clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird. 7 5055Both 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; 8 60Labour 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? trunk
June 1926 1927
A Dialogue of Self and Soul1
1
My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent, Upon the broken, crumbling battlement, Upon the breathless starlit air,
5 Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
6. Plate thought nature merely an image of an his discovery of the mathematical basis of musical ideal world that exists elsewhere. intervals. His disciples, the Pythagoreans, vener7. Plato's student Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) was ated their master as a god with a golden thigh. 'solider' because he regarded this world as the I. In a letter of October 2, 1923, Yeats wrote: 'I authentic one. He tutored Alexander the Great am writing a new tower poem 'Sword and Tower,' (356?323 b.c.e.), the 'king of kings,' and disci-which is a choice of rebirth rather than deliverance plined him with the 'taws,' or leather strap. from birth. 1 make my Japanese sword and its silk 8. Greek philosopher (ca. 580-500 b.C.e), known covering my symbol of life.' Junzo Sato, a friend, for his doctrine of the harmony of the spheres and had given him the ceremonial sword in 1920.
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A DIALOGU E O F SEL F AN D SOU L / 204 3 Fix every wandering thought upon That quarter where all thought is done: Who can distinguish darkness from the soul? 15My Self. The consecrated blade upon my knees Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was, Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass Unspotted by the centuries; That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn From some court-lady's dress and round The wooden scabbard bound and wound, Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn. My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war? Think of ancestral night that can, If but imagination scorn the earth And intellect its wandering To this and that and t'other thing, Deliver from the crime of death and birth. 25 My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it Five hundred years ago, about it lie Flowers from I know not what embroidery? Heart's purple?and all these I set For emblems of the day against the tower Emblematical of the night, And claim as by a soldier's right A charter to commit the crime once more. My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows And falls into the basin of the mind 35 That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind, For intellect no longer knows Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known? That is to say, ascends to Heaven; Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue's a stone. 2 My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more? 45Endure that toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain Brought face to face with his own clumsiness; The finished man among his enemies??How in the name of Heaven can he escape That defiling and disfigured shape
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2044 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The mirror of malicious eyes Casts upon his eyes until at last He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape If honour find him in the wintry blast?
I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
60 A blind man battering blind men; Or into that most fecund ditch of all, The folly that man does Or must suffer, if he woos A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
65 I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast
70 We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.
July-Dec. 1927 1929
Byzantium1
The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong;
5 A starlit or a moonlit dome2 disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire? of human veins. deep mud
Before me floats an image, man or shade,
io Shade more than man, more image than a shade; For Hades' bobbin' bound in mummy-cloth May unwind the winding path;4 A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
1. On October 4. 1930, Yeats sent his friend the soul is purified, birds of hammered gold singing Sturge Moore a copy of this poem, saying: 'The in the golden trees, in the harbour [dolphins] offer- poem originates from a criticism of yours. You ing their backs to the wailing dead that they may objected to the last verse of 'Sailing to Byzantium' carry them to Paradise.' because a bird made by a goldsmith was just as 2. Of the great church of St. Sophia. natural as anything else. That showed me that the 3. Spool. Hades was the Greek god of the under- idea needed exposition.' The previous April, Y'eats world, the realm of the dead. had noted in his dian7: 'Subject for a poem': 4. I.e., the spool of people's fate, which spins their 'Describe Byzantium as it is in the system towards destiny and which is wound like a mummy, may be the end of the first Christian millennium. A walk-unwound and lead to the timeless world of pure ing mummy. Flames at the street corners where spirit.
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CRAZY JANE TALKS WITH THE BISHOP / 204 5
Breathless mouths may summon; 15 I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.5
Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More miracle than bird or handiwork, Planted on the starlit golden
