William Butler Yeats Responsibilities, and other poems
For that she promised, and for that refused.
Thereon the bellowing of the empounded herds Rose round the walls, and through the bronze-ringed door Jostled and shouted those war-wasted men, And in the midst King Eochaid's brother stood. He'd heard that din on the horizon's edge And ridden towards it, being ignorant.
TO A WEALTHY MAN WHO PROMISED A SECOND SUBSCRIPTION TO THE DUBLIN MUNICIPAL GALLERY IF IT WERE PROVED THE PEOPLE WANTED PICTURES
You gave but will not give again Until enough of Paudeen's pence By Biddy's halfpennies have lain To be 'some sort of evidence,' Before you'll put your guineas down, That things it were a pride to give Are what the blind and ignorant town Imagines best to make it thrive. What cared Duke Ercole, that bid His mummers to the market place, What th' onion-sellers thought or did So that his Plautus set the pace For the Italian comedies? And Guidobaldo, when he made That grammar school of courtesies Where wit and beauty learned their trade Upon Urbino's windy hill, Had sent no runners to and fro That he might learn the shepherds' will. And when they drove out Cosimo, Indifferent how the rancour ran, He gave the hours they had set free To Michelozzo's latest plan For the San Marco Library, Whence turbulent Italy should draw Delight in Art whose end is peace, In logic and in natural law By sucking at the dugs of Greece.
Your open hand but shows our loss, For he knew better how to live. Let Paudeens play at pitch and toss, Look up in the sun's eye and give What the exultant heart calls good That some new day may breed the best Because you gave, not what they would But the right twigs for an eagle's nest!
December 1912.
SEPTEMBER 1913
What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone; For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Yet they were of a different kind The names that stilled your childish play, They have gone about the world like wind, But little time had they to pray For whom the hangman's rope was spun, And what, God help us, could they save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey 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.
Yet could we turn the years again, And call those exiles as they were, In all their loneliness and pain You'd cry 'some woman's yellow hair Has maddened every mother's son': They weighed so lightly what they gave, But let them be, they're dead and gone, They're with O'Leary in the grave.
TO A FRIEND WHOSE WORK HAS COME TO NOTHING
Now all the truth is out, Be secret and take defeat From any brazen throat, For how can you compete, Being honour bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbours' eyes? Bred to a harder thing Than Triumph, turn away And like a laughing string Whereon mad fingers play Amid a place of stone, Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.
PAUDEEN
Indignant at the fumbling wits, the obscure spite Of our old Paudeen in his shop, I stumbled blind Among the stones and thorn trees, under morning light; Until a curlew cried and in the luminous wind A curlew answered; and suddenly thereupon I thought That on the lonely height where all are in God's eye, There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot, A single soul that lacks a sweet crystaline cry.
TO A SHADE
If you have revisited the town, thin Shade, Whether to look upon your monument (I wonder if the builder has been paid) Or happier thoughted when the day is spent To drink of that salt breath out of the sea When grey gulls flit about instead of men, And the gaunt houses put on majesty: Let these content you and be gone again; For they are at their old tricks yet.
A man Of your own passionate serving kind who had brought In his full hands what, had they only known, Had given their children's children loftier thought, Sweeter emotion, working in their veins Like gentle blood, has been driven from the place, And insult heaped upon him for his pains And for his open-handedness, disgrace; An old foul mouth that slandered you had set The pack upon him.
Go, unquiet wanderer, And gather the Glasnevin coverlet About your head till the dust stops your ear, The time for you to taste of that salt breath And listen at the corners has not come; You had enough of sorrow before death — Away, away! You are safer in the tomb.
September 29th, 1914.
WHEN HELEN LIVED
We have cried in our despair That men desert, For some trivial affair Or noisy, insolent sport, Beauty that we have won From bitterest hours; Yet we, had we walked within Those topless towers Where Helen walked with her boy, Had given but as the rest Of the men and women of Troy, A word and a jest.
THE ATTACK ON 'THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD,' 1907
Once, when midnight smote the air, Eunuchs ran through Hell and met From thoroughfare to thoroughfare, While that great Juan galloped by; And like these to rail and sweat Staring upon his sinewy thigh.
THE THREE BEGGARS
'Though to my feathers in the wet, I have stood here from break of day, I have not found a thing to eat For only rubbish comes my way. Am I to live on lebeen-lone?' Muttered the old crane of Gort. 'For all my pains on lebeen-lone.'
King Guari walked amid his court The palace-yard and river-side And there to three old beggars said: 'You that have wandered far and wide Can ravel out what's in my head. Do men who least desire get most, Or get the most who most desire?' A beggar said: 'They get the most Whom man or devil cannot tire, And what could make their muscles taut Unless desire had made them so.' But Guari laughed with secret thought, 'If that be true as it seems true, One of you three is a rich man, For he shall have a thousand pounds Who is first asleep, if but he can Sleep before the third noon sounds.' And thereon merry as a bird, With his old thoughts King Guari went From river-side and palace-yard And left them to their argument. 'And if I win,' one beggar said, 'Though I am old I shall persuade A pretty girl to share my bed'; The second: 'I shall learn a trade'; The third: 'I'll hurry to the course Among the other gentlemen, And lay it all upon a horse'; The second: 'I have thought again: A farmer has more dignity.' One to another sighed and cried: The exorbitant dreams of beggary, That idleness had borne to pride, Sang through their teeth from noon to noon; And when the second twilight brought The frenzy of the beggars' moon They closed their blood-shot eyes for naught. One beggar cried: 'You're shamming sleep.' And thereupon their anger grew Till they were whirling in a heap.
They'd mauled and bitten the night through Or sat upon their heels to rail, And when old Guari came and stood Before the three to end this tale, They were commingling lice and blood. 'Time's up,' he cried, and all the three With blood-shot eyes upon him stared. 'Time's up,' he cried, and all the three Fell down upon the dust and snored.
'Maybe I shall be lucky yet, Now they are silent,' said the crane. 'Though to my feathers in the wet I've stood as I were made of stone And seen the rubbish run about, It's certain there are trout somewhere And maybe I shall take a trout If but I do not seem to care.'
THE THREE HERMITS
Three old hermits took the air By a cold and desolate sea, First was muttering a prayer, Second rummaged for a flea; On a windy stone, the third, Giddy with his hundredth year, Sang unnoticed like a bird. 'Though the Door of Death is near And what waits behind the door, Three times in a single day I, though upright on the shore, Fall asleep when I should pray.' So the first but now the second, 'We're but given what we have earned When all thoughts and deeds are reckoned, So it's plain to be discerned That the shades of holy men, Who have failed being weak of will, Pass the Door of Birth again, And are plagued by crowds, until They've the passion to escape.' Moaned the other, 'They are thrown Into some most fearful shape.' But the second mocked his moan: 'They are not changed to anything, Having loved God once, but maybe, To a poet or a king Or a witty lovely lady.' While he'd rummaged rags and hair, Caught and cracked his flea, the third, Giddy with his hundredth year Sang unnoticed like a bird.
BEGGAR TO BEGGAR CRIED
'Time to put off the world and go somewhere And find my health again in the sea air,' Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck, 'And make my soul before my pate is bare.'
'And get a comfortable wife and house To rid me of the devil in my shoes,' Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck, 'And the worse devil that is between my thighs.'
'And though I'd marry with a comely lass, She need not be too comely – let it pass,' Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck, 'But there's a devil in a looking-glass.'
'Nor should she be too rich, because the rich Are driven by wealth as beggars by the itch,' Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck, 'And cannot have a humorous happy speech.'
'And there I'll grow respected at my ease, And hear amid the garden's nightly peace,' Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck, 'The wind-blown clamor of the barnacle-geese.'
THE WELL AND THE TREE
'The Man that I praise,' Cries out the empty well, 'Lives all his days Where a hand on the bell Can call the milch-cows To the comfortable door of his house. Who but an idiot would praise Dry stones in a well?'
'The Man that I praise,' Cries out the leafless tree, 'Has married and stays By an old hearth, and he On naught has set store But children and dogs on the floor. Who but an idiot would praise A withered tree?'
RUNNING TO PARADISE
As I came over Windy Gap They threw a halfpenny into my cap, For I am running to Paradise; And all that I need do is to wish And somebody puts his hand in the dish To throw me a bit of salted fish: And there the king is but as the beggar.
My brother Mourteen is worn out With skelping his big brawling lout, And I am running to Paradise; A poor life do what he can, And though he keep a dog and a gun, A serving maid and a serving man: And there the king is but as the beggar.
Poor men have grown to be rich men, And rich men grown to be poor again, And I am running to Paradise; And many a darling wit's grown dull That tossed a bare heel when at school, Now it has filled an old sock full: And there the king is but as the beggar.
The wind is old and still at play While I must hurry upon my way, For I am running to Paradise; Yet never have I lit on a friend To take my fancy like the wind That nobody can buy or bind: And there the king is but as the beggar.