I
write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
William Butler Yeats
Easter, 1916 |
The
rhetorician would deceive his neighbors,
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of realty.
William Butler Yeats
Ego Dominus Tuus |
The
fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart.
William Butler Yeats
The Fascination of What's Difficult. |
The
beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.
William Butler Yeats
The Fisherman |
A
man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream.
William Butler Yeats
The Fisherman |
One
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.
William Butler Yeats
The Fisherman |
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.
William Butler Yeats
Oedipus at Colonus (of Sophocles) |
Had
I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet.
William Butler Yeats
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven |
But
I, being, poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven |
The
ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating at the door.
William Butler Yeats
The Ghost of Roger Casement |