Irish poet (1865-1939)
To sit beside the board and drink good wine
And watch the turf smoke coiling from the fire
And feel content and wisdom in your heart,
This is the best of life; when we are young
We long to tread a way none trod before,
But find the excellent old way through love
And through the care of children to the hour
Forbidding Fate and Time and Change goodbye.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Land of Heart's Desire
We must be tender with all budding things.
Our Maker let no thought of Calvary
Trouble the morning stars in their first song.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Land of Heart's Desire
The line of Nature is crooked ... though we dig the canal beds as straight as we can, the rivers run hither and thither in their wildness.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
letter to Ellen O'Leary, Feb. 3, 1889
What portion in the world can the artist have,
Who has awakened from the common dream,
But dissipation and despair?
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Ego Dominus Tuus", Per Amica Silentia Lunae
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Anima Hominis", Per Amica Silentia Lunae
No sooner had the words passed his lips than he was taken up and whisked into the moat with prodigious force; and the fairies came crowding round about him with great anger, screeching and screaming and roaring out, "Who spoiled our tune? Who spoiled our tune?"
W. B. YEATS
"The Legend of Knockgrafton", Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
There are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Celtic Twilight
Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or woman lost?
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"The Tower", The Tower
All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"The Great Day", Last Poems
I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Celtic Twilight
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
letter to Elizabeth Pelham, Jan. 4, 1939
Shakespeare watched Henry V not indeed as he watched the greater souls in the visionary procession, but cheerfully, as one watches some handsome spirited horse, and he spoke his tale, as he spoke all tales, with tragic irony.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
Land of Heart's Desire,
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Land of Heart's Desire
I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Anima Hominis", Per Amica Silentia Lunae
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Among School Children", The Tower
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.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Vacillation", The Winding Stair and Other Poems
Love's pleasure drives his love away,
The painter's brush consumes his dreams.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Two Songs from a Play", The Tower