Delphi Complete Poetry and Plays of W. B. Yeats (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by W. B. Yeats

  Written when Yeats was 60 years old, Sailing to Byzantium is one of the most celebrated literary works to explore the agony of old age and the imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual, even when the heart is “fastened to a dying animal” (the body). Yeats’ solution to old age is to leave the country of the young and travel to Byzantium, where the sages in the city’s famous gold mosaics could become the “singing-masters” of his soul.

  Thoor Ballylee Castle, a fortified 13th century Norman tower in County Galway

  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

  FRAGMENTS

  LEDA AND THE SWAN

  ON A PICTURE OF A BLACK CENTAUR BY EDMUND DULAC

  AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN

  COLONUS’ PRAISE

  WISDOM

  THE FOOL BY THE ROADSIDE

  THE HERO, THE GIRL, AND THE FOOL

  OWEN AHERNE AND HIS DANCERS

  A MAN YOUNG AND OLD

  THE THREE MONUMENTS

  THE GIFT OF HARUN AL-RASHID

  ALL SOULS’ NIGHT

  The first edition

  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 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 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.

  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. Frenc
h,

  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.

  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.

  O 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;

  O 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 castaways

  Forgetting a
nd 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 trestles, 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

  Me 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,