William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeatswas an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth13 June 1865
CitySandymount, Ireland
CountryIreland
Because of something told under the famished horn Of the hunter's moon, that hung between the night and the day, To dream of women whose beauty was folded in dismay, Even in an old story, is a burden not to be borne.
I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss I hear white Beauty sighing, too, For hours when all must fade like dew....
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....
For wisdom is the property of the dead, A something incompatible with life; and power, Like everything that has the stain of blood, A property of the living; but no stain Can come upon the visage of the moon When it has looked in glory from a cloud.
Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?
Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.
The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.
A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.
You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.
Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
we can make our minds so still like water. That beings gather about us to see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer perhaps even with a fiercer life because of silence.
The problem with some people is that when they aren't drunk, they're sober.