Title: The tower
Author: Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Language: English
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THE TOWER

by

W. B. Yeats


MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON

1928



         CONTENTS

  Sailing to Byzantium
  The Tower
  Meditations in Time of Civil War
  Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen
  The Wheel
  Youth and Age
  The New Faces
  A Prayer for My Son
  Two Songs from a Play
  Wisdom
  Leda and the Swan
  On a Picture of a Black Centaur
  Among School Children
  Colonus’ Praise
  The Hero, The Girl, and The Fool
  Owen Ahern and His Dancers
  A Man Young and Old
  The Three Monuments
  From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’
  The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid
  All Souls’ Night

  Notes



SAILING TO BYZANTIUM


  I

  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.


  II

  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,
  Nor is there singing school but studying
  Monuments of its own magnificence;
  And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
  To the holy city of Byzantium.


  III

  O sages standing in God’s holy fire
  As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
  Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
  And be the singing masters of my soul.
  Consume my heart away; sick with desire
  And fastened to a dying animal
  It knows not what it is; and gather me
  Into the artifice of eternity.


  IV

  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 enamelling
  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.

1927



THE TOWER


  I

  What shall I do with this absurdity--
  O heart, O troubled heart--this caricature,
  Decrepit age that has been tied to me
  As to a dog’s tail?
                     Never had I more
  Excited, passionate, fantastical
  Imagination, nor an ear and eye
  That more expected the impossible--
  No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,
  Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s back
  And had the livelong summer day to spend.
  It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,
  Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend
  Until imagination, ear and eye,
  Can be content with argument and deal
  In abstract things; or be derided by
  A sort of battered kettle at the heel.


  II

  I pace upon the battlements and stare
  On the foundations of a house, or where
  Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;
  And send imagination forth
  Under the day’s declining beam, and call
  Images and memories
  From ruin or from ancient trees,
  For I would ask a question of them all.

  Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and once
  When every silver candlestick or sconce
  Lit up the dark mahogany and the wine,
  A serving man that could divine
  That most respected lady’s every wish,
  Ran and with the garden shears
  Clipped an insolent farmer’s ears
  And brought them in a little covered dish.

  Some few remembered still when I was young
  A peasant girl commended by a song,
  Who’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place,
  And praised the colour of her face,
  And had the greater joy in praising her,
  Remembering that, if walked she there,
  Farmers jostled at the fair
  So great a glory did the song confer.

  And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,
  Or else by toasting her a score of times,
  Rose from the table and declared it right
  To test their fancy by their sight;
  But they mistook the brightness of the moon
  For the prosaic light of day--
  Music had driven their wits astray--
  And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.

  Strange, but the man who made the song was blind,
  Yet, now I have considered it, I find
  That nothing strange; the tragedy began
  With Homer that was a blind man,
  And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.
  O may the moon and sunlight seem
  One inextricable beam,
  For if I triumph I must make men mad.

  And I myself created Hanrahan
  And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn
  From somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.
  Caught by an old man’s juggleries
  He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro
  And had but broken knees for hire
  And horrible splendour of desire;
  I thought it all out twenty years ago:

  Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;
  And when that ancient ruffian’s turn was on
  He so bewitched the cards under his thumb
  That all, but the one card, became
  A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,
  And that he changed into a hare.
  Hanrahan rose in frenzy there
  And followed up those baying creatures towards--

  O towards I have forgotten what--enough!
  I must recall a man that neither love
  Nor music nor an enemy’s clipped ear
  Could, he was so harried, cheer;
  A figure that has grown so fabulous
  There’s not a neighbour left to say
  When he finished his dog’s day:
  An ancient bankrupt master of this house.

  Before that ruin came, for centuries,
  Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the knees
  Or shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs,
  And certain men-at-arms there were
  Whose images, in the Great Memory stored,
  Come with loud cry and panting breast
  To break upon a sleeper’s rest
  While their great wooden dice beat on the board.

  As I would question all, come all who can;
  Come old, necessitous, half-mounted man;
  And bring beauty’s blind rambling celebrant;
  The red man the juggler sent
  Through God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,
  Gifted with so fine an ear;
  The man drowned in a bog’s mire,
  When mocking muses chose the country wench.

  Did all old men and women, rich and poor,
  Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,
  Whether in public or in secret rage
  As I do now against old age?
  But I have found an answer in those eyes
  That are impatient to be gone;
  Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan
  For I need all his mighty memories.

  Old lecher with a love on every wind
  Bring up out of that deep considering mind
  All that you have discovered in the grave,
  For it is certain that you have
  Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing
  Plunge, lured by a softening eye,
  Or by a touch or a sigh,
  Into the labyrinth of another’s being;

  Does the imagination dwell the most
  Upon a woman won or woman lost?
  If on the lost, admit you turned aside
  From a great labyrinth out of pride,
  Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought
  Or anything called conscience once;
  And that if memory recur, the sun’s
  Under eclipse and the day blotted out.


  III

  It is time that I wrote my will;
  I choose upstanding men,
  That climb the streams until
  The fountain leap, and at dawn
  Drop their cast at the side
  Of dripping stone; I declare
  They shall inherit my pride,
  The pride of people that were
  Bound neither to Cause nor to State,
  Neither to slaves that were spat on,
  Nor to the tyrants that spat,
  The people of Burke and of Grattan
  That gave, though free to refuse--
  Pride, like that of the morn,
  When the headlong light is loose,
  Or that of the fabulous horn,
  Or that of the sudden shower
  When all streams are dry,
  Or that of the hour
  When the swan must fix his eye
  Upon a fading gleam,
  Float out upon a long
  Last reach of glittering stream
  And there sing his last song.
  And I declare my faith;
  I mock Plotinus’ thought
  And cry in Plato’s teeth,
  Death and life were not
  Till man made up the whole,
  Made lock, stock and barrel
  Out of his bitter soul,
  Aye, sun and moon and star, all,
  And further add to that
  That, being dead, we rise,
  Dream and so create
  Translunar Paradise.
  I have prepared my peace
  With learned Italian things
  And the proud stones of Greece,
  Poet’s imaginings
  And memories of love,
  Memories of the words of women,
  All those things whereof
  Man makes a superhuman,
  Mirror-resembling dream.

  As at the loophole there,
  The daws chatter and scream,
  And drop twigs layer upon layer.
  When they have mounted up,
  The mother bird will rest
  On their hollow top,
  And so warm her wild nest.

  I leave both faith and pride
  To young upstanding men
  Climbing the mountain side,
  That under bursting dawn
  They may drop a fly;
  Being of that metal made
  Till it was broken by
  This sedentary trade.

  Now shall I make my soul
  Compelling it to study
  In a learned school
  Till the wreck of body
  Slow decay of blood,
  Testy delirium
  Or dull decrepitude,
  Or what worse evil come--
  The death of friends, or death
  Of every brilliant eye
  That made a catch in the breath--
  Seem but the clouds of the sky
  When the horizon fades;
  Or a bird’s sleepy cry
  Among the deepening shades.

1926



MEDITATIONS IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR


  I
  Ancestral Houses

  Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns,
  Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
  Life overflows without ambitious pains;
  And rains down life until the basin spills,
  And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
  As though to choose whatever shape it wills
  And never stoop to a mechanical,
  Or servile shape, at others’ beck and call.

  Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not sung
  Had he not found it certain beyond dreams
  That out of life’s own self-delight had sprung
  The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems
  As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung
  Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,
  And not a fountain, were the symbol which
  Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.

  Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
  Called architect and artist in, that they,
  Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
  The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
  The gentleness none there had ever known;
  But when the master’s buried mice can play,
  And maybe the great-grandson of that house,
  For all its bronze and marble, ’s but a mouse.

  Oh, what if gardens where the peacock strays
  With delicate feet upon old terraces,
  Or else all Juno from an urn displays
  Before the indifferent garden deities;
  Oh, what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways
  Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease
  And Childhood a delight for every sense,
  But take our greatness with our violence!

  What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,
  And buildings that a haughtier age designed,
  The pacing to and fro on polished floors
  Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined
  With famous portraits of our ancestors;
  What if those things the greatest of mankind,
  Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
  But take our greatness with our bitterness!


  II
  My House

  An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
  A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
  An acre of stony ground,
  Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
  Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,
  The sound of the rain or sound
  Of every wind that blows;
  The stilted water-hen
  Crossing stream again
  Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;

  A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,
  A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,
  A candle and written page.
  ‘Il Penseroso’s’ Platonist toiled on
  In some like chamber, shadowing forth
  How the daemonic rage
  Imagined everything.
  Benighted travellers
  From markets and from fairs
  Have seen his midnight candle glimmering.

  Two men have founded here. A man-at-arms
  Gathered a score of horse and spent his days
  In this tumultuous spot,
  Where through long wars and sudden night alarms
  His dwindling score and he seemed cast-a-ways
  Forgetting and forgot;
  And I, that after me
  My bodily heirs may find,
  To exalt a lonely mind,
  Befitting emblems of adversity.


  III
  My Table

  Two heavy tressels, and a board
  Where Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,
  By pen and paper lies,
  That it may moralise
  My days out of their aimlessness.
  A bit of an embroidered dress
  Covers its wooden sheath.
  Chaucer had not drawn breath
  When it was forged. In Sato’s house,
  Curved like new moon, moon luminous
  It lay five hundred years.
  Yet if no change appears
  No moon; only an aching heart
  Conceives a changeless work of art.
  Our learned men have urged
  That when and where ’twas forged
  A marvellous accomplishment,
  In painting or in pottery, went
  From father unto son
  And through the centuries ran
  And seemed unchanging like the sword.
  Soul’s beauty being most adored,
  Men and their business took
  The soul’s unchanging look;
  For the most rich inheritor,
  Knowing that none could pass heaven’s door
  That loved inferior art,
  Had such an aching heart
  That he, although a country’s talk
  For silken clothes and stately walk,
  Had waking wits; it seemed
  Juno’s peacock screamed.


  IV
  My Descendants

  Having inherited a vigorous mind
  From my old fathers I must nourish dreams
  And leave a woman and a man behind
  As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems
  Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
  Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
  But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
  And there’s but common greenness after that.

  And what if my descendants lose the flower
  Through natural declension of the soul,
  Through too much business with the passing hour,
  Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?
  May this laborious stair and this stark tower
  Become a roofless ruin that the owl
  May build in the cracked masonry and cry
  Her desolation to the desolate sky.

  The Primum Mobile that fashioned us
  Has made the very owls in circles move;
  And I, that count myself most prosperous,
  Seeing that love and friendship are enough,
  For an old neighbour’s friendship chose the house
  And decked and altered it for a girl’s love,
  And know whatever flourish and decline
  These stones remain their monument and mine.


  V
  The Road at My Door

  An affable Irregular,
  A heavily built Falstaffan man,
  Comes cracking jokes of civil war
  As though to die by gunshot were
  The finest play under the sun.

  A brown Lieutenant and his men,
  Half dressed in national uniform,
  Stand at my door, and I complain
  Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
  A pear tree broken by the storm.

  I count those feathered balls of soot
  The moor-hen guides upon the stream,
  To silence the envy in my thought;
  And turn towards my chamber, caught
  In the cold snows of a dream.


  VI
  The Stare’s Nest by My Window

  The bees build in the crevices
  Of loosening masonry, and there
  The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
  My wall is loosening; honey-bees
  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  We are closed in, and the key is turned
  On our uncertainty; somewhere
  A man is killed, or a house burned,
  Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  A barricade of stone or of wood;
  Some fourteen days of civil war;
  Last night they trundled down the road
  That dead young soldier in his blood:
  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  We had fed the heart on fantasies,
  The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
  More substance in our enmities
  Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
  Come build in the empty house of the stare.


  VII
  I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming
    Emptiness

  I climb to the tower top and lean upon broken stone,
  A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
  Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
  That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
  A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
  And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.
  Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
  Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.

  ‘Vengeance upon the murderers,’ the cry goes up,
  ‘Vengeance for Jacques Molay.’ In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,
  The rage driven, rage tormented, and rage hungry troop,
  Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,
  Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide
  For the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astray
  Because of all that senseless tumult, all but cried
  For vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.

  Their legs long delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,
  Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs,
  The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,
  Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,
  Have closed the ladies’ eyes, their minds are but a pool
  Where even longing drowns under its own excess;
  Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full
  Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

  The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,
  The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,
  Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,
  Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place
  To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,
  Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone,
  Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency,
  The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.

  I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
  Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
  In something that all others understand or share;
  But oh, ambitious heart had such a proof drawn forth
  A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
  It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,
  The half read wisdom of daemonic images,
  Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.

1923



NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN


  I

  Many ingenious lovely things are gone
  That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
  Protected from the circle of the moon
  That pitches common things about. There stood
  Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
  An ancient image made of olive wood--
  And gone are Phidias’ famous ivories
  And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.

  We too had many pretty toys when young;
  A law indifferent to blame or praise,
  To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
  Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;
  Public opinion ripening for so long
  We thought it would outlive all future days.
  O what fine thought we had because we thought
  That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

  All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
  And a great army but a showy thing;
  What matter that no cannon had been turned
  Into a ploughshare; parliament and king
  Thought that unless a little powder burned
  The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
  And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
  The guardsmen’s drowsy chargers would not prance.

  Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
  Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
  Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
  To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
  The night can sweat with terror as before
  We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
  And planned to bring the world under a rule,
  Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

  He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned
  Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant
  From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,
  Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent
  On master work of intellect or hand,
  No honour leave its mighty monument,
  Has but one comfort left: all triumph would
  But break upon his ghostly solitude.

  But is there any comfort to be found?
  Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
  What more is there to say? That country round
  None dared admit, if such a thought were his,
  Incendiary or bigot could be found
  To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
  Or break in bits the famous ivories
  Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees?


  II

  When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound
  A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
  It seemed that a dragon of air
  Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
  Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
  So the platonic year
  Whirls out new right and wrong,
  Whirls in the old instead;
  All men are dancers and their tread
  Goes to the barbarous clangour of gong.


  III

  Some moralist or mythological poet
  Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
  I am satisfied with that,
  Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it
  Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,
  An image of its state;
  The wings half spread for flight,
  The breast thrust out in pride
  Whether to play, or to ride
  Those winds that clamour of approaching night.

  A man in his own secret meditation
  Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made
  In art or politics;
  Some platonist affirms that in the station
  Where we should cast off body and trade
  The ancient habit sticks,
  And that if our works could
  But vanish with our breath
  That were a lucky death,
  For triumph can but mar our solitude.

  The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
  That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
  To end all things, to end
  What my laborious life imagined, even
  The half imagined, the half written page;
  O but we dreamed to mend
  Whatever mischief seemed
  To afflict mankind, but now
  That winds of winter blow
  Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.


  IV

  We, who seven years ago
  Talked of honour and of truth,
  Shriek with pleasure if we show
  The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.


  V

  Come let us mock at the great
  That had such burdens on the mind
  And toiled so hard and late
  To leave some monument behind,
  Nor thought of the levelling wind.

  Come let us mock at the wise;
  With all those calendars whereon
  They fixed old aching eyes,
  They never saw how seasons run,
  And now but gape at the sun.

  Come let us mock at the good
  That fancied goodness might be gay,
  And sick of solitude
  Might proclaim a holiday:
  Wind shrieked--and where are they?

  Mock mockers after that
  That would not lift a hand maybe
  To help good, wise or great
  To bar that foul storm out, for we
  Traffic in mockery.


  VI

  Violence upon the roads: violence of horses;
  Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
  On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,
  But wearied running round and round in their courses
  All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:
  Herodias’ daughters have returned again
  A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
  Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
  Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;
  And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
  All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
  According to the wind, for all are blind.
  But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
  There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
  Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
  That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
  To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
  Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.

1919



THE WHEEL


  Through winter-time we call on spring,
  And through the spring on summer call,
  And when abounding hedges ring
  Declare that winter’s best of all;
  And after that there s nothing good
  Because the spring-time has not come--
  Nor know that what disturbs our blood
  Is but its longing for the tomb.



YOUTH AND AGE


  Much did I rage when young,
  Being by the world oppressed,
  But now with flattering tongue
  It speeds the parting guest.

1924



THE NEW FACES


  If you, that have grown old, were the first dead,
  Neither catalpa tree nor scented lime
  Should hear my living feet, nor would I tread
  Where we wrought that shall break the teeth of time.
  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.



A PRAYER FOR MY SON


  Bid a strong ghost stand at the head
  That my Michael may sleep sound,
  Nor cry, nor turn in the bed
  Till his morning meal come round;
  And may departing twilight keep
  All dread afar till morning’s back,
  That his mother may not lack
  Her fill of sleep.

  Bid the ghost have sword in fist:
  Some there are, for I avow
  Such devilish things exist,
  Who have planned his murder for they know
  Of some most haughty deed or thought
  That waits upon his future days,
  And would through hatred of the bays
  Bring that to nought.

  Though You can fashion everything
  From nothing every day, and teach
  The morning stars to sing,
  You have lacked articulate speech
  To tell Your simplest want, and known,
  Wailing upon a woman’s knee,
  All of that worst ignominy
  Of flesh and bone;

  And when through all the town there ran
  The servants of Your enemy,
  A woman and a man,
  Unless the Holy Writings lie,
  Hurried through the smooth and rough
  And through the fertile and waste,
  Protecting, till the danger past,
  With human love.



TWO SONGS FROM A PLAY


  I

  I saw a staring virgin stand
  Where holy Dionysus died,
  And tear the heart out of his side,
  And lay the heart upon her hand
  And bear that beating heart away;
  And then did all the Muses sing
  Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
  As though God’s death were but a play.

  Another Troy must rise and set,
  Another lineage feed the crow,
  Another Argo’s painted prow
  Drive to a flashier bauble yet.
  The Roman Empire stood appalled:
  It dropped the reins of peace and war
  When that fierce virgin and her Star
  Out of the fabulous darkness called.


  II

  In pity for man’s darkening thought
  He walked that room and issued thence
  In Galilean turbulence;
  The Babylonian Starlight brought
  A fabulous, formless darkness in;
  Odour of blood when Christ was slain
  Made Plato’s tolerance in vain
  And vain the Doric discipline.



WISDOM


  The true faith discovered was
  When painted panel, statuary,
  Glass-mosaic, window-glass,
  Straightened all that went awry
  When some peasant gospeller
  Imagined Him upon the floor
  Of a working-carpenter.
  Miracle had its playtime where
  In damask clothed and on a seat,
  Chryselephantine, cedar boarded,
  His majestic Mother sat
  Stitching at a purple hoarded,
  That He might be nobly breeched,
  In starry towers of Babylon
  Noah’s freshet never reached.
  King Abundance got Him on
  Innocence; and Wisdom He.
  That cognomen sounded best
  Considering what wild infancy
  Drove horror from His Mother’s breast.



LEDA AND THE SWAN


  A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
  Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
  By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
  He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

  How can those terrified vague fingers push
  The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
  And how can body, laid in that white rush
  But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

  A shudder in the loins engenders there
  The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
  And Agamemnon dead.
                     Being so caught up,
  So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
  Did she put on his knowledge with his power
  Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

1928



ON A PICTURE OF A BLACK CENTAUR BY EDMOND DULAC


  Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,
  Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.
  My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.
  I knew that horse play, knew it for a murderous thing.
  What wholesome sun has ripened is wholesome food to eat
  And that alone; yet I, being driven half insane
  Because of some green wing, gathered old mummy wheat
  In the mad abstract dark and ground it grain by grain
  And after baked it slowly in an oven; but now
  I bring full flavoured wine out of a barrel found
  Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew
  When Alexander’s empire past, they slept so sound.
  Stretch out your limbs and sleep a long Saturnian sleep;
  I have loved you better than my soul for all my words,
  And there is none so fit to keep a watch and keep
  Unwearied eyes upon those horrible green birds.



AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN


  I

  I walk through the long schoolroom questioning,
  A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
  The children learn to cipher and to sing,
  To study reading-books and history,
  To cut and sew, be neat in everything
  In the best modern way--the children’s eyes
  In momentary wonder stare upon
  A sixty year old smiling public man.


  II

  I dream of a Ledæan body, bent
  Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
  Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
  That changed some childish day to tragedy--
  Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
  Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
  Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
  Into the yolk and white of the one shell.


  III

  And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
  I look upon one child or t’other there
  And wonder if she stood so at that age--
  For even daughters of the swan can share
  Something of every paddler’s heritage--
  And had that colour upon cheek or hair
  And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
  She stands before me as a living child.


  IV

  Her present image floats in to the mind--
  Did quattrocento finger fashion it
  Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
  And took a mass of shadows for its meat?
  And I though never of Ledæan kind
  Had pretty plumage once--enough of that,
  Better to smile on all that smile, and show
  There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.


  V

  What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
  Honey of generation had betrayed,
  And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
  As recollection or the drug decide,
  Would think her son, did she but see that shape
  With sixty or more winters on its head,
  A compensation for the pang of his birth,
  Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?


  VI

  Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
  Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
  Solider Aristotle played the taws
  Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
  World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
  Fingered upon a fiddle stick or strings
  What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
  Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.


  VII

  Both nuns and mothers worship images,
  But those the candles light are not as those
  That animate a mother’s reveries,
  But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
  And yet they too break hearts--O Presences
  That passion, piety or affection knows,
  And that all heavenly glory symbolise--
  O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;


  VIII

  Labour is blossoming or dancing where
  The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
  Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
  Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
  O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
  Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
  O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
  How can we know the dancer from the dance?



COLONUS’ PRAISE

(From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’)


  CHORUS

  Come praise Colonus’ horses and come praise
  The wine dark of the wood’s intricacies,
  The nightingale that deafens daylight there,
  If daylight ever visit where,
  Unvisited by tempest or by sun,
  Immortal ladies tread the ground
  Dizzy with harmonious sound,
  Semele’s lad a gay companion.

  And yonder in the gymnasts’ garden thrives
  The self-sown, self-begotten shape that gives
  Athenian intellect its mastery,
  Even the grey-leaved olive tree
  Miracle-bred out of the living stone;
  Nor accident of peace nor war
  Shall wither that old marvel, for
  The great grey-eyed Athene stares thereon.

  Who comes into this country, and has come
  Where golden crocus and narcissus bloom,
  Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughter
  And beauty-drunken by the water
  Glittering among grey-leaved olive trees,
  Has plucked a flower and sung her loss;
  Who finds abounding Cephisus
  Has found the loveliest spectacle there is.

  Because this country has a pious mind
  And so remembers that when all mankind
  But trod the road, or paddled by the shore,
  Poseidon gave it bit and oar,
  Every Colonus lad or lass discourses
  Of that oar and of that bit;
  Summer and winter, day and night,
  Of horses and horses of the sea, white horses.



THE HERO, THE GIRL, AND THE FOOL

                  The Girl

  I rage at my own image in the glass,
  That’s so unlike myself that when you praise it
  It is as though you praised another, or even
  Mocked me with praise of my mere opposite;
  And when I wake towards morn I dread myself
  For the heart cries that what deception wins
  Cruelty must keep; therefore be warned and go
  If you have seen that image and not the woman.

                  The Hero

  I have raged at my own strength because you have loved it.

                  The Girl

  If you are no more strength than I am beauty
  I had better find a convent and turn nun;
  A nun at least has all men’s reverence
  And needs no cruelty.

                  The Hero

                       I have heard one say
  That men have reverence for their holiness
  And not themselves.

                  The Girl

                      Say on and say
  That only God has loved us for ourselves,
  But what care I that long for a man’s love?

           The Fool by the Roadside

  When my days that have
  From cradle run to grave
  From grave to cradle run instead;
  When thoughts that a fool
  Has wound upon a spool
  Are but loose thread, are but loose thread.

  When cradle and spool are past
  And I mere shade at last
  Coagulate of stuff
  Transparent like the wind,
  I think that I may find
  A faithful love, a faithful love.



OWEN AHERN AND HIS DANCERS


  I

  A strange thing surely that my heart when love had come unsought
  Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,
  Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.
  It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.

  The south wind brought it longing, and the east wind despair,
  The west wind made it pitiful, and the north wind afraid.
  It feared to give its love a hurt with all the tempest there;
  It feared the hurt that she could give and therefore it went mad.

  I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,
  I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer’s had,
  But oh my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;
  I ran, I ran, from my love’s side because my Heart went mad.


  II

  The Heart behind its rib laughed out, ‘You have called me mad,’ it said.
  ‘Because I made you turn away and run from that young child;
  How could she mate with fifty years that was so wildly bred?
  Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in
    the wild.’

  ‘You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,’ I replied.
  ‘And all those lies have but one end poor wretches to betray;
  I did not find in any cage the woman at my side.
  O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.’

  ‘Speak all your mind,’ my Heart sang out, ‘speak all your mind; who
    cares,
  Now that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she mistake
  Her childish gratitude for love and match your fifty years.
  O let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.’



A MAN YOUNG AND OLD


  First Love

  Though nurtured like the sailing moon
  In beauty’s murderous brood,
  She walked awhile and blushed awhile
  And on my pathway stood
  Until I thought her body bore
  A heart of flesh and blood.

  But since I laid a hand thereon
  And found a heart of stone
  I have attempted many things
  And not a thing is done,
  For every hand is lunatic
  That travels on the moon.

  She smiled and that transfigured me
  And left me but a lout,
  Maundering here, and maundering there,
  Emptier of thought
  Than heavenly circuit of its stars
  When the moon sails out.


  Human Dignity

  Like the moon her kindness is,
  If kindness I may call
  What has no comprehension in’t,
  But is the same for all
  As though my sorrow were a scene
  Upon a painted wall.

  So like a bit of stone I lie
  Under a broken tree.
  I could recover if I shrieked
  My heart’s agony
  To passing bird, but I am dumb
  From human dignity.


  The Mermaid

  A mermaid found a swimming lad,
  Picked him for her own,
  Pressed her body to his body,
  Laughed; and plunging down
  Forgot in cruel happiness
  That even lovers drown.


  The Death of the Hare

  I have pointed out the yelling pack,
  The hare leap to the wood,
  And when I pass a compliment
  Rejoice as lover should
  At the drooping of an eye
  At the mantling of the blood.

  Then suddenly my heart is wrung
  By her distracted air
  And I remember wildness lost
  And after, swept from there,
  Am set down standing in the wood
  At the death of the hare.


  The Empty Cup

  A crazy man that found a cup,
  When all but dead of thirst,
  Hardly dared to wet his mouth
  Imagining, moon accursed,
  That another mouthful
  And his beating heart would burst.
  October last I found it too
  But found it dry as bone,
  And for that reason am I crazed
  And my sleep is gone.


  His Memories

  We should be hidden from their eyes,
  Being but holy shows
  And bodies broken like a thorn
  Whereon the bleak north blows,
  To think of buried Hector
  And that none living knows.

  The women take so little stock
  In what I do or say
  They’d sooner leave their cosseting
  To hear a jackass bray;
  My arms are like the twisted thorn
  And yet there beauty lay;

  The first of all the tribe lay there
  And did such pleasure take--
  She who had brought great Hector down
  And put all Troy to wreck--
  That she cried into this ear
  Strike me if I shriek.


  The Friends of His Youth

  Laughter not time destroyed my voice
  And put that crack in it,
  And when the moon’s pot-bellied
  I get a laughing fit,
  For that old Madge comes down the lane
  A stone upon her breast,
  And a cloak wrapped about the stone,
  And she can get no rest
  With singing hush and hush-a-bye;
  She that has been wild
  And barren as a breaking wave
  Thinks that the stone’s a child.
  And Peter that had great affairs
  And was a pushing man
  Shrieks, ‘I am King of the Peacocks,’
  And perches on a stone;
  And then I laugh till tears run down
  And the heart thumps at my side,
  Remembering that her shriek was love
  And that he shrieks from pride.


  Summer and Spring

  We sat under an old thorn-tree
  And talked away the night,
  Told all that had been said or done
  Since first we saw the light,
  And when we talked of growing up
  Knew that we’d halved a soul
  And fell the one in t’other’s arms
  That we might make it whole;
  Then Peter had a murdering look
  For it seemed that he and she
  Had spoken of their childish days
  Under that very tree.
  O what a bursting out there was,
  And what a blossoming,
  When we had all the summer time
  And she had all the spring.


  The Secrets of the Old

  I have old women’s secrets now
  That had those of the young;
  Madge tells me what I dared not think
  When my blood was strong,
  And what had drowned a lover once
  Sounds like an old song.

  Though Margery is stricken dumb
  If thrown in Madge’s way,
  We three make up a solitude;
  For none alive to-day
  Can know the stories that we know
  Or say the things we say:

  How such a man pleased women most
  Of all that are gone,
  How such a pair loved many years
  And such a pair but one,
  Stories of the bed of straw
  Or the bed of down.


  His Wildness

  O bid me mount and sail up there
  Amid the cloudy wrack,
  For Peg and Meg and Paris’ love
  That had so straight a back,
  Are gone away, and some that stay,
  Have changed their silk for sack.

  Were I but there and none to hear
  I’d have a peacock cry
  For that is natural to a man
  That lives in memory,
  Being all alone I’d nurse a stone
  And sing it lullaby.



THE THREE MONUMENTS


  They hold their public meetings where
  Our most renowned patriots stand,
  One among the birds of the air,
  A stumpier on either hand;
  And all the popular statesmen say
  That purity built up the state
  And after kept it from decay;
  Admonish us to cling to that
  And let all base ambition be,
  For intellect would make us proud
  And pride bring in impurity:
  The three old rascals laugh aloud.



FROM ‘OEDIPUS AT COLONUS’


I

  Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
  Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
  Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.


  II

  Even from that delight memory treasures so,
  Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,
  As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.


  III

  In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,
  The bride is carried to the bridegroom’s chamber through torchlight and
    tumultuous song;
  I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.


  IV

  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 goodnight and quickly turn away.



THE GIFT OF HARUN AL-RASHID


  Kusta ben Luka is my name, I write
  To Abd Al-Rabban; fellow roysterer once,
  Now the good Caliph’s learned Treasurer,
  And for no ear but his.
                         Carry this letter
  Through the great gallery of the Treasure House
  Where banners of the Caliphs hang, night-coloured
  But brilliant as the night’s embroidery,
  And wait war’s music; pass the little gallery;
  Pass books of learning from Byzantium
  Written in gold upon a purple stain,
  And pause at last, I was about to say,
  At the great book of Sappho’s song; but no,
  For should you leave my letter there, a boy’s
  Love-lorn, indifferent hands might come upon it
  And let it fall unnoticed to the floor.
  Pause at the Treatise of Parmenides
  And hide it there, for Caliphs to world’s end
  Must keep that perfect, as they keep her song
  So great its fame.
                    When fitting time has passed
  The parchment will disclose to some learned man
  A mystery that else had found no chronicler
  But the wild Bedouin. Though I approve
  Those wanderers that welcomed in their tents
  What great Harun Al-Rashid, occupied
  With Persian embassy or Grecian war,
  Must needs neglect; I cannot hide the truth
  That wandering in a desert, featureless
  As air under a wing, can give birds’ wit.
  In after time they will speak much of me
  And speak but phantasy. Recall the year
  When our beloved Caliph put to death
  His Vizir Jaffer for an unknown reason;
  ‘If but the shirt upon my body knew it
  I’d tear it off and throw it in the fire.’
  That speech was all that the town knew, but he
  Seemed for a while to have grown young again;
  Seemed so on purpose, muttered Jaffer’s friends,
  That none might know that he was conscience struck--
  But that’s a traitor’s thought. Enough for me
  That in the early summer of the year
  The mightiest of the princes of the world
  Came to the least considered of his courtiers;
  Sat down upon the fountain’s marble edge
  One hand amid the goldfish in the pool;
  And thereupon a colloquy took place
  That I commend to all the chroniclers
  To show how violent great hearts can lose
  Their bitterness and find the honey-comb.
  ‘I have brought a slender bride into the house;
  You know the saying “Change the bride with Spring”,
  And she and I, being sunk in happiness,
  Cannot endure to think you tread these paths,
  When evening stirs the jasmine, and yet
  Are brideless.’
                 ‘I am falling into years.’
  ‘But such as you and I do not seem old
  Like men who live by habit. Every day
  I ride with falcon to the river’s edge
  Or carry the ringed mail upon my back,
  Or court a woman; neither enemy,
  Game-bird, nor woman does the same thing twice;
  And so a hunter carries in the eye
  A mimicry of youth. Can poet’s thought
  That springs from body and in body falls
  Like this pure jet, now lost amid blue sky
  Now bathing lily leaf and fishes’ scale,
  Be mimicry?’
              ‘What matter if our souls
  Are nearer to the surface of the body
  Than souls that start no game and turn no rhyme!
  The soul’s own youth and not the body’s youth
  Shows through our lineaments. My candle’s bright,
  My lantern is too loyal not to show
  That it was made in your great father’s reign.’

  ‘And yet the jasmine season warms our blood.’

  ‘Great prince, forgive the freedom of my speech;
  You think that love has seasons, and you think
  That if the spring bear off what the spring gave
  The heart need suffer no defeat; but I
  Who have accepted the Byzantine faith,
  That seems unnatural to Arabian minds,
  Think when I choose a bride I choose for ever;
  And if her eye should not grow bright for mine
  Or brighten only for some younger eye,
  My heart could never turn from daily ruin,
  Nor find a remedy.’
                     ‘But what if I
  Have lit upon a woman, who so shares
  Your thirst for those old crabbed mysteries,
  So strains to look beyond our life, an eye
  That never knew that strain would scarce seem bright,
  And yet herself can seem youth’s very fountain,
  Being all brimmed with life.’
                               ‘Were it but true
  I would have found the best that life can give,
  Companionship in those mysterious things
  That make a man’s soul or a woman’s soul
  Itself and not some other soul.’
                                  ‘That love
  Must needs be in this life and in what follows
  Unchanging and at peace, and it is right
  Every philosopher should praise that love.
  But I being none can praise its opposite.
  It makes my passion stronger but to think
  Like passion stirs the peacock and his mate,
  The wild stag and the doe; that mouth to mouth
  Is a man’s mockery of the changeless soul.’
  And thereupon his bounty gave what now
  Can shake more blossom from autumnal chill
  Than all my bursting springtime knew. A girl
  Perched in some window of her mother’s house
  Had watched my daily passage to and fro;
  Had heard impossible history of my past;
  Imagined some impossible history
  Lived at my side; thought time’s disfiguring touch
  Gave but more reason for a woman’s care.
  Yet was it love of me, or was it love
  Of the stark mystery that has dazed my sight,
  Perplexed her phantasy and planned her care?
  Or did the torchlight of that mystery
  Pick out my features in such light and shade
  Two contemplating passions chose one theme
  Through sheer bewilderment? She had not paced
  The garden paths, nor counted up the rooms,
  Before she had spread a book upon her knees
  And asked about the pictures or the text;
  And often those first days I saw her stare
  On old dry writing in a learned tongue,
  On old dry faggots that could never please
  The extravagance of spring; or move a hand
  As if that writing or the figured page
  Were some dear cheek.
                       Upon a moonless night
  I sat where I could watch her sleeping form,
  And wrote by candle-light; but her form moved,
  And fearing that my light disturbed her sleep
  I rose that I might screen it with a cloth.
  I heard her voice, ‘Turn that I may expound
  What’s bowed your shoulder and made pale your cheek’;
  And saw her sitting upright on the bed;
  Or was it she that spoke or some great Djinn?
  I say that a Djinn spoke. A live-long hour
  She seemed the learned man and I the child;
  Truths without father came, truths that no book
  Of all the uncounted books that I have read,
  Nor thought out of her mind or mine begot,
  Self-born, high-born, and solitary truths,
  Those terrible implacable straight lines
  Drawn through the wandering vegetative dream,
  Even those truths that when my bones are dust
  Must drive the Arabian host.
                              The voice grew still,
  And she lay down upon her bed and slept,
  But woke at the first gleam of day, rose up
  And swept the house and sang about her work
  In childish ignorance of all that passed.
  A dozen nights of natural sleep, and then
  When the full moon swam to its greatest height
  She rose, and with her eyes shut fast in sleep
  Walked through the house. Unnoticed and unfelt
  I wrapped her in a heavy hooded cloak, and she,
  Half running, dropped at the first ridge of the desert
  And there marked out those emblems on the sand
  That day by day I study and marvel at,
  With her white finger. I led her home asleep
  And once again she rose and swept the house
  In childish ignorance of all that passed.
  Even to-day, after some seven years
  When maybe thrice in every moon her mouth
  Murmured the wisdom of the desert Djinns,
  She keeps that ignorance, nor has she now
  That first unnatural interest in my books.
  It seems enough that I am there; and yet
  Old fellow student, whose most patient ear
  Heard all the anxiety of my passionate youth,
  It seems I must buy knowledge with my peace.
  What if she lose her ignorance and so
  Dream that I love her only for the voice,
  That every gift and every word of praise
  Is but a payment for that midnight voice
  That is to age what milk is to a child!
  Were she to lose her love, because she had lost
  Her confidence in mine, or even lose
  Its first simplicity, love, voice and all,
  All my fine feathers would be plucked away
  And I left shivering. The voice has drawn
  A quality of wisdom from her love’s
  Particular quality. The signs and shapes;
  All those abstractions that you fancied were
  From the great treatise of Parmenides;
  All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things
  Are but a new expression of her body
  Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.
  And now my utmost mystery is out.
  A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner;
  Under it wisdom stands, and I alone--
  Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone--
  Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost
  In the confusion of its night-dark folds,
  Can hear the armed man speak.

1923


ALL SOULS’ NIGHT

An Epilogue to ‘A Vision’


  Midnight has come and the great Christ Church Bell,
  And may a lesser bell, sound through the room;
  And it is All Souls’ Night,
  And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel
  Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;
  For it is a ghost’s right,
  His element is so fine
  Being sharpened by his death,
  To drink from the wine-breath
  While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

  I need some mind that, if the cannon sound
  From every quarter of the world, can stay
  Wound in mind’s pondering,
  As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;
  Because I have a marvellous thing to say,
  A certain marvellous thing
  None but the living mock,
  Though not for sober ear;
  It may be all that hear
  Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

  H----’s the first I call. He loved strange thought
  And knew that sweet extremity of pride
  That’s called platonic love,
  And that to such a pitch of passion wrought
  Nothing could bring him, when his lady died,
  Anodyne for his love.
  Words were but wasted breath;
  One dear hope had he:
  The inclemency
  Of that or the next winter would be death.

  Two thoughts were so mixed up I could not tell
  Whether of her or God he thought the most,
  But think that his mind’s eye,
  When upward turned, on one sole image fell;
  And that a slight companionable ghost,
  Wild with divinity,
  Had so lit up the whole
  Immense miraculous house
  The Bible promised us,
  It seemed a gold-fish swimming in a bowl.

  On Florence Emery I call the next,
  Who finding the first wrinkles on a face
  Admired and beautiful,
  And knowing that the future would be vexed
  With ’minished beauty, multiplied commonplace,
  Preferred to teach a school,
  Away from neighbour or friend
  Among dark skins, and there
  Permit foul years to wear
  Hidden from eyesight to the unnoticed end.

  Before that end much had she ravelled out
  From a discourse in figurative speech
  By some learned Indian
  On the soul’s journey. How it is whirled about,
  Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,
  Until it plunge into the sun;
  And there, free and yet fast
  Being both Chance and Choice,
  Forget its broken toys
  And sink into its own delight at last.

  And I call up MacGregor from the grave,
  For in my first hard springtime we were friends,
  Although of late estranged.
  I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,
  And told him so, but friendship never ends;
  And what if mind seem changed,
  And it seem changed with the mind,
  When thoughts rise up unbid
  On generous things that he did
  And I grow half contented to be blind.

  He had much industry at setting out,
  Much boisterous courage, before loneliness
  Had driven him crazed;
  For meditations upon unknown thought
  Make human intercourse grow less and less;
  They are neither paid nor praised.
  But he’d object to the host,
  The glass because my glass;
  A ghost-lover he was
  And may have grown more arrogant being a ghost.

  But names are nothing. What matter who it be,
  So that his elements have grown so fine
  The fume of muscatel
  Can give his sharpened palate ecstasy
  No living man can drink from the whole wine.
  I have mummy truths to tell
  Whereat the living mock,
  Though not for sober ear,
  For maybe all that hear
  Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

  Such thought--such thought have I that hold it tight
  Till meditation master all its parts,
  Nothing can stay my glance
  Until that glance run in the world’s despite
  To where the damned have howled away their hearts,
  And where the blessed dance;
  Such thought, that in it bound
  I need no other thing
  Wound in mind’s wandering,
  As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.



NOTES


SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

Stanza IV

I have read somewhere that in the Emperor’s palace at Byzantium was a
tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang.


THE TOWER. Part II

The persons mentioned are associated by legend, story and tradition with
the neighbourhood of Thoor Ballylee or Ballylee Castle, where the poem
was written. Mrs. French lived at Peterswell in the eighteenth century
and was related to Sir Jonah Barrington, who described the incident of
the ear and the trouble that came of it. The peasant beauty and the blind
poet are Mary Hynes and Raftery, and the incident of the man drowned in
Cloone Bog is recorded in my ‘Celtic Twilight’. Hanrahan’s pursuit of the
phantom hare and hounds is from my ‘Stories of Red Hanrahan’. The ghosts
have been seen at their game of dice in what is now my bedroom, and the
old bankrupt man lived about a hundred years ago. According to one legend
he could only leave the Castle upon a Sunday because of his creditors,
and according to another he hid in the secret passage.


THE TOWER. Part III

In the passage about the Swan I have unconsciously echoed one of the
loveliest lyrics of our time--Mr. Sturge Moore’s ‘Dying Swan’. I often
recited it during an American lecturing tour, which explains the theft.

  THE DYING SWAN

  O silver-throated Swan
  Struck, struck! A golden dart
  Clean through thy breast has gone
  Home to thy heart.
  Thrill, thrill, O silver throat!
  O silver trumpet, pour
  Love for defiance back
  On him who smote!
  And brim, brim o’er
  With love; and ruby-dye thy track
  Down thy last living reach
  Of river, sail the golden light--
  Enter the sun’s heart--even teach,
  O wondrous-gifted pain, teach thou
  The God to love, let him learn how!

When I wrote the lines about Plato and Plotinus I forgot that it is
something in our own eyes that makes us see them as all transcendence.
Has not Plotinus written: ‘Let every soul recall, then, at the outset
the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has
breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea,
all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the
maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts
all that rhythmic motion--and it is a principle distinct from all these
to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be
more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings
them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself,
is of eternal being’.


MEDITATIONS IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR

These poems were written at Thoor Ballylee in 1922, during the civil war.
Before they were finished the Republicans blew up our ‘ancient bridge’
one midnight. They forbade us to leave the house, but were otherwise
polite, even saying at last ‘Goodnight, thank you’ as though we had
given them the bridge.

Section Six

In the West of Ireland we call a starling a stare, and during the civil
war one built in a hole in the masonry by my bedroom window.

Section Seven, Stanza II

The cry ‘Vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay’, Grand Master of
the Templars, seems to me fit symbol for those who labour from hatred,
and so for sterility in various kinds. It is said to have been
incorporated in the ritual of certain Masonic societies of the eighteenth
century, and to have fed class-hatred.

Section Seven, Stanza IV

I have a ring with a hawk and a butterfly upon it, to symbolise the
straight road of logic, and so of mechanism, and the crooked road of
intuition: ‘For wisdom is a butterfly and not a gloomy bird of prey’.


NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN

Section Six

The country people see at times certain apparitions whom they name now
‘fallen angels’, now ‘ancient inhabitants of the country’, and describe
as riding at whiles ‘with flowers upon the heads of the horses’. I have
assumed in the sixth poem that these horsemen, now that the times worsen,
give way to worse. My last symbol, Robert Artisson, was an evil spirit
much run after in Kilkenny at the start of the fourteenth century. Are
not those who travel in the whirling dust also in the Platonic Year?


TWO SONGS FROM A PLAY

These songs are sung by the Chorus in a play that has for its theme
Christ’s first appearance to the Apostles after the Resurrection, a play
intended for performance in a drawing-room or studio.


AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN

Stanza III

I have taken ‘the honey of generation’ from Porphyry’s essay on ‘The
Cave of the Nymphs’, but find no warrant in Porphyry for considering
it the ‘drug’ that destroys the ‘recollection’ of pre-natal freedom.
He blamed a cup of oblivion given in the zodiacal sign of Cancer.


THE GIFT OF HARUN AL-RASHID

Part of an unfinished set of poems, dialogues and stories about John
Ahern and Michael Robartes, Kusta ben Luka, a philosopher of Bagdad,
and his Bedouin followers.



THE END

Printed in Great Britain by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.



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