William Butler
William Butler
Multi-instrumentalist for the band Arcade Fire who plays bass, synth, guitar, and percussion. He has also worked on movie soundtracks, like the one for Her.
ProfessionGuitarist
Date of Birth6 October 1982
beauty mirrors swans
Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan; I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone....
happiness sweet poetry
I thought of rhyme alone, For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble And make the daylight sweet once more....
gay sick poetry
I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay
beauty dream women
O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes, The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a woman's gaze....
world fairy empty-souls
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
fire mountain decay
Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out. And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; But, kindly old rout Of the fire-born moods, You pass not away.
beautiful artist significant-things
I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.
faces spit
I spit into the face of time that has transfigured me
life men race
Many times man lives and dies Betweeen his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all. Whether man die in his bed Or the rifle knocks him dead
life men long
And that enquiring man John Synge comes next, That dying chose the living world for text And never could have rested in the tomb But that, long travelling, he had come Towards nightfall upon certain set apart In a most desolate stony place....
life lost-love fool
Being young you have not known The fool's triumph, nor yet Love lost as soon as won, Nor the best labourer dead And all the sheaves to bind.
life pain rain
Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills, Life overflows without ambitious pains; And rains down life until the basin spills, And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains As though to choose whatever shape it wills....
life men giving
Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span; Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man; Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.
life children laughter
Yet they that know all things but know That all this life can give us is A child's laughter, a woman's kiss.