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
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves among silence
we can make our minds so still like water. That beings gather about us to see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer perhaps even with a fiercer life because of silence.
What do you think of when alone at night?Do not the things your mothers spoke about,Before they took the candle from the bedside,Rush up into the mind and master it,Till you believe in them against your will?
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.
Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.
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.
Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind, That loved his learning better than mankind, Though courteous to the worst; much falling he Brooded upon sanctity....
I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent
What if I bade you leave The cavern of the mind? There's better exercise In the sunlight and wind.
For what but eye and ear silence the mind With the minute particulars of mankind?
There where the course is, Delight makes all of the one mind, The riders upon the galloping horses, The crowd that closes in behind....
If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf
We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.
God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.