Quotes from W.B. Yeats

Surely some revelation is at hand.

I will make rigid my roots and branches. It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and flowers.

Cuchulain stirred, Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard The cars of battle and his own name cried; And fought with the invulnerable tide.

My fiftieth year had come and gone, 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.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress

This melancholy London — I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually.

I went out to the hazel wood because a fire was in my head cut and peeled a hazel wand and hooked a berry to a thread and when white moths were on the wing and moth-like stars were flickering out I dropped the berry in a stream, and caught a little silver trout.... (Song of Wandering Aengus)

I) only write it now because I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English. ("The Adoration of The Magi")

Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me ("The Circus Animal's Desertion")

Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-coloured Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.

When they had finished they made me take notes of whatever conversation they had quoted, so that I might have the exact words, and got up to go, and when I asked them where they were going and what they were doing and by what names I should call them, they would tell me nothing, except that they had been commanded to travel over Ireland continually, and upon foot and at night, that they might live close to the stones and the trees and at the hours when the immortals are awake.

The host is rushing 'twixt day and night, And where is there hope or deed as fair? Caoilte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh calling Away, come away.

From man's blood-sodden heart are sprung Those branches of the night and day Where the gaudy moon is hung. What's the meaning of all song? "Let all things pass away.

A king is but a foolish labourer Who wastes his blood to be another's dream. -from "Fergus and the Druid

Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. 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.

tradition gives the one thing many shapes.

I think that a fierce woman's better, a woman That breaks away when you have thought her won, For I'd be fed and hungry at one time.

Come away, O, human child! To the woods and waters wild, With a fairy hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

And her hair was a folded flower And the quiet of love in her feet.

I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.

We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died?

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

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 good night and quickly turn away.

rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination