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
Land of Heart's Desire, Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
The land of fairy, where nobody gets old and godly and grave, where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman's face, or worse-- The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil.
My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd. "This Land of Saints," and then as the applause died out, "Of plaster Saints;" his beautiful mischievous head thrown back.
I had this thought a while ago, "My darling cannot understand What I have done, or what would do In this blind bitter land." And I grew weary of the sun
Land of Heart's Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.
Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants.
Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land; Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand....
What shall I do for pretty girlsNow my old bawd is dead?
I sigh that kiss you,For I must ownThat I shall miss youWhen you have grown.
I sigh that kiss you, For I must own That I shall miss you When you have grown.
It would need a great deal of wisdom to know what it is we want to know.
Things said or done long years ago,Or things I did not do or sayBut thought that I might say or do,Weigh me down, and not a dayBut something is recalled,My conscience or my vanity appalled.