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
Odor of blood when Christ was slain Made all Platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline.
No man has ever lived that had enough of children's gratitude or woman's love.
The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves The brilliant moon and all the milky sky And all that famous harmony of leaves Had blotted out man's image and his cry.
And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the plowman, splashing the wintry mold, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
Farewell - farewell, For I am weary of the weight of time.
The Father and His angelic hierarchy That made the magnitude and glory there Stood in the circuit of a needle's eye.
That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.
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.
Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality.
If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf
All hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will