Quotes from W.B. Yeats

The other was out on the road late at night waiting for her young man, when something came flapping and rolling along the road up to her feet. It had the likeness of a newspaper, and presently it flapped up into her face, and she knew by the size of it that it was the Irish Times. All of a sudden it changed into a young man, who asked her to go walking with him. She would

Here are copies of verses you said you liked. I do not think I could ever write or paint any more. I prepare myself for a cycle of other activities in some other life. I will make rigid my roots and branches. It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and flowers.

Once he said to me in the height of his imperial propaganda, "Tell those young men in Ireland that this great thing must go on. They say Ireland is not fit for self-government, but that is nonsense. It is as fit as any other European country, but we cannot grant it.

Yet surely there are men who have made their art Out of no tragic war, lovers of life, Impulsive men that look for happiness And sing when they have found it.

Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination.

ANASHUYA Vijaya, swear to love her never more, VIJAYA Ay, ay. ANASHUYA Swear by the parents of the gods, Dread oath, who dwell on sacred Himalay, On the far Golden Peak; enormous shapes, Who still were old when the great sea was young On their vast faces mystery and dreams; Their hair along the mountains rolled and filled From year to year by the unnumbered nests Of aweless birds, and round their stirless feet The joyous flocks of deer and antelope, Who never hear the unforgiving hound. Swear!

The old brown thorn trees break in two high over Cummen Strand   Under a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand;   Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies,   But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes   Of Cathleen the daughter of Hoolihan.

He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination. What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!

I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of The Golden Age, Barry Pain, now a well-known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief secretary, and now or later Oscar Wilde, who was some ten years older than the rest of us.

Yet Henley never wholly lost that first admiration, for after Wilde's downfall he said to me: "Why did he do it? I told my lads to attack him and yet we might have fought under his banner.

and that he delighted in Flaubert and Pater, read Homer in the original and not as a schoolmaster reads him for the grammar.

I know now that revelation is from the self, but from that age-long memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest; and that genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our trivial daily mind.

Here ends, 'Two Plays for Dancers,' by William Butler Yeats. Four hundred copies of this book have been printed and published by Elizabeth Corbet Yeats on paper made in Ireland, at the Cuala Press, Churchtown, Dundrum, in the County of Dublin, Ireland. Finished on the tenth day of January in the year nineteen hundred and nineteen.

asked him had he ever seen the faeries, and got the reply, "Am I not annoyed with them?" I asked too if he had ever seen the banshee. "I have seen it," he said, "down there by the water, batting the river with its hands.

such are the topsy-turvydoms of faery glamour—in a cockleshell.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosened upon the world.

Young Man. Aoife is far away. I am alone. I have come alone in the midst of you To weigh this sword against Cuchullain's sword.

O blessed and happy he, who knowing the mysteries of the gods, sanctifies his life, and purifies his soul, celebrating orgies in the mountains with holy purifications.—Euripides.

I praise but in brief words the noble writing of these books, for words that praise a book, wherein something is done supremely well, remain, to sound in the ears of a later generation, like the foolish sound of church bells from the tower of a church when every pew is full.

Go gather by the humming sea Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell, And to its lips thy story tell.

A learned theologian has laid down That starving men may take what's necessary, And yet be sinless.

A writer must die every day he lives, be reborn, as it is said in the Burial Service, an incorruptible self, that self opposite of all that he has named 'himself'.

And never was piping so sad, And never was piping so gay.