The Double Vision Of Michael Robartes

On the grey rock of Cashel the minds eye
Has called up the cold spirits that are born
When the old moon is vanished from the sky
And the new still hides her horn.

Under blank eyes and fingers never still
The particular is pounded till it is man,
When had I my own will?
Oh, not since life began.

Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent
By these wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood,
Themselves obedient,
Knowing not evil and good;

Obedient to some hidden magical breath.
They do not even feel, so abstract are they,
So dead beyond our death,
Triumph that we obey.

II

On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw
A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,
A Buddha, hand at rest,
Hand lifted up that blest;

And right between these two a girl at play
That it may be had danced her life away,
For now being dead it seemed
That she of dancing dreamed.

Although I saw it all in the minds eye
There can be nothing solider till I die;
I saw by the moons light
Now at its fifteenth night.

One lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon
Gazed upon all things known, all things unknown,
In triumph of intellect
With motionless head erect.

That others moonlit eyeballs never moved,
Being fixed on all things loved, all things unloved,
Yet little peace he had
For those that love are sad.

Oh, little did they care who danced between,
And little she by whom her dance was seen
So that she danced. No thought,
Body perfection brought,

For what but eye and ear silence the mind
With the minute particulars of mankind?
Mind moved yet seemed to stop
As twere a spinning-top.

In contemplation had those three so wrought
Upon a moment, and so stretched it out
That they, time overthrown,
Were dead yet flesh and bone.

III

I knew that I had seen, had seen at last
That girl my unremembering nights hold fast
Or else my dreams that fly,
If I should rub an eye,

And yet in flying fling into my meat
A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat
As though I had been undone
By Homers Paragon

Who never gave the burning town a thought;
To such a pitch of folly I am brought,
Being caught between the pull
Of the dark moon and the full,

The commonness of thought and images
That have the frenzy of our western seas.
Thereon I made my moan,
And after kissed a stone,

And after that arranged it in a song
Seeing that I, ignorant for so long,
Had been rewarded thus
In Cormacs ruined house.

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

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English

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Had trod the uneven road. Their boots were soiled,
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Aherne What made that sound?

Robartes A rat or water-hen
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All Souls' Night

i(Epilogue to "A Vision')

Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell
And may a lesser bell sound through the room;
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Wound in mind's pondering
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;
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A certain marvellous thing
None but the living mock,
Though not for sober ear;
It may be all that hear
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I
i(Ancestral Houses)
Surely among a rich man s flowering lawns,
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As though to choose whatever shape it wills
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Ego Dominus Tuus

Hic. On the grey sand beside the shallow stream
Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still
A lamp burns on beside the open book
That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon
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Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion
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Ille. By the help of an image
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Hic. And I would find myself and not an image.

Ille. That is our modern hope and by its light
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The Grey Rock

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When cups went round at close of day,
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Somewhere within some hollow hill,
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William Butler Yeats