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
Oh, who could have foretoldThat the heart grows old?
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
May she be granted beauty and yet notBeauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,Being made beautiful overmuch,Consider beauty a sufficient end,Lose natural kindness and maybeThe heart-revealing intimacyThat chooses right, and never find a friend.
May God be praised for womanThat gives up all her mind,A man may find in no mana friendship of her kind.
My fiftieth year had come and gone,I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,And open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.
Of conflicts with others we make retorica, of conflicts with ourselves poetry
Now that my ladder's goneI must lie down where all ladders startIn the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
When two close kindred meetWhat better than call a dance?
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves among silence
Because of that great nobleness of hersThe fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,Burns but more clearly.
I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Though leaves are many, the root is one;Through all the lying days of my youthI swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;Now I may wither into the truth.
TOIL and grow rich, what's that but to lie with a foul witch and after, drained dry, to be brought to the chamber where lies one long sought with despair.
We were the last romantics -- chose for themeTraditional sanctity and loveliness.