THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OF THE TOWER

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Title: The tower

Author: W. B. Yeats

Release date: February 18, 2024 [eBook #72985]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Macmillan and Co, Limited

Credits: Produced by Christopher Hapka. Images generously made available by HathiTrust Digital Library.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TOWER ***

THE TOWER

BY

W. B. YEATS

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON

1928

CONTENTS

- SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

- THE TOWER

- MEDITATIONS IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR

- NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN

- THE WHEEL

- YOUTH AND AGE

- THE NEW FACES

- A PRAYER FOR MY SON

- TWO SONGS FROM A PLAY

- WISDOM

- LEDA AND THE SWAN

- ON A PICTURE OF A BLACK CENTAUR

- AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN

- COLONUS’ PRAISE

- THE HERO, THE GIRL, AND THE FOOL

- OWEN AHERN AND HIS DANCERS

- A MAN YOUNG AND OLD

- THE THREE MONUMENTS

- FROM ‘OEDIPUS AT COLONUS’

- THE GIFT OF HARUN AL-RASHID

- ALL SOULS’ NIGHT

- NOTES

SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

I

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s 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 unaging 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 but 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 God’s 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 and 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.

1927

THE TOWER

I

What shall I do with this absurdity—

O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog’s tail? Never had I more

Excited, passionate, fantastical

Imagination, nor an ear and eye

That more expected the impossible—

No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,

Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s back

And had the livelong summer day to spend.

It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,

Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend

Until imagination, ear and eye,

Can be content with argument and deal

In abstract things; or be derided by

A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

II

I pace upon the battlements and stare

On the foundations of a house, or where

Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;

And send imagination forth

Under the day’s declining beam, and call

Images and memories

From ruin or from ancient trees,

For I would ask a question of them all.

Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and once

When every silver candlestick or sconce

Lit up the dark mahogany and the wine,

A serving man that could divine

That most respected lady’s every wish,

Ran and with the garden shears

Clipped an insolent farmer’s ears

And brought them in a little covered dish.

Some few remembered still when I was young

A peasant girl commended by a song,

Who’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place,

And praised the colour of her face,

And had the greater joy in praising her,

Remembering that, if walked she there,

Farmers jostled at the fair

So great a glory did the song confer.

And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,

Or else by toasting her a score of times,

Rose from the table and declared it right

To test their fancy by their sight;

But they mistook the brightness of the moon

For the prosaic light of day—

Music had driven their wits astray—

And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.

Strange, but the man who made the song was blind,

Yet, now I have considered it, I find

That nothing strange; the tragedy began

With Homer that was a blind man,

And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.

O may the moon and sunlight seem

One inextricable beam,

For if I triumph I must make men mad.

And I myself created Hanrahan

And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn

From somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.

Caught by an old man’s juggleries

He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro

And had but broken knees for hire

And horrible splendour of desire;

I thought it all out twenty years ago:

Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;

And when that ancient ruffian’s turn was on

He so bewitched the cards under his thumb

That all, but the one card, became

A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,

And that he changed into a hare.

Hanrahan rose in frenzy there

And followed up those baying creatures towards—

O towards I have forgotten what—enough!

I must recall a man that neither love

Nor music nor an enemy’s clipped ear

Could, he was so harried, cheer;

A figure that has grown so fabulous

There’s not a neighbour left to say

When he finished his dog’s day:

An ancient bankrupt master of this house.

Before that ruin came, for centuries,

Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the knees

Or shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs,

And certain men-at-arms there were

Whose images, in the Great Memory stored,

Come with loud cry and panting breast

To break upon a sleeper’s rest

While their great wooden dice beat on the board.

As I would question all, come all who can;

Come old, necessitous, half-mounted man;

And bring beauty’s blind rambling celebrant;

The red man the juggler sent

Through God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,

Gifted with so fine an ear;

The man drowned in a bog’s mire,

When mocking muses chose the country wench.

Did all old men and women, rich and poor,

Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,

Whether in public or in secret rage

As I do now against old age?

But I have found an answer in those eyes

That are impatient to be gone;

Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan

For I need all his mighty memories.

Old lecher with a love on every wind

Bring up out of that deep considering mind

All that you have discovered in the grave,

For it is certain that you have

Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing

Plunge, lured by a softening eye,

Or by a touch or a sigh,

Into the labyrinth of another’s being;

Does the imagination dwell the most

Upon a woman won or woman lost?

If on the lost, admit you turned aside

From a great labyrinth out of pride,

Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought

Or anything called conscience once;

And that if memory recur, the sun’s

Under eclipse and the day blotted out.

III

It is time that I wrote my will;

I choose upstanding men,

That climb the streams until

The fountain leap, and at dawn

Drop their cast at the side

Of dripping stone; I declare

They shall inherit my pride,

The pride of people that were

Bound neither to Cause nor to State,

Neither to slaves that were spat on,

Nor to the tyrants that spat,

The people of Burke and of Grattan

That gave, though free to refuse—

Pride, like that of the morn,

When the headlong light is loose,

Or that of the fabulous horn,

Or that of the sudden shower

When all streams are dry,

Or that of the hour

When the swan must fix his eye

Upon a fading gleam,

Float out upon a long

Last reach of glittering stream

And there sing his last song.

And I declare my faith;

I mock Plotinus’ thought

And cry in Plato’s teeth,

Death and life were not

Till man made up the whole,

Made lock, stock and barrel

Out of his bitter soul,

Aye, sun and moon and star, all,

And further add to that

That, being dead, we rise,

Dream and so create

Translunar Paradise.

I have prepared my peace

With learned Italian things

And the proud stones of Greece,

Poet’s imaginings

And memories of love,

Memories of the words of women,

All those things whereof

Man makes a superhuman,

Mirror-resembling dream.

As at the loophole there,

The daws chatter and scream,

And drop twigs layer upon layer.

When they have mounted up,

The mother bird will rest

On their hollow top,

And so warm her wild nest.

I leave both faith and pride

To young upstanding men

Climbing the mountain side,

That under bursting dawn

They may drop a fly;

Being of that metal made

Till it was broken by

This sedentary trade.

Now shall I make my soul

Compelling it to study

In a learned school

Till the wreck of body

Slow decay of blood,

Testy delirium

Or dull decrepitude,

Or what worse evil come—

The death of friends, or death

Of every brilliant eye

That made a catch in the breath—

Seem but the clouds of the sky

When the horizon fades;

Or a bird’s sleepy cry

Among the deepening shades.

1926

MEDITATIONS IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR

I

ANCESTRAL HOUSES

Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns,

Amid the rustle of his planted hills,

Life overflows without ambitious pains;

And rains down life until the basin spills,

And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains

As though to choose whatever shape it wills

And never stoop to a mechanical,

Or servile shape, at others’ beck and call.

Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not sung

Had he not found it certain beyond dreams

That out of life’s own self-delight had sprung

The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems

As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung

Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,

And not a fountain, were the symbol which

Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.

Some violent bitter man, some powerful man

Called architect and artist in, that they,

Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone

The sweetness that all longed for night and day,

The gentleness none there had ever known;

But when the master’s buried mice can play,

And maybe the great-grandson of that house,

For all its bronze and marble, ’s but a mouse.

Oh, what if gardens where the peacock strays

With delicate feet upon old terraces,

Or else all Juno from an urn displays

Before the indifferent garden deities;

Oh, what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways

Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease

And Childhood a delight for every sense,

But take our greatness with our violence!

What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,

And buildings that a haughtier age designed,

The pacing to and fro on polished floors

Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined

With famous portraits of our ancestors;

What if those things the greatest of mankind,

Consider most to magnify, or to bless,

But take our greatness with our bitterness!

II

MY HOUSE

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,

A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,

An acre of stony ground,

Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,

Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,

The sound of the rain or sound

Of every wind that blows;

The stilted water-hen

Crossing stream again

Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;

A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,

A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,

A candle and written page.

Il Penseroso’s Platonist toiled on

In some like chamber, shadowing forth

How the daemonic rage

Imagined everything.

Benighted travellers

From markets and from fairs

Have seen his midnight candle glimmering.

Two men have founded here. A man-at-arms

Gathered a score of horse and spent his days

In this tumultuous spot,

Where through long wars and sudden night alarms

His dwindling score and he seemed cast-a-ways

Forgetting and forgot;

And I, that after me

My bodily heirs may find,

To exalt a lonely mind,

Befitting emblems of adversity.

III

MY TABLE

Two heavy tressels, and a board

Where Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,

By pen and paper lies,

That it may moralise

My days out of their aimlessness.

A bit of an embroidered dress

Covers its wooden sheath.

Chaucer had not drawn breath

When it was forged. In Sato’s house,

Curved like new moon, moon luminous

It lay five hundred years.

Yet if no change appears

No moon; only an aching heart

Conceives a changeless work of art.

Our learned men have urged

That when and where ’twas forged

A marvellous accomplishment,

In painting or in pottery, went

From father unto son

And through the centuries ran

And seemed unchanging like the sword.

Soul’s beauty being most adored,

Men and their business took

The soul’s unchanging look;

For the most rich inheritor,

Knowing that none could pass heaven’s door

That loved inferior art,

Had such an aching heart

That he, although a country’s talk

For silken clothes and stately walk,

Had waking wits; it seemed

Juno’s peacock screamed.

IV

MY DESCENDANTS

Having inherited a vigorous mind

From my old fathers I must nourish dreams

And leave a woman and a man behind

As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems

Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,

Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,

But the torn petals strew the garden plot;

And there’s but common greenness after that.

And what if my descendants lose the flower

Through natural declension of the soul,

Through too much business with the passing hour,

Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?

May this laborious stair and this stark tower

Become a roofless ruin that the owl

May build in the cracked masonry and cry

Her desolation to the desolate sky.

The Primum Mobile that fashioned us

Has made the very owls in circles move;

And I, that count myself most prosperous,

Seeing that love and friendship are enough,

For an old neighbour’s friendship chose the house

And decked and altered it for a girl’s love,

And know whatever flourish and decline

These stones remain their monument and mine.

V

THE ROAD AT MY DOOR

An affable Irregular,

A heavily built Falstaffan man,

Comes cracking jokes of civil war

As though to die by gunshot were

The finest play under the sun.

A brown Lieutenant and his men,

Half dressed in national uniform,

Stand at my door, and I complain

Of the foul weather, hail and rain,

A pear tree broken by the storm.

I count those feathered balls of soot

The moor-hen guides upon the stream,

To silence the envy in my thought;

And turn towards my chamber, caught

In the cold snows of a dream.

VI

THE STARE’S NEST BY MY WINDOW

The bees build in the crevices

Of loosening masonry, and there

The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

My wall is loosening; honey-bees

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned

On our uncertainty; somewhere

A man is killed, or a house burned,

Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;

Some fourteen days of civil war;

Last night they trundled down the road

That dead young soldier in his blood:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love; oh, honey-bees

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

VII

I SEE PHANTOMS OF HATRED AND OF THE HEART’S FULLNESS AND OF THE COMING EMPTINESS

I climb to the tower top and lean upon broken stone,

A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,

Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon

That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,

A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind

And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.

Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;

Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.

‘Vengeance upon the murderers,’ the cry goes up,

‘Vengeance for Jacques Molay.’ In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,

The rage driven, rage tormented, and rage hungry troop,

Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,

Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide

For the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astray

Because of all that senseless tumult, all but cried

For vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.

Their legs long delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,

Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs,

The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,

Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,

Have closed the ladies’ eyes, their minds are but a pool

Where even longing drowns under its own excess;

Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full

Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,

The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,

Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,

Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place

To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,

Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone,

Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency,

The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.

I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair

Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth

In something that all others understand or share;

But oh, ambitious heart had such a proof drawn forth

A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,

It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,

The half read wisdom of daemonic images,

Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.

1923

NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN

I

Many ingenious lovely things are gone

That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,

Protected from the circle of the moon

That pitches common things about. There stood

Amid the ornamental bronze and stone

An ancient image made of olive wood—

And gone are Phidias’ famous ivories

And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.

We too had many pretty toys when young;

A law indifferent to blame or praise,

To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong

Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;

Public opinion ripening for so long

We thought it would outlive all future days.

O what fine thought we had because we thought

That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,

And a great army but a showy thing;

What matter that no cannon had been turned

Into a ploughshare; parliament and king

Thought that unless a little powder burned

The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting

And yet it lack all glory; and perchance

The guardsmen’s drowsy chargers would not prance.

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare

Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery

Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,

To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;

The night can sweat with terror as before

We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,

And planned to bring the world under a rule,

Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned

Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant

From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,

Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent

On master work of intellect or hand,

No honour leave its mighty monument,

Has but one comfort left: all triumph would

But break upon his ghostly solitude.

But is there any comfort to be found?

Man is in love and loves what vanishes,

What more is there to say? That country round

None dared admit, if such a thought were his,

Incendiary or bigot could be found

To burn that stump on the Acropolis,

Or break in bits the famous ivories

Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees?

II

When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound

A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,

It seemed that a dragon of air

Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round

Or hurried them off on its own furious path;

So the platonic year

Whirls out new right and wrong,

Whirls in the old instead;

All men are dancers and their tread

Goes to the barbarous clangour of gong.

III

Some moralist or mythological poet

Compares the solitary soul to a swan;

I am satisfied with that,

Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it

Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,

An image of its state;

The wings half spread for flight,

The breast thrust out in pride

Whether to play, or to ride

Those winds that clamour of approaching night.

A man in his own secret meditation

Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made

In art or politics;

Some platonist affirms that in the station

Where we should cast off body and trade

The ancient habit sticks,

And that if our works could

But vanish with our breath

That were a lucky death,

For triumph can but mar our solitude.

The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:

That image can bring wildness, bring a rage

To end all things, to end

What my laborious life imagined, even

The half imagined, the half written page;

O but we dreamed to mend

Whatever mischief seemed

To afflict mankind, but now

That winds of winter blow

Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

IV

We, who seven years ago

Talked of honour and of truth,

Shriek with pleasure if we show

The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.

V

Come let us mock at the great

That had such burdens on the mind

And toiled so hard and late

To leave some monument behind,

Nor thought of the levelling wind.

Come let us mock at the wise;

With all those calendars whereon

They fixed old aching eyes,

They never saw how seasons run,

And now but gape at the sun.

Come let us mock at the good

That fancied goodness might be gay,

And sick of solitude

Might proclaim a holiday:

Wind shrieked—and where are they?

Mock mockers after that

That would not lift a hand maybe

To help good, wise or great

To bar that foul storm out, for we

Traffic in mockery.

VI

Violence upon the roads: violence of horses;

Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded

On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,

But wearied running round and round in their courses

All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:

Herodias’ daughters have returned again

A sudden blast of dusty wind and after

Thunder of feet, tumult of images,

Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;

And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter

All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,

According to the wind, for all are blind.

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.

1919

THE WHEEL

Through winter-time we call on spring,

And through the spring on summer call,

And when abounding hedges ring

Declare that winter’s best of all;

And after that there s nothing good

Because the spring-time has not come—

Nor know that what disturbs our blood

Is but its longing for the tomb.

YOUTH AND AGE

Much did I rage when young,

Being by the world oppressed,

But now with flattering tongue

It speeds the parting guest.

1924

THE NEW FACES

If you, that have grown old, were the first dead,

Neither catalpa tree nor scented lime

Should hear my living feet, nor would I tread

Where we wrought that shall break the teeth of time.

Let the new faces play what tricks they will

In the old rooms; night can outbalance day,

Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,

The living seem more shadowy than they.

A PRAYER FOR MY SON

Bid a strong ghost stand at the head

That my Michael may sleep sound,

Nor cry, nor turn in the bed

Till his morning meal come round;

And may departing twilight keep

All dread afar till morning’s back,

That his mother may not lack

Her fill of sleep.

Bid the ghost have sword in fist:

Some there are, for I avow

Such devilish things exist,

Who have planned his murder for they know

Of some most haughty deed or thought

That waits upon his future days,

And would through hatred of the bays

Bring that to nought.

Though You can fashion everything

From nothing every day, and teach

The morning stars to sing,

You have lacked articulate speech

To tell Your simplest want, and known,

Wailing upon a woman’s knee,

All of that worst ignominy

Of flesh and bone;

And when through all the town there ran

The servants of Your enemy,

A woman and a man,

Unless the Holy Writings lie,

Hurried through the smooth and rough

And through the fertile and waste,

Protecting, till the danger past,

With human love.

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;

And then did all the Muses sing

Of Magnus Annus at the spring,

As though God’s death were but a play.

Another Troy must rise and set,

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 Plato’s tolerance in vain

And vain the Doric discipline.

WISDOM

The true faith discovered was

When painted panel, statuary,

Glass-mosaic, window-glass,

Straightened all that went awry

When some peasant gospeller

Imagined Him upon the floor

Of a working-carpenter.

Miracle had its playtime where

In damask clothed and on a seat,

Chryselephantine, cedar boarded,

His majestic Mother sat

Stitching at a purple hoarded,

That He might be nobly breeched,

In starry towers of Babylon

Noah’s freshet never reached.

King Abundance got Him on

Innocence; and Wisdom He.

That cognomen sounded best

Considering what wild infancy

Drove horror from His Mother’s breast.

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?

1928

ON A PICTURE OF A BLACK CENTAUR BY EDMOND DULAC

Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,

Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.

My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.

I knew that horse play, knew it for a murderous thing.

What wholesome sun has ripened is wholesome food to eat

And that alone; yet I, being driven half insane

Because of some green wing, gathered old mummy wheat

In the mad abstract dark and ground it grain by grain

And after baked it slowly in an oven; but now

I bring full flavoured wine out of a barrel found

Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew

When Alexander’s empire past, they slept so sound.

Stretch out your limbs and sleep a long Saturnian sleep;

I have loved you better than my soul for all my words,

And there is none so fit to keep a watch and keep

Unwearied eyes upon those horrible green birds.

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 children’s eyes

In momentary wonder stare upon

A sixty year old smiling public man.

II

I dream of a Ledæan 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 Plato’s 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 t’other there

And wonder if she stood so at that age—

For even daughters of the swan can share

Something of every paddler’s heritage—

And had that colour upon cheek or hair

And thereupon my heart is driven wild:

She stands before me as a living child.

IV

Her present image floats in to the mind—

Did quattrocento finger fashion it

Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind

And took a mass of shadows for its meat?

And I though never of Ledæan 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

As 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;

Solider 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 mother’s reveries,

But keep a marble or a 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 man’s 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 blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

COLONUS’ PRAISE

(FROM ‘OEDIPUS AT COLONUS’)

CHORUS

Come praise Colonus’ horses and come praise

The wine dark of the wood’s intricacies,

The nightingale that deafens daylight there,

If daylight ever visit where,

Unvisited by tempest or by sun,

Immortal ladies tread the ground

Dizzy with harmonious sound,

Semele’s lad a gay companion.

And yonder in the gymnasts’ garden thrives

The self-sown, self-begotten shape that gives

Athenian intellect its mastery,

Even the grey-leaved olive tree

Miracle-bred out of the living stone;

Nor accident of peace nor war

Shall wither that old marvel, for

The great grey-eyed Athene stares thereon.

Who comes into this country, and has come

Where golden crocus and narcissus bloom,

Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughter

And beauty-drunken by the water

Glittering among grey-leaved olive trees,

Has plucked a flower and sung her loss;

Who finds abounding Cephisus

Has found the loveliest spectacle there is.

Because this country has a pious mind

And so remembers that when all mankind

But trod the road, or paddled by the shore,

Poseidon gave it bit and oar,

Every Colonus lad or lass discourses

Of that oar and of that bit;

Summer and winter, day and night,

Of horses and horses of the sea, white horses.

THE HERO, THE GIRL, AND THE FOOL

THE GIRL

I rage at my own image in the glass,

That’s so unlike myself that when you praise it

It is as though you praised another, or even

Mocked me with praise of my mere opposite;

And when I wake towards morn I dread myself

For the heart cries that what deception wins

Cruelty must keep; therefore be warned and go

If you have seen that image and not the woman.

THE HERO

I have raged at my own strength because you have loved it.

THE GIRL

If you are no more strength than I am beauty

I had better find a convent and turn nun;

A nun at least has all men’s reverence

And needs no cruelty.

THE HERO

I have heard one say

That men have reverence for their holiness

And not themselves.

THE GIRL

Say on and say

That only God has loved us for ourselves,

But what care I that long for a man’s love?

THE FOOL BY THE ROADSIDE

When my days that have

From cradle run to grave

From grave to cradle run instead;

When thoughts that a fool

Has wound upon a spool

Are but loose thread, are but loose thread.

When cradle and spool are past

And I mere shade at last

Coagulate of stuff

Transparent like the wind,

I think that I may find

A faithful love, a faithful love.

OWEN AHERN AND HIS DANCERS

I

A strange thing surely that my heart when love had come unsought

Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,

Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.

It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.

The south wind brought it longing, and the east wind despair,

The west wind made it pitiful, and the north wind afraid.

It feared to give its love a hurt with all the tempest there;

It feared the hurt that she could give and therefore it went mad.

I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,

I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer’s had,

But oh my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;

I ran, I ran, from my love’s side because my Heart went mad.

II

The Heart behind its rib laughed out, ‘You have called me mad,’ it said.

‘Because I made you turn away and run from that young child;

How could she mate with fifty years that was so wildly bred?

Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.’

‘You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,’ I replied.

‘And all those lies have but one end poor wretches to betray;

I did not find in any cage the woman at my side.

O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.’

‘Speak all your mind,’ my Heart sang out, ‘speak all your mind; who cares,

Now that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she mistake

Her childish gratitude for love and match your fifty years.

O let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.’

A MAN YOUNG AND OLD

FIRST LOVE

Though nurtured like the sailing moon

In beauty’s murderous brood,

She walked awhile and blushed awhile

And on my pathway stood

Until I thought her body bore

A heart of flesh and blood.

But since I laid a hand thereon

And found a heart of stone

I have attempted many things

And not a thing is done,

For every hand is lunatic

That travels on the moon.

She smiled and that transfigured me

And left me but a lout,

Maundering here, and maundering there,

Emptier of thought

Than heavenly circuit of its stars

When the moon sails out.

HUMAN DIGNITY

Like the moon her kindness is,

If kindness I may call

What has no comprehension in’t,

But is the same for all

As though my sorrow were a scene

Upon a painted wall.

So like a bit of stone I lie

Under a broken tree.

I could recover if I shrieked

My heart’s agony

To passing bird, but I am dumb

From human dignity.

THE MERMAID

A mermaid found a swimming lad,

Picked him for her own,

Pressed her body to his body,

Laughed; and plunging down

Forgot in cruel happiness

That even lovers drown.

THE DEATH OF THE HARE

I have pointed out the yelling pack,

The hare leap to the wood,

And when I pass a compliment

Rejoice as lover should

At the drooping of an eye

At the mantling of the blood.

Then suddenly my heart is wrung

By her distracted air

And I remember wildness lost

And after, swept from there,

Am set down standing in the wood

At the death of the hare.

THE EMPTY CUP

A crazy man that found a cup,

When all but dead of thirst,

Hardly dared to wet his mouth

Imagining, moon accursed,

That another mouthful

And his beating heart would burst.

October last I found it too

But found it dry as bone,

And for that reason am I crazed

And my sleep is gone.

HIS MEMORIES

We should be hidden from their eyes,

Being but holy shows

And bodies broken like a thorn

Whereon the bleak north blows,

To think of buried Hector

And that none living knows.

The women take so little stock

In what I do or say

They’d sooner leave their cosseting

To hear a jackass bray;

My arms are like the twisted thorn

And yet there beauty lay;

The first of all the tribe lay there

And did such pleasure take—

She who had brought great Hector down

And put all Troy to wreck—

That she cried into this ear

Strike me if I shriek.

THE FRIENDS OF HIS YOUTH

Laughter not time destroyed my voice

And put that crack in it,

And when the moon’s pot-bellied

I get a laughing fit,

For that old Madge comes down the lane

A stone upon her breast,

And a cloak wrapped about the stone,

And she can get no rest

With singing hush and hush-a-bye;

She that has been wild

And barren as a breaking wave

Thinks that the stone’s a child.

And Peter that had great affairs

And was a pushing man

Shrieks, ‘I am King of the Peacocks,’

And perches on a stone;

And then I laugh till tears run down

And the heart thumps at my side,

Remembering that her shriek was love

And that he shrieks from pride.

SUMMER AND SPRING

We sat under an old thorn-tree

And talked away the night,

Told all that had been said or done

Since first we saw the light,

And when we talked of growing up

Knew that we’d halved a soul

And fell the one in t’other’s arms

That we might make it whole;

Then Peter had a murdering look

For it seemed that he and she

Had spoken of their childish days

Under that very tree.

O what a bursting out there was,

And what a blossoming,

When we had all the summer time

And she had all the spring.

THE SECRETS OF THE OLD

I have old women’s secrets now

That had those of the young;

Madge tells me what I dared not think

When my blood was strong,

And what had drowned a lover once

Sounds like an old song.

Though Margery is stricken dumb

If thrown in Madge’s way,

We three make up a solitude;

For none alive to-day

Can know the stories that we know

Or say the things we say:

How such a man pleased women most

Of all that are gone,

How such a pair loved many years

And such a pair but one,

Stories of the bed of straw

Or the bed of down.

HIS WILDNESS

O bid me mount and sail up there

Amid the cloudy wrack,

For Peg and Meg and Paris’ love

That had so straight a back,

Are gone away, and some that stay,

Have changed their silk for sack.

Were I but there and none to hear

I’d have a peacock cry

For that is natural to a man

That lives in memory,

Being all alone I’d nurse a stone

And sing it lullaby.

THE THREE MONUMENTS

They hold their public meetings where

Our most renowned patriots stand,

One among the birds of the air,

A stumpier on either hand;

And all the popular statesmen say

That purity built up the state

And after kept it from decay;

Admonish us to cling to that

And let all base ambition be,

For intellect would make us proud

And pride bring in impurity:

The three old rascals laugh aloud.

FROM ‘OEDIPUS AT COLONUS’

I

Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;

Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man; Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;

Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.

II

Even from that delight memory treasures so,

Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,

As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.

III

In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,

The bride is carried to the bridegroom’s chamber through torchlight and tumultuous song;

I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.

IV

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;

Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;

The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

THE GIFT OF HARUN AL-RASHID

Kusta ben Luka is my name, I write

To Abd Al-Rabban; fellow roysterer once,

Now the good Caliph’s learned Treasurer,

And for no ear but his. Carry this letter

Through the great gallery of the Treasure House

Where banners of the Caliphs hang, night-coloured

But brilliant as the night’s embroidery,

And wait war’s music; pass the little gallery;

Pass books of learning from Byzantium

Written in gold upon a purple stain,

And pause at last, I was about to say,

At the great book of Sappho’s song; but no,

For should you leave my letter there, a boy’s

Love-lorn, indifferent hands might come upon it

And let it fall unnoticed to the floor.

Pause at the Treatise of Parmenides

And hide it there, for Caliphs to world’s end

Must keep that perfect, as they keep her song

So great its fame. When fitting time has passed

The parchment will disclose to some learned man

A mystery that else had found no chronicler

But the wild Bedouin. Though I approve

Those wanderers that welcomed in their tents

What great Harun Al-Rashid, occupied

With Persian embassy or Grecian war,

Must needs neglect; I cannot hide the truth

That wandering in a desert, featureless

As air under a wing, can give birds’ wit.

In after time they will speak much of me

And speak but phantasy. Recall the year

When our beloved Caliph put to death

His Vizir Jaffer for an unknown reason;

‘If but the shirt upon my body knew it

I’d tear it off and throw it in the fire.’

That speech was all that the town knew, but he

Seemed for a while to have grown young again;

Seemed so on purpose, muttered Jaffer’s friends,

That none might know that he was conscience struck—

But that’s a traitor’s thought. Enough for me

That in the early summer of the year

The mightiest of the princes of the world

Came to the least considered of his courtiers;

Sat down upon the fountain’s marble edge

One hand amid the goldfish in the pool;

And thereupon a colloquy took place

That I commend to all the chroniclers

To show how violent great hearts can lose

Their bitterness and find the honey-comb.

‘I have brought a slender bride into the house;

You know the saying “Change the bride with Spring”,

And she and I, being sunk in happiness,

Cannot endure to think you tread these paths,

When evening stirs the jasmine, and yet

Are brideless.’ ‘I am falling into years.’

‘But such as you and I do not seem old

Like men who live by habit. Every day

I ride with falcon to the river’s edge

Or carry the ringed mail upon my back,

Or court a woman; neither enemy,

Game-bird, nor woman does the same thing twice;

And so a hunter carries in the eye

A mimicry of youth. Can poet’s thought

That springs from body and in body falls

Like this pure jet, now lost amid blue sky

Now bathing lily leaf and fishes’ scale,

Be mimicry?’ ‘What matter if our souls

Are nearer to the surface of the body

Than souls that start no game and turn no rhyme!

The soul’s own youth and not the body’s youth

Shows through our lineaments. My candle’s bright,

My lantern is too loyal not to show

That it was made in your great father’s reign.’

‘And yet the jasmine season warms our blood.’

‘Great prince, forgive the freedom of my speech;

You think that love has seasons, and you think

That if the spring bear off what the spring gave

The heart need suffer no defeat; but I

Who have accepted the Byzantine faith,

That seems unnatural to Arabian minds,

Think when I choose a bride I choose for ever;

And if her eye should not grow bright for mine

Or brighten only for some younger eye,

My heart could never turn from daily ruin,

Nor find a remedy.’ ‘But what if I

Have lit upon a woman, who so shares

Your thirst for those old crabbed mysteries,

So strains to look beyond our life, an eye

That never knew that strain would scarce seem bright,

And yet herself can seem youth’s very fountain,

Being all brimmed with life.’ ‘Were it but true

I would have found the best that life can give,

Companionship in those mysterious things

That make a man’s soul or a woman’s soul

Itself and not some other soul.’ ‘That love

Must needs be in this life and in what follows

Unchanging and at peace, and it is right

Every philosopher should praise that love.

But I being none can praise its opposite.

It makes my passion stronger but to think

Like passion stirs the peacock and his mate,

The wild stag and the doe; that mouth to mouth

Is a man’s mockery of the changeless soul.’

And thereupon his bounty gave what now

Can shake more blossom from autumnal chill

Than all my bursting springtime knew. A girl

Perched in some window of her mother’s house

Had watched my daily passage to and fro;

Had heard impossible history of my past;

Imagined some impossible history

Lived at my side; thought time’s disfiguring touch

Gave but more reason for a woman’s care.

Yet was it love of me, or was it love

Of the stark mystery that has dazed my sight,

Perplexed her phantasy and planned her care?

Or did the torchlight of that mystery

Pick out my features in such light and shade

Two contemplating passions chose one theme

Through sheer bewilderment? She had not paced

The garden paths, nor counted up the rooms,

Before she had spread a book upon her knees

And asked about the pictures or the text;

And often those first days I saw her stare

On old dry writing in a learned tongue,

On old dry faggots that could never please

The extravagance of spring; or move a hand

As if that writing or the figured page

Were some dear cheek. Upon a moonless night

I sat where I could watch her sleeping form,

And wrote by candle-light; but her form moved,

And fearing that my light disturbed her sleep

I rose that I might screen it with a cloth.

I heard her voice, ‘Turn that I may expound

What’s bowed your shoulder and made pale your cheek’;

And saw her sitting upright on the bed;

Or was it she that spoke or some great Djinn?

I say that a Djinn spoke. A live-long hour

She seemed the learned man and I the child;

Truths without father came, truths that no book

Of all the uncounted books that I have read,

Nor thought out of her mind or mine begot,

Self-born, high-born, and solitary truths,

Those terrible implacable straight lines

Drawn through the wandering vegetative dream,

Even those truths that when my bones are dust

Must drive the Arabian host. The voice grew still,

And she lay down upon her bed and slept,

But woke at the first gleam of day, rose up

And swept the house and sang about her work

In childish ignorance of all that passed.

A dozen nights of natural sleep, and then

When the full moon swam to its greatest height

She rose, and with her eyes shut fast in sleep

Walked through the house. Unnoticed and unfelt

I wrapped her in a heavy hooded cloak, and she,

Half running, dropped at the first ridge of the desert

And there marked out those emblems on the sand

That day by day I study and marvel at,

With her white finger. I led her home asleep

And once again she rose and swept the house

In childish ignorance of all that passed.

Even to-day, after some seven years

When maybe thrice in every moon her mouth

Murmured the wisdom of the desert Djinns,

She keeps that ignorance, nor has she now

That first unnatural interest in my books.

It seems enough that I am there; and yet

Old fellow student, whose most patient ear

Heard all the anxiety of my passionate youth,

It seems I must buy knowledge with my peace.

What if she lose her ignorance and so

Dream that I love her only for the voice,

That every gift and every word of praise

Is but a payment for that midnight voice

That is to age what milk is to a child!

Were she to lose her love, because she had lost

Her confidence in mine, or even lose

Its first simplicity, love, voice and all,

All my fine feathers would be plucked away

And I left shivering. The voice has drawn

A quality of wisdom from her love’s

Particular quality. The signs and shapes;

All those abstractions that you fancied were

From the great treatise of Parmenides;

All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things

Are but a new expression of her body

Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.

And now my utmost mystery is out.

A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner;

Under it wisdom stands, and I alone—

Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone—

Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost

In the confusion of its night-dark folds,

Can hear the armed man speak.

1923

ALL SOULS’ NIGHT

AN EPILOGUE TO ‘A VISION’

Midnight has come and the great Christ Church Bell,

And may a lesser bell, sound through the room;

And it is All Souls’ Night,

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 some mind that, if the cannon sound

From every quarter of the world, can stay

Wound in mind’s pondering,

As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;

Because I have a marvellous thing to say,

A certain marvellous thing

None but the living mock,

Though not for sober ear;

It may be all that hear

Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

H⸺’s the first I call. He loved strange thought

And knew that sweet extremity of pride

That’s called platonic love,

And that to such a pitch of passion wrought

Nothing could bring him, when his lady died,

Anodyne for his love.

Words were but wasted breath;

One dear hope had he:

The inclemency

Of that or the next winter would be death.

Two thoughts were so mixed up I could not tell

Whether of her or God he thought the most,

But think that his mind’s eye,

When upward turned, on one sole image fell;

And that a slight companionable ghost,

Wild with divinity,

Had so lit up the whole

Immense miraculous house

The Bible promised us,

It seemed a gold-fish swimming in a bowl.

On Florence Emery I call the next,

Who finding the first wrinkles on a face

Admired and beautiful,

And knowing that the future would be vexed

With ’minished beauty, multiplied commonplace,

Preferred to teach a school,

Away from neighbour or friend

Among dark skins, and there

Permit foul years to wear

Hidden from eyesight to the unnoticed end.

Before that end much had she ravelled out

From a discourse in figurative speech

By some learned Indian

On the soul’s journey. How it is whirled about,

Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,

Until it plunge into the sun;

And there, free and yet fast

Being both Chance and Choice,

Forget its broken toys

And sink into its own delight at last.

And I call up MacGregor from the grave,

For in my first hard springtime we were friends,

Although of late estranged.

I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,

And told him so, but friendship never ends;

And what if mind seem changed,

And it seem changed with the mind,

When thoughts rise up unbid

On generous things that he did

And I grow half contented to be blind.

He had much industry at setting out,

Much boisterous courage, before loneliness

Had driven him crazed;

For meditations upon unknown thought

Make human intercourse grow less and less;

They are neither paid nor praised.

But he’d object to the host,

The glass because my glass;

A ghost-lover he was

And may have grown more arrogant being a ghost.

But names are nothing. What matter who it be,

So that his elements have grown so fine

The fume of muscatel

Can give his sharpened palate ecstasy

No living man can drink from the whole wine.

I have mummy truths to tell

Whereat the living mock,

Though not for sober ear,

For maybe all that hear

Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

Such thought—such thought have I that hold it tight

Till meditation master all its parts,

Nothing can stay my glance

Until that glance run in the world’s despite

To where the damned have howled away their hearts,

And where the blessed dance;

Such thought, that in it bound

I need no other thing

Wound in mind’s wandering,

As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.

NOTES

SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

STANZA IV

I have read somewhere that in the Emperor’s palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang.

THE TOWER. PART II

The persons mentioned are associated by legend, story and tradition with the neighbourhood of Thoor Ballylee or Ballylee Castle, where the poem was written. Mrs. French lived at Peterswell in the eighteenth century and was related to Sir Jonah Barrington, who described the incident of the ear and the trouble that came of it. The peasant beauty and the blind poet are Mary Hynes and Raftery, and the incident of the man drowned in Cloone Bog is recorded in my Celtic Twilight. Hanrahan’s pursuit of the phantom hare and hounds is from my Stories of Red Hanrahan. The ghosts have been seen at their game of dice in what is now my bedroom, and the old bankrupt man lived about a hundred years ago. According to one legend he could only leave the Castle upon a Sunday because of his creditors, and according to another he hid in the secret passage.

THE TOWER. PART III

In the passage about the Swan I have unconsciously echoed one of the loveliest lyrics of our time—Mr. Sturge Moore’s ‘Dying Swan’. I often recited it during an American lecturing tour, which explains the theft.

THE DYING SWAN

O silver-throated Swan

Struck, struck! A golden dart

Clean through thy breast has gone

Home to thy heart.

Thrill, thrill, O silver throat!

O silver trumpet, pour

Love for defiance back

On him who smote!

And brim, brim o’er

With love; and ruby-dye thy track

Down thy last living reach

Of river, sail the golden light—

Enter the sun’s heart—even teach,

O wondrous-gifted pain, teach thou

The God to love, let him learn how!

When I wrote the lines about Plato and Plotinus I forgot that it is something in our own eyes that makes us see them as all transcendence. Has not Plotinus written: ‘Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion—and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being’.

MEDITATIONS IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR

These poems were written at Thoor Ballylee in 1922, during the civil war. Before they were finished the Republicans blew up our ‘ancient bridge’ one midnight. They forbade us to leave the house, but were otherwise polite, even saying at last ‘Goodnight, thank you’ as though we had given them the bridge.

SECTION SIX

In the West of Ireland we call a starling a stare, and during the civil war one built in a hole in the masonry by my bedroom window.

SECTION SEVEN, STANZA II

The cry ‘Vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay’, Grand Master of the Templars, seems to me fit symbol for those who labour from hatred, and so for sterility in various kinds. It is said to have been incorporated in the ritual of certain Masonic societies of the eighteenth century, and to have fed class-hatred.

SECTION SEVEN, STANZA IV

I have a ring with a hawk and a butterfly upon it, to symbolise the straight road of logic, and so of mechanism, and the crooked road of intuition: ‘For wisdom is a butterfly and not a gloomy bird of prey’.

NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN

SECTION SIX

The country people see at times certain apparitions whom they name now ‘fallen angels’, now ‘ancient inhabitants of the country’, and describe as riding at whiles ‘with flowers upon the heads of the horses’. I have assumed in the sixth poem that these horsemen, now that the times worsen, give way to worse. My last symbol, Robert Artisson, was an evil spirit much run after in Kilkenny at the start of the fourteenth century. Are not those who travel in the whirling dust also in the Platonic Year?

TWO SONGS FROM A PLAY

These songs are sung by the Chorus in a play that has for its theme Christ’s first appearance to the Apostles after the Resurrection, a play intended for performance in a drawing-room or studio.

AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN

STANZA III

I have taken ‘the honey of generation’ from Porphyry’s essay on ‘The Cave of the Nymphs’, but find no warrant in Porphyry for considering it the ‘drug’ that destroys the ‘recollection’ of pre-natal freedom. He blamed a cup of oblivion given in the zodiacal sign of Cancer.

THE GIFT OF HARUN AL-RASHID

Part of an unfinished set of poems, dialogues and stories about John Ahern and Michael Robartes, Kusta ben Luka, a philosopher of Bagdad, and his Bedouin followers.

THE END

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Table of Contents

The Tower

CONTENTS

Sailing to Byzantium

I

II

III

IV

The Tower

I

II

III

Meditations in Time of Civil War

I Ancestral Houses

II My House

III My Table

IV My Descendants

V The Road at My Door

VI The Stare’s Nest by My Window

VII I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness

Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

The Wheel

Youth and Age

The New Faces

A Prayer for My Son

Two Songs from a Play

I

II

Wisdom

Leda and the Swan

On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmond Dulac

Among School Children

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

Colonus’ Praise

(From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’)

Chorus

The Hero, The Girl, and The Fool

The Girl

The Hero

The Girl

The Hero

The Girl

The Fool by the Roadside

Owen Ahern and His Dancers

I

II

A Man Young and Old

First Love

Human Dignity

The Mermaid

The Death of the Hare

The Empty Cup

His Memories

The Friends of His Youth

Summer and Spring

The Secrets of the Old

His Wildness

The Three Monuments

From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’

I

II

III

IV

The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid

All Souls’ Night

An Epilogue to ‘A Vision’

NOTES

SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

Stanza IV

THE TOWER. Part II

THE TOWER. Part III

The Dying Swan

MEDITATIONS IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR

Section Six

Section Seven, Stanza II

Section Seven, Stanza IV

NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN

Section Six

TWO SONGS FROM A PLAY

AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN

Stanza III

THE GIFT OF HARUN AL-RASHID

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE