Surely some revelation is at hand;
10 Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming!3 Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi4 Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
15 A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep
20 Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem5 to be born?
Jan. 1919 1920, 1921
A Prayer for My Daughter
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on.' There is no obstacle But Gregory's wood2 and one bare hill
5 Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind, Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed; And for an hour I have walked and prayed Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.
I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
10 And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower, And under the arches of the bridge, and scream In the elms above the flooded stream; Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come,
15 Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
May she be granted beauty and yet not Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught, Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
20 Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend.
3. Christ's second coming is heralded by the com-5. Jesus' birthplace. ing of the Beast of the Apocalypse, or Antichrist (1 1. Yeats's daughter and first child, Anne Butler John 2.18). Yeats, was born on February 26, 1919, in Dublin 4. The spirit of the universe (Latin); i.e., Yeats and brought home to Yeats's refitted Norman said, 'a general storehouse of images,' a collective tower of Thoor Ballylee in Galway. unconscious or memory, in which the human race 2. Lady Gregory's wood at Coole, only a few miles preserves its past memories. from Thoor Ballylee.
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203 8 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
25 Helen being chosen found life flat and dull And later had much trouble from a fool,3 While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,4 Being fatherless could have her way Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man.
30 It's certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat Whereby the Horn of Plenty5 is undone.
In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned; Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
35 By those that are not entirely beautiful; Yet many, that have played the fool For beauty's very self, has charm made wise, And many a poor man that has roved, Loved and thought himself beloved,
40 From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
May she become a flourishing hidden tree That all her thoughts may like the linnet' be, small songbird And have no business but dispensing round Their magnanimities of sound,
45 Not but in merriment begin a chase, Nor but in merriment a quarrel. O may she live like some green laurel Rooted in one dear perpetual place.
My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
50 The sort of beauty that I have approved, Prosper but little, has dried up of late, Yet knows that to be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief. If there's no hatred in a mind
55 Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.
An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman6 born
60 Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?
65 Considering that, all hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
3. Menelaus, Helen's husband. Her abduction by 5. In Greek mythology the goat's horn that suck- Paris precipitated the Trojan War. led the god Zeus flowed with nectar and ambrosia; 4. Venus, born from the sea, was the Roman god-the cornucopia thus became a symbol of plenty. dess of love; her husband, Vulcan, was the lame 6. Maud Gonne. god of fire and metalwork (line 29).
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LEDA AND THE SWAN / 2039
70Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will; She can, though every face should scowl And every windy quarter howl Or every bellows burst, be happy still. 75soAnd may her bridegroom bring her to a house Where all's accustomed, ceremonious; For arrogance and hatred are the wares Peddled in the thoroughfares. How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony's a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree. Feb.?June 1919 1919, 1921 Leda and the Swan1 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. 5 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? 10A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower2 And Agamemnon dead.
