bough,
20 Can like the cocks of Hades crow, Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal Common bird or petal And all complexities of mire or blood.
25 At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit Flames that no faggot0 feeds, nor steel has lit, bundle of sticks Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave,
JO Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,6 Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
35 The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor Break bitter furies of complexity, Those images that yet Fresh images beget,
40 That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
Sept. 1930 1932
Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop1
I met the Bishop on the road And much said he and I. 'Those breasts are flat and fallen now Those veins must soon be dry;
5 Live in a heavenly mansion, Not in some foul sty.'
'Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,' I cried. 'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
10 Nor grave nor bed denied,
5. On Roman tombstones the cock is a herald of Blessed. rebirth, thus of the continuing cycle of human life. 1. One of a series of poems about an old woman 6. In ancient mythology dolphins were thought to partly modeled on Cracked Mary, an old woman carry the souls of the dead to the Isles of the who lived near Lady Gregory.
.
2046 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Learned in bodily lowliness And in the heart's pride.
'A woman can be proud and stiff When on love intent;
15 But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.'
Nov. 1931 1932
Lapis Lazuli
(For Harry Clifton)'
I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay, For everybody knows or else should know
5 That if nothing drastic is done2 Aeroplane and Zeppelin3 will come out, Pitch like King Billy4 bomb-balls in Until the town lie beaten flat.
All perform their tragic play,
10 There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That's Ophelia, that Cordelia; Yet they, should the last scene be there, The great stage curtain about to drop, If worthy their prominent part in the play,
is Do not break up their lines to weep. They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; Gaiety transfiguring all that dread. All men have aimed at, found and lost; Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
20 Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, And all the drop scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages, It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
25 On their own feet they came, or on shipboard, Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
1. The English writer Harry Clifton (1908-1978) the east, that must raise the heroic cry' [Yeats to gave Yeats for his seventieth birthday a piece of Dorothy Wellesley, July 6, 1935]. lapis lazuli, a deep blue stone, 'carved by some 2. Because Europe was (in 1936) close to war. Chinese sculptor into the semblance of a mountain 3. German Zeppelins, or airships, bombed London with temple, trees, paths, and an ascetic and pupil during World War I. about to climb the mountain. Ascetic, pupil, hard 4. King William III (William of Orange), who stone, eternal theme of the sensual east. The defeated the army of King James II at the Battle of heroic cry in the midst of despair. But no, I am the Boyne, in Ireland, in 1690. In a popular ballad, wrong, the east has its solutions always and 'King William he threw his bomb-balls in, / And therefore knows nothing of tragedy. It is we, not set them on fire.'
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UNDER BEN BULBEN / 2047
Old civilisations put to the sword. Then they and their wisdom went to rack: No handiwork of Callimachus5
30 Who handled marble as if it were bronze, Made draperies that seemed to rise When sea-wind swept the corner, stands; His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
35 All things fall and are built again And those that build them again are gay.
Two Chinamen, behind them a third, Are carved in Lapis Lazuli, Over them flies a long-legged bird
40 A symbol of longevity; The third, doubtless a serving-man, Carries a musical instrument.
Every discolouration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent
