William Butler Yeats Quotes
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Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.
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The friends that have it I do wrong Whenever I remake a song, Should know what issue is at stake: It is myself that I remake.
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What the world's million lips are searching for, must be substantial somewhere.
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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.
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There is no release In a bodkin or disease, Nor can there be a work so great As that which cleans man's dirty slate.
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I would have touched it like a child But knew my finger could but have touched Cold stone and water. I grew wild, Even accusing heaven because It had set down among its laws: Nothing that we love over-much Is ponderable to our touch.
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I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.
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The soul of man is of the imperishable substance of the stars!
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Come, fix upon me that accusing eye. I thirst for accusation. All that was sung. All that was said in Ireland is a lie Breed out of the contagion of the throng, Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.
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Let the new faces play what tricks they will In the old rooms; night can outbalance day, Our shadows rove the garden gravel still, The living seem more shadowy than they.
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Now must we sing and sing the best we can, But first you must be told your character: Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain.
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Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.
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That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees - Those dying generations-at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unaging intellect.
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The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.
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... What matter, so there is but fire In you, in me?
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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.
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Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.
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Come swish around my pretty punk And keep me dancing still That I may stay a sober man Although I drink my fill.
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There is only one romance the Soul's.
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There where the course is, Delight makes all of the one mind, The riders upon the galloping horses, The crowd that closes in behind.
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Farewell - farewell, For I am weary of the weight of time.
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Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
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What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
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Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enameling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.