropping slow

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattle made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping

    slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket

    sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

- W.B. Yeats

No Second Troy

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late

Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,

Or hurled the little streets upon the great,

Had they but courage equal to desire?

What could have made her peaceful with a mind

That nobleness made simple as a fire,

With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind

That is not natural in an age like this,

Being high and solitary and most stern?

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?

Was there another Troy for her to burn?

- W.B. Yeats

That we must labour to be beautiful

Adam's Curse


We sat together at one summer's end,

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,

And you and I, and talked of poetry.

I said, ' A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon yout marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.'

                                        And thereupon

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake

There's many a one shall find out all heartache

On finding that her voice is sweet and low

Replied, ' To be born woman is to know -

Although they do not talk of it as school -

That we must labour to be beautiful.'

I said, 'It's certain there is no fine thing

Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.

There have been lovers who thought love should be

So much compounded of high courtesy

That they would sigh and quote with learned looks

Precedents out of beautiful old books;

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.'

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;

We saw the last embers of daylight die,

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell

Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:

That you were beautiful, and that I strove 

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it has all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.