On Hearing That The Students Of Our New University Have Joined The Ancient Order Of Hibernians And The Agitation Against Immoral Literature

Where, where but here have Pride and Truth,
That long to give themselves for wage,
To shake their wicked sides at youth
Restraining reckless middle-age.

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

William Butler Yeats

The Unappeasable Host

William Butler Yeats, Simple Poetry

A Stick Of Incense

William Butler Yeats, Simple Poetry

The Secret Rose

William Butler Yeats, Simple Poetry

English

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The Leaders Of The Crowd

They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invent
And murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no Solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

William Butler Yeats

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 Irelands dead and gone,
Its with OLeary 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 hangmans rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save:
Romantic Irelands dead and gone,
Its with OLeary 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 ...

William Butler Yeats

At the Abbey Theatre

Dear Craoibhin Aoibhin, look into our case.
When we are high and airy hundreds say
That if we hold that flight theyll leave the place,
While those same hundreds mock another day
Because we have made our art of common things,
So bitterly, youd dream they longed to look
All their lives through into some drift of wings.
Youve dandled them and fed them from the book
And know them to the bone; impart to us,
Well keep the secret, a new trick to please.
Is there a bridle for this Proteus
That turns and changes like his draughty seas?
Or is there none, most popular of men,
But when they mock us that we mock again?

William Butler Yeats

On Those That Hated "The Playboy Of The Western World"

Once, when midnight smote the air,
Eunuchs ran through Hell and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon great Juan riding by:
Even like these to rail and sweat
Staring upon his sinewy thigh.

William Butler Yeats

The Seven Sages

i(The First.) My great-grandfather spoke to Edmund Burke
In Grattan's house.
i(The Second.) My great-grandfather shared
A pot-house bench with Oliver Goldsmith once.
i(The Third.) My great-grandfather's father talked of music,
Drank tar-water with the Bishop of Cloyne.
i(The Fourth.) But mine saw Stella once.
i(The Fifth.) Whence came our thought?
i(The Sixth.) From four great minds that hated Whiggery.
i(The Fifth.) Burke was a Whig.
i(The Sixth.) Whether they knew or not,
Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne
All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery?
A leveling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard's eye.
i(The Seventh.) All's Whiggery now,
But we old men are massed against the wor...

William Butler Yeats

The Scholars

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in loves despair
To flatter beautys ignorant ear.

Theyll cough in the ink to the worlds end;
Wear out the carpet with their shoes
Earning respect; have no strange friend;
If they have sinned nobody knows.
Lord, what would they say
Should their Catullus walk that way?

William Butler Yeats