Quotes from W.B. Yeats

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head

I kiss you and the world begins to fade. – W. B. Yeats, The Land of Heart's Desire (? Jennings Press, August 25, 2008) Originally published 1894.

I heard the old, old man say, "Everything alters, And one by one we drop away." They had hands like claws, and their knees Were twisted like the old thorn trees By the waters. I heard the old, old man say, "All that is beautiful drifts away Like the waters.

IF this importunate heart trouble your peace With words lighter than air

Be secret and exult Because of all things known That is most difficult

On Midsummer Eve, when the bonfires are lighted on every hill in honour of St. John, the fairies are at their gayest, and sometime steal away beautiful mortals to be their brides.

We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive.

To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And is anxious in its sleep.

Mr. Dowler, could you go through this? Mr. Algie. Don't answer him, Dowler; he's going beyond all bounds. Paul Ruttledge. I was a rich man and I could not, and yet I am something smaller than a camel, and this is something larger than a needle's eye.

You have accused me of upsetting order by my free drinks, and I have showed you that there is a more dreadful fermentation in the Sermon on the Mount than in my beer-barrels. Christ thought it in the irresponsibility of His omnipotence.

Because all dark, like those that are all light, They are cast beyond the verge, and in a cloud, Crying to one another like the bats; And having no desire they cannot tell What's good or bad, or what it is to triumph At the perfection of one's own obedience; And yet they speak what's blown into the mind; Deformed beyond deformity, unformed, Insipid as the dough before it is baked, They change their bodies at a word.

The Magi Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye, In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones, And all their helms of silver hovering side by side, And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more, Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied, The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

It's not a dream, But the reality that makes our passion As a lamp shadow—no—no lamp, the sun. What the world's million lips are thirsting for Must be substantial somewhere...

Everything in this world is eater or eaten, seed is the food, fire is the eater.

Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet. BELIEF

No woman loves me, no man seeks my help, Because I be not of the things I dream.

A terrible beauty is born.

THE REALISTS Hope that you may understand! What can books of men that wive In a dragon-guarded land, Paintings of the dolphin-drawn Sea-nymphs in their pearly waggons Do, but awake a hope to live That had gone With the dragons?

O hiding hair and dewy eyes, I am no more with life and death, My heart upon his warm heart lies, My breath is mixed into his breath.

That ancient chronicler Giraldus taunted the Archbishop of Cashel because no one in Ireland had received the crown of martyrdom. "Our people may be barbarous," the prelate answered, "but they have never lifted their hands against God's saints; but now that a people have come amongst us who know how to make them (it was just after the English invasion), we shall have martyrs plentifully.

What hurts the soul My soul adores

IMITATED FROM THE JAPANESE A MOST astonishing thing — Seventy years have I lived; (Hurrah for the flowers of Spring, For Spring is here again.) Seventy years have I lived No ragged beggar-man, Seventy years have I lived, Seventy years man and boy, And never have I danced for joy.

With us nothing has time to gather meaning, and too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.

And yet the wise are of opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and melancholy multitude.