These poems were written at Thoor Ballylee in 1922, during the civil war. Before they were finished the Republicans blew up our “ancient bridge” one midnight. They forbade us to leave the house, but were otherwise polite, even saying at last “Goodnight, thank you” as though we had given them the bridge. ↩
In the West of Ireland we call a starling a stare, and during the civil war one built in a hole in the masonry by my bedroom window. ↩
The cry “Vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay,” Grand Master of the Templars, seems to me fit symbol for those who labour from hatred, and so for sterility in various kinds. It is said to have been incorporated in the ritual of certain Masonic societies of the eighteenth century, and to have fed class-hatred. ↩
I have a ring with a hawk and a butterfly upon it, to symbolise the straight road of logic, and so of mechanism, and the crooked road of intuition: “For wisdom is a butterfly and not a gloomy bird of prey.” ↩
The country people see at times certain apparitions whom they name now “fallen angels,” now “ancient inhabitants of the country,” and describe as riding at whiles “with flowers upon the heads of the horses.” I have assumed in the sixth poem that these horsemen, now that the times worsen, give way to worse. My last symbol, Robert Artisson, was an evil spirit much run after in Kilkenny at the start of the fourteenth century. Are not those who travel in the whirling dust also in the Platonic Year? ↩
I have taken “the honey of generation” from Porphyry’s essay on “The Cave of the Nymphs,” but find no warrant in Porphyry for considering it the “drug” that destroys the “recollection” of prenatal freedom. He blamed a cup of oblivion given in the zodiacal sign of Cancer. ↩
Part of an unfinished set of poems, dialogues and stories about John Ahern and Michael Robartes, Kusta ben Luka, & philosopher of Bagdad, and his Bedouin followers. ↩
In 1917 and later editions Yeats replaced the above with:
I leave out two long paragraphs which have been published in earlier editions of these poems. There is no need now to defend Sir Hugh Lane’s pictures against Dublin newspapers. The trustees of the London National Gallery, through his leaving a codicil to his will unwitnessed, have claimed the pictures for London, and propose to build a wing to the Tate Gallery to contain them. Some that were hostile are now contrite, and doing what they can, or letting others do unhindered what they can, to persuade Parliament to such action as may restore the collection to Ireland.
Colophon
Poetry
includes poems first published between 1885 and 1928 by
W. B. Yeats.
This ebook was produced for
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