William Butler Yeats Quotes

Do not let him touch you! It is not true That drunken men cannot beget, And if he touch he must beget And you must bear his murderer. Deaf ! Both deaf !

Propinquity had brought Imagination to that pitch where it casts out All that is not itself. I had grown wild And wandered murmuring everywhere, ‘My child, my child.’

No marble, no conventional phrase, On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!

Under bare Ben Bulben’s head In Drumcliffe churchyard Yeats is laid, An ancestor was rector there Long years ago; a church stands near, By the road an ancient Cross.

Swear by what the sages spoke Round the Mareotic Lake That the Witch of Atlas knew, Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.

We Irish, born into that ancient sect But thrown upon this filthy modern tide And by its formless spawning fury wrecked, Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.

Our master Caesar is in the tent Where the maps are spread, His eyes fixed upon nothing, A hand under his head. Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence.

When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side, What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect, What calculation, number, measurement, replied?

Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Or sucked such milk as he, And there’s no luck about a house If it lacks honesty. The ghost of Roger Casement Is beating on the door.

John Bull has gone to India And all must pay him heed For histories are there to prove That none of another breed Has had a like inheritance.

Grant me an old man’s frenzy. Myself I must remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.

Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.

If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No Vanity’s displayed: I’m looking for the face I had Before the world was made.

Marbles of the dancing floor Break bitter furies of complexity, Those images that yet Fresh images beget, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities The fury and the mire of human veins.

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.

O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance.