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?

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 Withering Of The Boughs

William Butler Yeats, Simple Poetry

Into The Twilight

William Butler Yeats, Simple Poetry

On A Political Prisoner

William Butler Yeats, Simple Poetry

Swift's Epitaph

William Butler Yeats, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

The Man Who Dreamed Of Faeryland

He stood among a crowd at Dromahair;
His heart hung all upon a silken dress,
And he had known at last some tenderness,
Before earth took him to her stony care;
But when a man poured fish into a pile,
It Seemed they raised their little silver heads,
And sang what gold morning or evening sheds
Upon a woven world-forgotten isle
Where people love beside the ravelled seas;
That Time can never mar a lover's vows
Under that woven changeless roof of boughs:
The singing shook him out of his new ease.
He wandered by the sands of Lissadell;
His mind ran all on money cares and fears,
And he had known at last some prudent years
Before they heaped his grave under the hill;
But while he passed before a plashy place,
A lug-worm with its grey and muddy mouth
Sang tha...

William Butler Yeats

Coole Park and Ballylee

I meditate upon a swallow's flight,
Upon a aged woman and her house,
A sycamore and lime-tree lost in night
Although that western cloud is luminous,
Great works constructed there in nature's spite
For scholars and for poets after us,
Thoughts long knitted into a single thought,
A dance-like glory that those walls begot.
There Hyde before he had beaten into prose
That noble blade the Muses buckled on,
There one that ruffled in a manly pose
For all his timid heart, there that slow man,
That meditative man, John Synge, and those
Impetuous men, Shawe-Taylor and Hugh Lane,
Found pride established in humility,
A scene well Set and excellent company.
They came like swallows and like swallows went,
And yet a woman's powerful character
Could keep a Swallow to...

William Butler Yeats

The Living Beauty

Ill say and maybe dream I have drawn content
Seeing that time has frozen up the blood,
The wick of youth being burned and the oil spent
From beauty that is cast out of a mould
In bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,
Appears, and when we have gone is gone again,
Being more indifferent to our solitude
Than twere an apparition. O heart, we are old,
The living beauty is for younger men,
We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.

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

Tom ORoughley

Though logic choppers rule the town,
And every man and maid and boy
Has marked a distant object down,
An aimless joy is a pure joy,
Or so did Tom ORoughley say
That saw the surges running by,
And wisdom is a butterfly
And not a gloomy bird of prey.

If little planned is little sinned
But little need the grave distress.
Whats dying but a second wind?
How but in zigzag wantonness
Could trumpeter Michael be so brave?
Or something of that sort he said,
And if my dearest friend were dead
Id dance a measure on his grave.

William Butler Yeats

The Fisherman

Although I can see him still,
The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies,
Its long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day Id looked in the face
What I had hoped twould be
To write for my own race
And the reality;
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer,
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.

Maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,

William Butler Yeats