Irish poets learn your trade
Sing whatever is well made,
TO Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds. Sing the peasantry, and then
75 Hard-riding country gentlemen, The holiness of monks, and after Porter-drinkers'1 randy laughter; Sing the lords and ladies gay That were beaten into the clay
5. Greek sculptor (fl. ca. 490-430 b.c.e.) . Wilson (1714?1782), English landscape painter 6. 15th-century Italian art. and disciple of Claude Lorraine (1600?1682), 7. Yeats's term for conelike spirals or cycles of his-French artist. torv. 9. Samuel Palmer (1805-1881), English land8. Edward Calvert (1799-1883), English vision-scape painter who admired Blake. ary artist and follower of William Blake (1757? 1. Drinkers of dark brown bitter beer. 1827), English mystical poet and artist. Richard
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2050 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
80 Through seven heroic centuries;2 Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be Still the indomitable Irishry.
6
Under bare Ben Bulben's head
85 In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid, An ancestor was rector there3 Long years ago; a church stands near, By the road an ancient Cross. No marble, no conventional phrase,
90 On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!
Sept. 1938 1939
Man and the Echo
Man. In a cleft that's christened Alt Under broken stone I halt At the bottom of a pit That broad noon has never lit,
5 And shout a secret to the stone. All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night
10 And never get the answers right. Did that play of mine1 send out Certain men the English shot? Did words of mine put too great strain On that woman's reeling brain?2
15 Could my spoken words have checked That whereby a house3 lay wrecked? And all seems evil until I Sleepless would lie down and die.
Echo. Lie down and die.
2. Since the Norman conquest of Ireland, in the inspire the Easter Rising of 1916. 12th century. 2. Margot Ruddock (1907-1951), a young poet 3. Yeats's great-grandfather, the Reverend John with whom Yeats had a brief affair in the 1930s Yeats (1/74-1846), was rector of Drumcliff and to whom he offered financial support when Church, Sligo. she suffered a nervous breakdown. 1. Cathleen ni Houlihan, a nationalist play Yeats 3. Coole Park, Lady Gregory's home, in disrepair wrote with Lady Gregory and in which Maud since her death in 1932. Gonne played the title role in 1902. It helped
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TH E CIRCU S ANIMALS ' DESERTIO N / 205 1 Man. That were to shirk 20 The spiritual intellect's great work And shirk it in vain. There is no release In a bodkin4 or disease, Nor can there be a work so great As that which cleans man's dirty slate. 25 While man can still his body keep Wine or love drug him to sleep, Waking he thanks the Lord that he Has body and its stupidity, But body gone he sleeps no more 30 And till his intellect grows sure That all's arranged in one clear view Pursues the thoughts that I pursue, Then stands in judgment on his soul, And, all work done, dismisses all 35 Out of intellect and sight And sinks at last into the night. Echo. Into the night. Man. O rocky voice Shall we in that great night rejoice? What do we know but that we face 40 One another in this place? But hush, for I have lost the theme Its joy or night seem but a dream; Up there some hawk or owl has struck Dropping out of sky or rock, 45 A stricken rabbit is crying out And its cry distracts my thought. 1938 1939
The Circus Animals' Desertion
1
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, I sought it daily for six weeks or so. Maybe at last being but a broken man, I must be satisfied with my heart, although
5 Winter and summer till old age began My circus animals were all on show, Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.'
4. Dagger. Cf. Hamlet 3.1.77?78: 'When he him- riage of his play The Unicorn from the Stars (1908), self might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin.' and the lion in several of his poems, including'The 1. Yeats refers to the ancient Irish heroes of his Second Coming.' early work ('Those stilted boys'), the gilded car
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2052 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
2 ioisWhat can I but enumerate old themes, First that sea-rider Oisin2 led by the nose Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams, Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose, Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems, That might adorn old songs or courtly shows; But what cared I that set him on to ride, I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride. 20And then a counter-truth filled out its play, 'The Countess Cathleen'3 was the name I gave it, She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away, But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it. 1 thought my dear must her own soul destroy So did fanaticism and hate enslave it, And this brought forth a dream and soon enough This dream itself had all my thought and love. 25 And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;4 Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me: 30Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my love And not those things that they were emblems of. 3 35Those masterful images because
