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
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.
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.
Time's bitter flood will rise,Your beauty perish and be lostFor all eyes but these eyes.
Time's bitter flood will rise, Your beauty perish and be lost For all eyes but these eyes.
If I make the lashes darkAnd the eyes more brightAnd the lips more scarlet,Or ask if all be rightFrom mirror after mirror,No vanity's displayed:I'm looking for the face I hadBefore the world was made.
I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, and what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magic illusions in the visions of truth in the depths of the minds when the eyes are closed.
Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye, In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky With all their ancient faces like rain- beaten stones, And all their helms of silver hovering.
Cast a cold eye on life, on death Horseman pass by
Wine enters through the mouth, Love, the eyes. I raise the glass to my mouth, I look at you, I sigh.
The chief imagination of Christendom, Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself That he has made that hollow face of his More plain to the mind's eye than any face But that of Christ.
Come, fix upon me that accusing eye. I thirst for accusation. All that was sung. All that was said in Ireland is a lie Breed out of the contagion of the throng, Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.
For what but eye and ear silence the mind With the minute particulars of mankind?
All the stream that's roaring by Came out of a needle's eye....
Eyes spiritualised by death can judge, I cannot, but I am not content.