Category W. B. Yeats

Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-coloured Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.’ ‘But I can get a hair-dye And set such colour there, Brown, or black,…

Under my window-ledge the waters race, Otters below and moor-hens on the top, Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven’s face Then darkening through ‘dark’ Raftery’s ‘cellar’ drop, Run underground, rise in a rocky place In Coole demesne, and there…

I meditate upon a swallow’s flight, Upon a aged woman and her house, A sycamore and lime-tree lost in night Although that western cloud is luminous, Great works constructed there in nature’s spite For scholars and for poets after us,…

Crazed through much child-bearing The moon is staggering in the sky; Moon-struck by the despairing Glances of her wandering eye We grope, and grope in vain, For children born of her pain. Children dazed or dead! When she in all…

The First. My great-grandfather spoke to Edmund Burke In Grattan’s house. The Second. My great-grandfather shared A pot-house bench with Oliver Goldsmith once. The Third. My great-grandfather’s father talked of music, Drank tar-water with the Bishop of Cloyne. The Fourth.…

Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land; Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand; What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?

‘Those Platonists are a curse,’ he said, ‘God’s fire upon the wane, A diagram hung there instead, More women born than men.’

Thought the great song return no more There’s keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave.

We that have done and thought, That have thought and done, Must ramble, and thin out Like milk spilt on a stone.

A storm beaten old watch-tower, A blind hermit rings the hour. All-destroying sword-blade still Carried by the wandering fool. Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade, Beauty and fool together laid.