The Tower

William Butler Yeats

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  • Sailing to Byzantium
  • The Tower
  • Meditations In Time Of Civil War
  • Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen
  • The Wheel
  • Youth And Age
  • The New Faces
  • A Prayer For My Son
  • Two Songs From A Play
  • Fragments
  • Leda And The Swan
  • On A Picture Of A Black Centaur By Edmund Dulac
  • Among School Children
  • Colonus' Praise
  • Wisdom
  • The Fool By The Roadside (version of The Hero, The Girl And The Fool)
  • Owen Aherne And His Dancers
  • A Man Young And Old

  • Sailing to Byzantium



    THAT is no country for old men. The young
    In one another's arms, birds in the trees
    - Those dying generations - at their song,
    The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
    Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
    Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
    Caught in that sensual music all neglect
    Monuments of unageing intellect.

    An aged man is but a paltry thing,
    A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
    Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
    For every tatter in its mortal dress,
    Nor is there singing school but studying
    Monuments of its own magnificence;
    And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
    To the holy city of Byzantium.

    O sages standing in God's holy fire
    As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
    Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
    And be the singing-masters of my soul.
    Consume my heart away; sick with desire
    And fastened to a dying animal
    It knows not what it is; and gather me
    Into the artifice of eternity.

    Once out of nature I shall never take
    My bodily form from any natural thing,
    But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
    Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
    To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
    Or set upon a golden bough to sing
    To lords and ladies of Byzantium
    Of what is past, or passing, or to come.





    The Tower



    I
    WHAT shall I do with this absurdity -
    O heart, O troubled heart - this caricature,
    Decrepit age that has been tied to me
    As to a dog's tail?
                                                              Never had I more
    Excited, passionate, fantastical
    Imagination, nor an ear and eye
    That more expected the impossible -
    No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,
    Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben's back
    And had the livelong summer day to spend.
    It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,
    Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend
    Until imagination, ear and eye,
    Can be content with argument and deal
    In abstract things; or be derided by
    A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

    II
    I pace upon the battlements and stare
    On the foundations of a house, or where
    Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;
    And send imagination forth
    Under the day's declining beam, and call
    Images and memories
    From ruin or from ancient trees,
    For I would ask a question of them all.

    Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and once
    When every silver candlestick or sconce
    Lit up the dark mahogany and the wine.
    A serving-man, that could divine
    That most respected lady's every wish,
    Ran and with the garden shears
    Clipped an insolent farmer's ears
    And brought them in a little covered dish.

    Some few remembered still when I was young
    A peasant girl commended by a Song,
    Who'd lived somewhere upon that rocky place,
    And praised the colour of her face,
    And had the greater joy in praising her,
    Remembering that, if walked she there,
    Farmers jostled at the fair
    So great a glory did the song confer.

    And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,
    Or else by toasting her a score of times,
    Rose from the table and declared it right
    To test their fancy by their sight;
    But they mistook the brightness of the moon
    For the prosaic light of day -
    Music had driven their wits astray -
    And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.

    Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;
    Yet, now I have considered it, I find
    That nothing strange; the tragedy began
    With Homer that was a blind man,
    And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.
    O may the moon and sunlight seem
    One inextricable beam,
    For if I triumph I must make men mad.

    And I myself created Hanrahan
    And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn
    From somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.
    Caught by an old man's juggleries
    He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro
    And had but broken knees for hire
    And horrible splendour of desire;
    I thought it all out twenty years ago:

    Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;
    And when that ancient ruffian's turn was on
    He so bewitched the cards under his thumb
    That all but the one card became
    A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,
    And that he changed into a hare.
    Hanrahan rose in frenzy there
    And followed up those baying creatures towards -

    O towards I have forgotten what - enough!
    I must recall a man that neither love
    Nor music nor an enemy's clipped ear
    Could, he was so harried, cheer;
    A figure that has grown so fabulous
    There's not a neighbour left to say
    When he finished his dog's day:
    An ancient bankrupt master of this house.

    Before that ruin came, for centuries,
    Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the knees
    Or shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs,
    And certain men-at-arms there were
    Whose images, in the Great Memory stored,
    Come with loud cry and panting breast
    To break upon a sleeper's rest
    While their great wooden dice beat on the board.

    As I would question all, come all who can;
    Come old, necessitous. half-mounted man;
    And bring beauty's blind rambling celebrant;
    The red man the juggler sent
    Through God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,
    Gifted with so fine an ear;
    The man drowned in a bog's mire,
    When mocking Muses chose the country wench.

    Did all old men and women, rich and poor,
    Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,
    Whether in public or in secret rage
    As I do now against old age?
    But I have found an answer in those eyes
    That are impatient to be gone;
    Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan,
    For I need all his mighty memories.

    Old lecher with a love on every wind,
    Bring up out of that deep considering mind
    All that you have discovered in the grave,
    For it is certain that you have
    Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing
    plunge, lured by a softening eye,
    Or by a touch or a sigh,
    Into the labyrinth of another's being;

    Does the imagination dwell the most
    Upon a woman won or woman lost?
    If on the lost, admit you turned aside
    From a great labyrinth out of pride,
    Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought
    Or anything called conscience once;
    And that if memory recur, the sun's
    Under eclipse and the day blotted out.

    III
    It is time that I wrote my will;
    I choose upstanding men
    That climb the streams until
    The fountain leap, and at dawn
    Drop their cast at the side
    Of dripping stone; I declare
    They shall inherit my pride,
    The pride of people that were
    Bound neither to Cause nor to State.
    Neither to slaves that were spat on,
    Nor to the tyrants that spat,
    The people of Burke and of Grattan
    That gave, though free to refuse -
    pride, like that of the morn,
    When the headlong light is loose,
    Or that of the fabulous horn,
    Or that of the sudden shower
    When all streams are dry,
    Or that of the hour
    When the swan must fix his eye
    Upon a fading gleam,
    Float out upon a long
    Last reach of glittering stream
    And there sing his last song.
    And I declare my faith:
    I mock plotinus' thought
    And cry in plato's teeth,
    Death and life were not
    Till man made up the whole,
    Made lock, stock and barrel
    Out of his bitter soul,
    Aye, sun and moon and star, all,
    And further add to that
    That, being dead, we rise,
    Dream and so create
    Translunar paradise.
    I have prepared my peace
    With learned Italian things
    And the proud stones of Greece,
    Poet's imaginings
    And memories of love,
    Memories of the words of women,
    All those things whereof
    Man makes a superhuman,
    Mirror-resembling dream.

    As at the loophole there
    The daws chatter and scream,
    And drop twigs layer upon layer.
    When they have mounted up,
    The mother bird will rest
    On their hollow top,
    And so warm her wild nest.

    I leave both faith and pride
    To young upstanding men
    Climbing the mountain-side,
    That under bursting dawn
    They may drop a fly;
    Being of that metal made
    Till it was broken by
    This sedentary trade.

    Now shall I make my soul,
    Compelling it to study
    In a learned school
    Till the wreck of body,
    Slow decay of blood,
    Testy delirium
    Or dull decrepitude,
    Or what worse evil come -
    The death of friends, or death
    Of every brilliant eye
    That made a catch in the breath - .
    Seem but the clouds of the sky
    When the horizon fades;
    Or a bird's sleepy cry
    Among the deepening shades.
                                                             



    Meditations In Time Of Civil War



    I
    Ancestral Houses
    Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
    Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
    Life overflows without ambitious pains;
    And rains down life until the basin spills,
    And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
    As though to choose whatever shape it wills
    And never stoop to a mechanical
    Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.

    Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not Sung
    Had he not found it certain beyond dreams
    That out of life's own self-delight had sprung
    The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems
    As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung
    Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,
    And not a fountain, were the symbol which
    Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.

    Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
    Called architect and artist in, that they,
    Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
    The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
    The gentleness none there had ever known;
    But when the master's buried mice can play.
    And maybe the great-grandson of that house,
    For all its bronze and marble, 's but a mouse.

    O what if gardens where the peacock strays
    With delicate feet upon old terraces,
    Or else all Juno from an urn displays
    Before the indifferent garden deities;
    O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways
    Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease
    And Childhood a delight for every sense,
    But take our greatness with our violence?

    What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,
    And buildings that a haughtier age designed,
    The pacing to and fro on polished floors
    Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined
    With famous portraits of our ancestors;
    What if those things the greatest of mankind
    Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
    But take our greatness with our bitterness?

    II
    My House
    An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
    A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
    An acre of stony ground,
    Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
    Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,
    The sound of the rain or sound
    Of every wind that blows;
    The stilted water-hen
    Crossing Stream again
    Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;

    A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,
    A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,
    A candle and written page.
    Il Penseroso's Platonist toiled on
    In some like chamber, shadowing forth
    How the daemonic rage
    Imagined everything.
    Benighted travellers
    From markets and from fairs
    Have seen his midnight candle glimmering.

    Two men have founded here. A man-at-arms
    Gathered a score of horse and spent his days
    In this tumultuous spot,
    Where through long wars and sudden night alarms
    His dwinding score and he seemed castaways
    Forgetting and forgot;
    And I, that after me
    My bodily heirs may find,
    To exalt a lonely mind,
    Befitting emblems of adversity.

    III
    My Table
    Two heavy trestles, and a board
    Where Sato's gift, a changeless sword,
    By pen and paper lies,
    That it may moralise
    My days out of their aimlessness.
    A bit of an embroidered dress
    Covers its wooden sheath.
    Chaucer had not drawn breath
    When it was forged. In Sato's house,
    Curved like new moon, moon-luminous
    It lay five hundred years.
    Yet if no change appears
    No moon; only an aching heart
    Conceives a changeless work of art.
    Our learned men have urged
    That when and where 'twas forged
    A marvellous accomplishment,
    In painting or in pottery, went
    From father unto son
    And through the centuries ran
    And seemed unchanging like the sword.
    Soul's beauty being most adored,
    Men and their business took
    Me soul's unchanging look;
    For the most rich inheritor,
    Knowing that none could pass Heaven's door,
    That loved inferior art,
    Had such an aching heart
    That he, although a country's talk
    For silken clothes and stately walk.
    Had waking wits; it seemed
    Juno's peacock screamed.

    IV
    My Descendants
    Having inherited a vigorous mind
    From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams
    And leave a woman and a man behind
    As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems
    Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
    Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
    But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
    And there's but common greenness after that.

    And what if my descendants lose the flower
    Through natural declension of the soul,
    Through too much business with the passing hour,
    Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?
    May this laborious stair and this stark tower
    Become a roofless min that the owl
    May build in the cracked masonry and cry
    Her desolation to the desolate sky.

    The primum Mobile that fashioned us
    Has made the very owls in circles move;
    And I, that count myself most prosperous,
    Seeing that love and friendship are enough,
    For an old neighbour's friendship chose the house
    And decked and altered it for a girl's love,
    And know whatever flourish and decline
    These stones remain their monument and mine.

    V
    The Road at My Door
    An affable Irregular,
    A heavily-built Falstaffian man,
    Comes cracking jokes of civil war
    As though to die by gunshot were
    The finest play under the sun.

    A brown Lieutenant and his men,
    Half dressed in national uniform,
    Stand at my door, and I complain
    Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
    A pear-tree broken by the storm.

    I count those feathered balls of soot
    The moor-hen guides upon the stream.
    To silence the envy in my thought;
    And turn towards my chamber, caught
    In the cold snows of a dream.

    VI
    The Stare's Nest by My Window
    The bees build in the crevices
    Of loosening masonry, and there
    The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
    My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
    Come build in the empty house of the state.

    We are closed in, and the key is turned
    On our uncertainty; somewhere
    A man is killed, or a house burned,
    Yet no cleat fact to be discerned:
    Come build in he empty house of the stare.

    A barricade of stone or of wood;
    Some fourteen days of civil war;
    Last night they trundled down the road
    That dead young soldier in his blood:
    Come build in the empty house of the stare.

    We had fed the heart on fantasies,
    The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
    More Substance in our enmities
    Than in our love; O honey-bees,
    Come build in the empty house of the stare.

    VII
    I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's
    Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness
    I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,
    A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
    Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
    That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
    A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
    And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.
    Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
    Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind's eye.

    "Vengeance upon the murderers,' the cry goes up,
    "Vengeance for Jacques Molay.' In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,
    The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop,
    Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,
    Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide
    For the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astray
    Because of all that senseless tumult, all but cried
    For vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.

    Their legs long, delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,
    Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs.
    The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,
    Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,
    Have closed the ladies' eyes, their minds are but a pool
    Where even longing drowns under its own excess;
    Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full
    Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

    The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,
    The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,
    Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,
    Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place
    To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,
    Nor hate of what's to come, nor pity for what's gone,
    Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye's complacency,
    The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.

    I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
    Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
    In something that all others understand or share;
    But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth
    A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
    It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,
    The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,
    Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.




    Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen



    I
    MANY ingenious lovely things are gone
    That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
    protected from the circle of the moon
    That pitches common things about. There stood
    Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
    An ancient image made of olive wood -
    And gone are phidias' famous ivories
    And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.

    We too had many pretty toys when young:
    A law indifferent to blame or praise,
    To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
    Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays;
    Public opinion ripening for so long
    We thought it would outlive all future days.
    O what fine thought we had because we thought
    That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

    All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
    And a great army but a showy thing;
    What matter that no cannon had been turned
    Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
    Thought that unless a little powder burned
    The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
    And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
    The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.

    Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
    Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
    Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
    To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
    The night can sweat with terror as before
    We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
    And planned to bring the world under a rule,
    Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

    He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned
    Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant
    From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,
    Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent
    On master-work of intellect or hand,
    No honour leave its mighty monument,
    Has but one comfort left: all triumph would
    But break upon his ghostly solitude.
    But is there any comfort to be found?

    Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
    What more is there to say? That country round
    None dared admit, if Such a thought were his,
    Incendiary or bigot could be found
    To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
    Or break in bits the famous ivories
    Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees.

    II
    When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound
    A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
    It seemed that a dragon of air
    Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
    Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
    So the platonic Year
    Whirls out new right and wrong,
    Whirls in the old instead;
    All men are dancers and their tread
    Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.

    III
    Some moralist or mythological poet
    Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
    I am satisfied with that,
    Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
    Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,
    An image of its state;
    The wings half spread for flight,
    The breast thrust out in pride
    Whether to play, or to ride
    Those winds that clamour of approaching night.

    A man in his own secret meditation
    Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made
    In art or politics;
    Some platonist affirms that in the station
    Where we should cast off body and trade
    The ancient habit sticks,
    And that if our works could
    But vanish with our breath
    That were a lucky death,
    For triumph can but mar our solitude.

    The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
    That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
    To end all things, to end
    What my laborious life imagined, even
    The half-imagined, the half-written page;
    O but we dreamed to mend
    Whatever mischief seemed
    To afflict mankind, but now
    That winds of winter blow
    Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

    IV
    We, who seven yeats ago
    Talked of honour and of truth,
    Shriek with pleasure if we show
    The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.

    V
    Come let us mock at the great
    That had such burdens on the mind
    And toiled so hard and late
    To leave some monument behind,
    Nor thought of the levelling wind.

    Come let us mock at the wise;
    With all those calendars whereon
    They fixed old aching eyes,
    They never saw how seasons run,
    And now but gape at the sun.

    Come let us mock at the good
    That fancied goodness might be gay,
    And sick of solitude
    Might proclaim a holiday:
    Wind shrieked - and where are they?

    Mock mockers after that
    That would not lift a hand maybe
    To help good, wise or great
    To bar that foul storm out, for we
    Traffic in mockery.

    VI
    Violence upon the roads: violence of horses;
    Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
    On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,
    But wearied running round and round in their courses
    All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:
    Herodias' daughters have returned again,
    A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
    Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
    Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;
    And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
    All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
    According to the wind, for all are blind.
    But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
    There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
    Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
    That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
    To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
    Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.
                                                             





    The Wheel



    THROUGH winter-time we call on spring,
    And through the spring on summer call,
    And when abounding hedges ring
    Declare that winter's best of all;
    And after that there s nothing good
    Because the spring-time has not come -
    Nor know that what disturbs our blood
    Is but its longing for the tomb.
                                                             





    Youth And Age



    MUCH did I rage when young,
    Being by the world oppressed,
    But now with flattering tongue
    It speeds the parting guest.
                                                             





    The New Faces



    IF you, that have grown old, were the first dead,
    Neither catalpa tree nor scented lime
    Should hear my living feet, nor would I tread
    Where we wrought that shall break the teeth of Time.
    Let the new faces play what tricks they will
    In the old rooms; night can outbalance day,
    Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,
    The living seem more shadowy than they.
                                                             





    A Prayer For My Son



    BID a strong ghost stand at the head
    That my Michael may sleep sound,
    Nor cry, nor turn in the bed
    Till his morning meal come round;
    And may departing twilight keep
    All dread afar till morning's back.
    That his mother may not lack
    Her fill of sleep.

    Bid the ghost have sword in fist:
    Some there are, for I avow
    Such devilish things exist,
    Who have planned his murder, for they know
    Of some most haughty deed or thought
    That waits upon his future days,
    And would through hatred of the bays
    Bring that to nought.

    Though You can fashion everything
    From nothing every day, and teach
    The morning stars to sing,
    You have lacked articulate speech
    To tell Your simplest want, and known,
    Wailing upon a woman's knee,
    All of that worst ignominy
    Of flesh and bone;

    And when through all the town there ran
    The servants of Your enemy,
    A woman and a man,
    Unless the Holy Writings lie,
    Hurried through the smooth and rough
    And through the fertile and waste,
    protecting, till the danger past,
    With human love.
                                                             





    Two Songs From A Play



    I
    I SAW a staring virgin stand
    Where holy Dionysus died,
    And tear the heart out of his side.
    And lay the heart upon her hand
    And bear that beating heart away;
    Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
    As though God's death were but a play.

    Another Troy must rise and set,
    Another lineage feed the crow,
    Another Argo's painted prow
    Drive to a flashier bauble yet.
    The Roman Empire stood appalled:
    It dropped the reins of peace and war
    When that fierce virgin and her Star
    Out of the fabulous darkness called.

    II
    In pity for man's darkening thought
    He walked that room and issued thence
    In Galilean turbulence;
    The Babylonian starlight brought
    A fabulous, formless darkness in;
    Odour of blood when Christ was slain
    Made all platonic tolerance vain
    And vain all Doric discipline.

    Everything that man esteems
    Endures a moment or a day.
    Love's pleasure drives his love away,
    The painter's brush consumes his dreams;
    The herald's cry, the soldier's tread
    Exhaust his glory and his might:
    Whatever flames upon the night
    Man's own resinous heart has fed.
                                                             





    Fragments



    I
    LOCKE sank into a swoon;
    The Garden died;
    God took the spinning-jenny
    Out of his side.

    II
    Where got I that truth?
    Out of a medium's mouth.
    Out of nothing it came,
    Out of the forest loam,
    Out of dark night where lay
    The crowns of Nineveh.
                                                             





    Leda And The Swan



    A SUDDEN blow: the great wings beating still
    Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
    By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
    He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

    How can those terrified vague fingers push
    The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
    And how can body, laid in that white rush,
    But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

    A shudder in the loins engenders there
    The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
    And Agamemnon dead.
                                                              Being so caught up,
    So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
    Did she put on his knowledge with his power
    Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
                                                             





    On A Picture Of A Black Centaur By Edmund Dulac



    YOUR hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,
    Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.
    My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.
    I knew that horse-play, knew it for a murderous thing.
    What wholesome sun has ripened is wholesome food to eat,
    And that alone; yet I, being driven half insane
    Because of some green wing, gathered old mummy wheat
    In the mad abstract dark and ground it grain by grain
    And after baked it slowly in an oven; but now
    I bring full-flavoured wine out of a barrel found
    Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew
    When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.
    Stretch out your limbs and sleep a long Saturnian sleep;
    I have loved you better than my soul for all my words,
    And there is none so fit to keep a watch and keep
    Unwearied eyes upon those horrible green birds.
                                                             





    Among School Children



    I
    I WALK through the long schoolroom questioning;
    A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
    The children learn to cipher and to sing,
    To study reading-books and histories,
    To cut and sew, be neat in everything
    In the best modern way - the children's eyes
    In momentary wonder stare upon
    A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

    II
    I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
    Above a sinking fire. a tale that she
    Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
    That changed some childish day to tragedy -
    Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
    Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
    Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
    Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

    III
    And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
    I look upon one child or t'other there
    And wonder if she stood so at that age -
    For even daughters of the swan can share
    Something of every paddler's heritage -
    And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
    And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
    She stands before me as a living child.

    IV
    Her present image floats into the mind -
    Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
    Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
    And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
    And I though never of Ledaean kind
    Had pretty plumage once - enough of that,
    Better to smile on all that smile, and show
    There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

    V
    What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
    Honey of generation had betrayed,
    And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
    As recollection or the drug decide,
    Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
    With sixty or more winters on its head,
    A compensation for the pang of his birth,
    Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

    VI
    Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
    Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
    Solider Aristotle played the taws
    Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
    World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
    Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
    What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
    Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

    VII
    Both nuns and mothers worship images,
    But thos the candles light are not as those
    That animate a mother's reveries,
    But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
    And yet they too break hearts - O presences
    That passion, piety or affection knows,
    And that all heavenly glory symbolise -
    O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

    VIII
    Labour is blossoming or dancing where
    The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
    Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
    Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
    O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
    Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
    O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
    How can we know the dancer from the dance?
                                                             





    Colonus' Praise



    (From Oedipus at Colonus)

    Chorus. Come praise Colonus' horses, and come praise
    The wine-dark of the wood's intricacies,
    The nightingale that deafens daylight there,
    If daylight ever visit where,
    Unvisited by tempest or by sun,
    Immortal ladies tread the ground
    Dizzy with harmonious sound,
    Semele's lad a gay companion.

    And yonder in the gymnasts' garden thrives
    The self-sown, self-begotten shape that gives
    Athenian intellect its mastery,
    Even the grey-leaved olive-tree
    Miracle-bred out of the living stone;
    Nor accident of peace nor war
    Shall wither that old marvel, for
    The great grey-eyed Athene stares thereon.

    Who comes into this countty, and has come
    Where golden crocus and narcissus bloom,
    Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughter
    And beauty-drunken by the water
    Glittering among grey-leaved olive-trees,
    Has plucked a flower and sung her loss;
    Who finds abounding Cephisus
    Has found the loveliest spectacle there is.

    because this country has a pious mind
    And so remembers that when all mankind
    But trod the road, or splashed about the shore,
    Poseidon gave it bit and oar,
    Every Colonus lad or lass discourses
    Of that oar and of that bit;
    Summer and winter, day and night,
    Of horses and horses of the sea, white horsffes.
                                                             





    Wisdom



    THE true faith discovered was
    When painted panel, statuary.
    Glass-mosaic, window-glass,
    Amended what was told awry
    By some peasant gospeller;
    Swept the Sawdust from the floor
    Of that working-carpenter.
    Miracle had its playtime where
    In damask clothed and on a seat
    Chryselephantine, cedar-boarded,
    His majestic Mother sat
    Stitching at a purple hoarded
    That He might be nobly breeched
    In starry towers of Babylon
    Noah's freshet never reached.
    King Abundance got Him on
    Innocence; and Wisdom He.
    That cognomen sounded best
    Considering what wild infancy
    Drove horror from His Mother's breast.
                                                             





    The Fool By The Roadside (version of The Hero, The Girl And The Fool)



    WHEN all works that have
    From cradle run to grave
    From grave to cradle run instead;
    When thoughts that a fool
    Has wound upon a spool
    Are but loose thread, are but loose thread;
    When cradle and spool are past
    And I mere shade at last
    Coagulate of stuff
    Transparent like the wind,
    I think that I may find
    A faithful love, a faithful love.
                                                             





    Owen Aherne And His Dancers



    A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought
    Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,
    Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.
    It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.

    The south wind brought it longing, and the east wind despair,
    The west wind made it pitiful, and the north wind afraid.
    It feared to give its love a hurt with all the tempestthere;
    It feared the hurt that shc could give and therefore it went mad.

    I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,
    I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer's had,
    But O! my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;
    I ran, I ran, from my love's side because my Heart went mad.

    The Heart behind its rib laughed out. "You have called me mad,' it said,
    "Because I made you turn away and run from that young child;
    How could she mate with fifty years that was so wildly bred?
    Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.'

    "You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,' I replied.
    "And all those lies have but one end, poor wretches to betray;
    I did not find in any cage the woman at my side.
    O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.'

    'Speak all your mind,' my Heart sang out, "speak all your mind; who cares,
    Now that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she mistake
    Her childish gratitude for love and match your fifty years?
    O let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.'
                                                             



    A Man Young And Old



    I First Love



    THOUGH nurtured like the sailing moon
    In beauty's murderous brood,
    She walked awhile and blushed awhile
    And on my pathway stood
    Until I thought her body bore
    A heart of flesh and blood.

    But since I laid a hand thereon
    And found a heart of stone
    I have attempted many things
    And not a thing is done,
    For every hand is lunatic
    That travels on the moon.

    She smiled and that transfigured me
    And left me but a lout,
    Maundering here, and maundering there,
    Emptier of thought
    Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
    When the moon sails out.


    II Human Dignity



    Like the moon her kindness is,
    If kindness I may call
    What has no comprehension in't,
    But is the same for all
    As though my sorrow were a scene
    Upon a painted wall.

    So like a bit of stone I lie
    Under a broken tree.
    I could recover if I shrieked
    My heart's agony
    To passing bird, but I am dumb
    From human dignity.


    III The Mermaid



    A mermaid found a swimming lad,
    Picked him for her own,
    Pressed her body to his body,
    Laughed; and plunging down
    Forgot in cruel happiness
    That even lovers drown.





    IV The Death of the Hare



    I have pointed out the yelling pack,
    The hare leap to the wood,
    And when I pass a compliment
    Rejoice as lover should
    At the drooping of an eye,
    At the mantling of the blood.

    Then suddenly my heart is wrung
    By her distracted air
    And I remember wildness lost
    And after, swept from there,
    Am set down standing in the wood
    At the death of the hare.


    V The Empty Cup



    A crazy man that found a cup,
    When all but dead of thirst,
    Hardly dared to wet his mouth
    Imagining, moon-accursed,
    That another mouthful
    And his beating heart would burst.
    October last I found it too
    But found it dry as bone,
    And for that reason am I crazed
    And my sleep is gone.


    VI His Memories



    We should be hidden from their eyes,
    Being but holy shows
    And bodies broken like a thorn
    Whereon the bleak north blows,
    To think of buried Hector
    And that none living knows.

    The women take so little stock
    In what I do or say
    They'd sooner leave their cosseting
    To hear a jackass bray;
    My arms are like the twisted thorn
    And yet there beauty lay;

    The first of all the tribe lay there
    And did such pleasure take -
    She who had brought great Hector down
    And put all Troy to wreck -
    That she cried into this ear,
    "Strike me if I shriek.'


    VII The Friends of his Youth



    Laughter not time destroyed my voice
    And put that crack in it,
    And when the moon's pot-bellied
    I get a laughing fit,
    For that old Madge comes down the lane,
    A stone upon her breast,
    And a cloak wrapped about the stone,
    And she can get no rest
    With singing hush and hush-a-bye;
    She that has been wild
    And barren as a breaking wave
    Thinks that the stone's a child.

    And Peter that had great affairs
    And was a pushing man
    Shrieks, "I am King of the Peacocks,'
    And perches on a stone;
    And then I laugh till tears run down
    And the heart thumps at my side,
    Remembering that her shriek was love
    And that he shrieks from pride.


    VIII Summer and Spring



    We sat under an old thorn-tree
    And talked away the night,
    Told all that had been said or done
    Since first we saw the light,
    And when we talked of growing up
    Knew that we'd halved a soul
    And fell the one in t'other's arms
    That we might make it whole;
    Then peter had a murdering look,
    For it seemed that he and she
    Had spoken of their childish days
    Under that very tree.
    O what a bursting out there was,
    And what a blossoming,
    When we had all the summer-time
    And she had all the spring!


    IX The Secrets of the Old



    I have old women's secrets now
    That had those of the young;
    Madge tells me what I dared not think
    When my blood was strong,
    And what had drowned a lover once
    Sounds like an old song.

    Though Margery is stricken dumb
    If thrown in Madge's way,
    We three make up a solitude;
    For none alive to-day
    Can know the stories that we know
    Or say the things we say:

    How such a man pleased women most
    Of all that are gone,
    How such a pair loved many years
    And such a pair but one,
    Stories of the bed of straw
    Or the bed of down.



    X His Wildness



    O bid me mount and sail up there
    Amid the cloudy wrack,
    For peg and Meg and Paris' love
    That had so straight a back,
    Are gone away, and some that stay
    Have changed their silk for sack.

    Were I but there and none to hear
    I'd have a peacock cry,
    For that is natural to a man
    That lives in memory,
    Being all alone I'd nurse a stone
    And sing it lullaby.


    XI From Oedipus at Colonus



    Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
    Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
    Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.

    Even from that delight memory treasures so,
    Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,
    As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.

    In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,
    The bride is catried to the bridegroom's chamber through torchlight and tumultuous song;
    I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.

    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.