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Speech after long silence; it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead . . . That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young We loved each other and were ignorant.
William Butler Yeats -
What if I bade you leave The cavern of the mind? There's better exercise In the sunlight and wind.
William Butler Yeats
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Civilisation is hooped together, brought Under a rule, under the semblance of peace By manifold illusion.
William Butler Yeats -
Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war?
William Butler Yeats -
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.
William Butler Yeats -
All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it
William Butler Yeats -
THAT crazed girl improvising her music. Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling She knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing Heroically lost, heroically found. No matter what disaster occurred She stood in desperate music wound, Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph Where the bales and the baskets lay No common intelligible sound But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea
William Butler Yeats -
Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.
William Butler Yeats
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A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
William Butler Yeats -
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core.
William Butler Yeats -
I spit into the face of time that has transfigured me
William Butler Yeats -
even The bed of love, that in the imagination Had seemed to be the giver of all peace, Is no more than a wine-cup in the tasting, And as soon finished.
William Butler Yeats -
If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation, wherein the heart withers.
William Butler Yeats -
But Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement. For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.
William Butler Yeats
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Was it for this the wild geese spread The gray wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this. Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
William Butler Yeats -
Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.
William Butler Yeats -
I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.
William Butler Yeats -
For the good are always the merry, / Save by an evil chance,/ And the merry love the fiddle,/ And the merry love to dance: / And when the folk there spy me,/ They will all come up to me, / With,”Here is the fiddler of Dooney!” / And dance like a wave of the sea.
William Butler Yeats -
Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? -Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil
William Butler Yeats -
A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught... Better go down upon your marrow-bones / And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones... For to articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these, and yet / Be thought an idler by the noisy set.
William Butler Yeats
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He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer.
William Butler Yeats -
One should say before sleeping: I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knee and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again.
William Butler Yeats -
We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.
William Butler Yeats -
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings.
William Butler Yeats