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

by W. B. Yeats

  That feed on some foul parasite

  Of the Moroccan flocks and herds

  Cross the narrow Straits to light

  In the rich midnight of the garden trees

  Till the dawn break upon those mingled seas.

  Often at evening when a boy

  Would I carry to a friend -

  Hoping more substantial joy

  Did an older mind commend -

  Not such as are in Newton’s metaphor,

  But actual shells of Rosses’ level shore.

  Greater glory in the Sun,

  An evening chill upon the air,

  Bid imagination run

  Much on the Great Questioner;

  What He can question, what if questioned I

  Can with a fitting confidence reply.

  THE CHOICE

  The intellect of man is forced to choose

  perfection of the life, or of the work,

  And if it take the second must refuse

  A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

  When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?

  In luck or out the toil has left its mark:

  That old perplexity an empty purse,

  Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

  MOHINI CHATTERJEE

  I ASKED if I should pray.

  But the Brahmin said,

  ‘pray for nothing, say

  Every night in bed,

  ‘I have been a king,

  I have been a slave,

  Nor is there anything.

  Fool, rascal, knave,

  That I have not been,

  And yet upon my breast

  A myriad heads have lain.’’’

  That he might Set at rest

  A boy’s turbulent days

  Mohini Chatterjee

  Spoke these, or words like these,

  I add in commentary,

  ‘Old lovers yet may have

  All that time denied —

  Grave is heaped on grave

  That they be satisfied —

  Over the blackened earth

  The old troops parade,

  Birth is heaped on Birth

  That such cannonade

  May thunder time away,

  Birth-hour and death-hour meet,

  Or, as great sages say,

  Men dance on deathless feet.’

  BYZANTIUM

  THE unpurged images of day recede;

  The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;

  Night resonance recedes, night walkers’ song

  After great cathedral gong;

  A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

  All that man is,

  All mere complexities,

  The fury and the mire of human veins.

  Before me floats an image, man or shade,

  Shade more than man, more image than a shade;

  For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth

  May unwind the winding path;

  A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

  Breathless mouths may summon;

  I hail the superhuman;

  I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

  Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,

  More miraclc than bird or handiwork,

  Planted on the star-lit golden bough,

  Can like the cocks of Hades crow,

  Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud

  In glory of changeless metal

  Common bird or petal

  And all complexities of mire or blood.

  At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit

  Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,

  Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,

  Where blood-begotten spirits come

  And all complexities of fury leave,

  Dying into a dance,

  An agony of trance,

  An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

  Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,

  Spirit after Spirit! The smithies break the flood.

  The golden smithies of the Emperor!

  Marbles of the dancing floor

  Break bitter furies of complexity,

  Those images that yet

  Fresh images beget,

  That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

  THE MOTHER OF GOD

  THE threefold terror of love; a fallen flare

  Through the hollow of an ear;

  Wings beating about the room;

  The terror of all terrors that I bore

  The Heavens in my womb.

  Had I not found content among the shows

  Every common woman knows,

  Chimney corner, garden walk,

  Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes

  And gather all the talk?

  What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,

  This fallen star my milk sustains,

  This love that makes my heart’s blood stop

  Or strikes a Sudden chill into my bones

  And bids my hair stand up?

  VACILLATION

  I

  BETWEEN extremities

  Man runs his course;

  A brand, or flaming breath.

  Comes to destroy

  All those antinomies

  Of day and night;

  The body calls it death,

  The heart remorse.

  But if these be right

  What is joy?

  II

  A tree there is that from its topmost bough

  Is half all glittering flame and half all green

  Abounding foliage moistened with the dew;

  And half is half and yet is all the scene;

  And half and half consume what they renew,

  And he that Attis’ image hangs between

  That staring fury and the blind lush leaf

  May know not what he knows, but knows not grief

  III

  Get all the gold and silver that you can,

  Satisfy ambition, animate

  The trivial days and ram them with the sun,

  And yet upon these maxims meditate:

  All women dote upon an idle man

  Although their children need a rich estate;

  No man has ever lived that had enough

  Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.

  No longer in Lethean foliage caught

  Begin the preparation for your death

  And from the fortieth winter by that thought

  Test every work of intellect or faith,

  And everything that your own hands have wrought

  And call those works extravagance of breath

  That are not suited for such men as come

  proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

  IV

  My fiftieth year had come and gone,

  I sat, a solitary man,

  In a crowded London shop,

  An open book and empty cup

  On the marble table-top.

  While on the shop and street I gazed

  My body of a sudden blazed;

  And twenty minutes more or less

  It seemed, so great my happiness,

  That I was blessed and could bless.

  Although the summer Sunlight gild

  Cloudy leafage of the sky,

  Or wintry moonlight sink the field

  In storm-scattered intricacy,

  I cannot look thereon,

  Responsibility so weighs me down.

  Things said or done long years ago,

  Or things I did not do or say

  But thought that I might say or do,

  Weigh me down, and not a day

  But something is recalled,

  My conscience or my vanity appalled.

  A rivery field spread out below,

  An odour of the new-mown hay

  In his nostrils, the great lord of Chou

  Cried, casting off the mountain snow, />
  “Let all things pass away.’

  Wheels by milk-white asses drawn

  Where Babylon or Nineveh

  Rose; some conquer drew rein

  And cried to battle-weary men,

  “Let all things pass away.’

  From man’s blood-sodden heart are sprung

  Those branches of the night and day

  Where the gaudy moon is hung.

  What’s the meaning of all song?

  “Let all things pass away.’

  VII

  The Soul. Seek out reality, leave things that seem.

  The Heart. What, be a singer born and lack a theme?

  The Soul. Isaiah’s coal, what more can man desire?

  The Heart. Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!

  The Soul. Look on that fire, salvation walks within.

  The Heart. What theme had Homer but original sin?

  VIII

  Must we part, Von Hugel, though much alike, for we

  Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?

  The body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb,

  Bathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come,

  Healing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands perchance

  Eternalised the body of a modern saint that once

  Had scooped out pharaoh’s mummy. I – though heart might find relief

  Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief

  What seems most welcome in the tomb – play a pre destined part.

  Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

  The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said?

  So get you gone, Von Hugel, though with blessings on

  your head.

  QUARREL IN OLD AGE

  WHERE had her sweetness gone?

  What fanatics invent

  In this blind bitter town,

  Fantasy or incident

  Not worth thinking of,

  put her in a rage.

  I had forgiven enough

  That had forgiven old age.

  All lives that has lived;

  So much is certain;

  Old sages were not deceived:

  Somewhere beyond the curtain

  Of distorting days

  Lives that lonely thing

  That shone before these eyes

  Targeted, trod like Spring.

  THE RESULTS OF THOUGHT

  ACQUAINTANCE; companion;

  One dear brilliant woman;

  The best-endowed, the elect,

  All by their youth undone,

  All, all, by that inhuman

  Bitter glory wrecked.

  But I have straightened out

  Ruin, wreck and wrack;

  I toiled long years and at length

  Came to so deep a thought

  I can summon back

  All their wholesome strength.

  What images are these

  That turn dull-eyed away,

  Or Shift Time’s filthy load,

  Straighten aged knees,

  Hesitate or stay?

  What heads shake or nod?

  GRATITUDE TO THE UNKNOWN INSTRUCTORS

  WHAT they undertook to do

  They brought to pass;

  All things hang like a drop of dew

  Upon a blade of grass.

  REMORSE FOR INTEMPERATE SPEECH

  I RANTED to the knave and fool,

  But outgrew that school,

  Would transform the part,

  Fit audience found, but cannot rule

  My fanatic heart.

  I sought my betters: though in each

  Fine manners, liberal speech,

  Turn hatred into sport,

  Nothing said or done can reach

  My fanatic heart,

  Out of Ireland have we come.

  Great hatred, little room,

  Maimed us at the start.

  I carry from my mother’s womb

  A fanatic heart.

  STREAM AND SUN AT GLENDALOUGH

  THROUGH intricate motions ran

  Stream and gliding sun

  And all my heart seemed gay:

  Some stupid thing that I had done

  Made my attention stray.

  Repentance keeps my heart impure;

  But what am I that dare

  Fancy that I can

  Better conduct myself or have more

  Sense than a common man?

  What motion of the sun or stream

  Or eyelid shot the gleam

  That pierced my body through?

  What made me live like these that seem

  Self-born, born anew?

  WORDS FOR MUSIC PERHAPS

  I - CRAZY JANE AND THE BISHOP

  BRING me to the blasted oak

  That I, midnight upon the stroke,

  (All find safety in the tomb.)

  May call down curses on his head

  Because of my dear Jack that’s dead.

  Coxcomb was the least he said:

  The solid man and the coxcomb.

  Nor was he Bishop when his ban

  Banished Jack the Journeyman,

  (All find safety in the tomb.)

  Nor so much as parish priest,

  Yet he, an old book in his fist,

  Cried that we lived like beast and beast:

  The solid man and the coxcomb.

  The Bishop has a skin, God knows,

  Wrinkled like the foot of a goose,

  (All find safety in the tomb.)

  Nor can he hide in holy black

  The heron’s hunch upon his back,

  But a birch-tree stood my Jack:

  The solid man and the coxcomb.

  Jack had my virginity,

  And bids me to the oak, for he

  (all find safety in the tomb.)

  Wanders out into the night

  And there is shelter under it,

  But should that other come, I spit:

  The solid man and the coxcomb.

  II - CRAZY JANE REPROVED

  I CARE not what the sailors say:

  All those dreadful thunder-stones,

  All that storm that blots the day

  Can but show that Heaven yawns;

  Great Europa played the fool

  That changed a lover for a bull.

  Fol de rol, fol de rol.

  To round that shell’s elaborate whorl,

  Adorning every secret track

  With the delicate mother-of-pearl,

  Made the joints of Heaven crack:

  So never hang your heart upon

  A roaring, ranting journeyman.

  Fol de rol, fol de rol.

  III - CRAZY JANE ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT

  ‘LOVE is all

  Unsatisfied

  That cannot take the whole

  Body and soul’;

  And that is what Jane said.

  ‘Take the sour

  If you take me

  I can scoff and lour

  And scold for an hour.’

  ‘That’s certainly the case,’ said he.

  ‘Naked I lay,

  The grass my bed;

  Naked and hidden away,

  That black day’;

  And that is what Jane said.

  ‘What can be shown?

  What true love be?

  All could be known or shown

  If Time were but gone.’

  ‘That’s certainly the case,’ said he.

  IV - CRAZY JANE AND JACK THE JOURNEYMAN

  I KNOW, although when looks meet

  I tremble to the bone,

  The more I leave the door unlatched

  The sooner love is gone,

  For love is but a skein unwound

  Between the dark and dawn.

  A lonely ghost the ghost is

  That to God shall come;

  I — love’s skein upon the ground,

  My body in the tomb —


  Shall leap into the light lost

  In my mother’s womb.

  But were I left to lie alone

  In an empty bed,

  The skein so bound us ghost to ghost

  When he turned his head

  passing on the road that night,

  Mine must walk when dead.

  V - CRAZY JANE ON GOD

  THAT lover of a night

  Came when he would,

  Went in the dawning light

  Whether I would or no;

  Men come, men go;

  All things remain in God.

  Banners choke the sky;

  Men-at-arms tread;

  Armoured horses neigh

  In the narrow pass:

  All things remain in God.

  Before their eyes a house

  That from childhood stood

  Uninhabited, ruinous,

  Suddenly lit up

  From door to top:

  All things remain in God.

  I had wild Jack for a lover;

  Though like a road

  That men pass over

  My body makes no moan

  But sings on:

  All things remain in God.

  VI - CRAZY JANE TALKS WITH THE BISHOP

  I MET the Bishop on the road

  And much said he and I.

  ‘Those breasts are flat and fallen now,

  Those veins must soon be dry;

  Live in a heavenly mansion,

  Not in some foul sty.’

  ‘Fair and foul are near of kin,

  And fair needs foul,’ I cried.

  ‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth

  Nor grave nor bed denied,

  Learned in bodily lowliness

  And in the heart’s pride.

  ‘A woman can be proud and stiff

  When on love intent;

  But Love has pitched his mansion in

  The place of excrement;

  For nothing can be sole or whole

  That has not been rent.’

  VII - CRAZY JANE GROWN OLD LOOKS AT THE DANCERS

  I FOUND that ivory image there

  Dancing with her chosen youth,

  But when he wound her coal-black hair

  As though to strangle her, no scream

  Or bodily movement did I dare,

  Eyes under eyelids did so gleam;

  Love is like the lion’s tooth.

  When She, and though some said she played