Responsibilities, and other poems. William Butler Yeats

those mouths that sing their sweethearts' praise,

      Your empty bed." "How should I love," I answered,

      "Were it not that when the dawn has lit my bed

      And shown my husband sleeping there, I have sighed,

      'Your strength and nobleness will pass away.'

      Or how should love be worth its pains were it not

      That when he has fallen asleep within my arms,

      Being wearied out, I love in man the child?

      What can they know of love that do not know

      She builds her nest upon a narrow ledge

      Above a windy precipice?" Then he:

      "Seeing that when you come to the death-bed

      You must return, whether you would or no,

      This human life blotted from memory,

      Why must I live some thirty, forty years,

      Alone with all this useless happiness?"

      Thereon he seized me in his arms, but I

      Thrust him away with both my hands and cried,

      "Never will I believe there is any change

      Can blot out of my memory this life

      Sweetened by death, but if I could believe

      That were a double hunger in my lips

      For what is doubly brief."

      And now the shape,

      My hands were pressed to, vanished suddenly.

      I staggered, but a beech tree stayed my fall,

      And clinging to it I could hear the cocks

      Crow upon Tara.'

      King Eochaid bowed his head

      And thanked her for her kindness to his brother,

      For that she promised, and for that refused.

      Thereon the bellowing of the empounded herds

      Rose round the walls, and through the bronze-ringed door

      Jostled and shouted those war-wasted men,

      And in the midst King Eochaid's brother stood.

      He'd heard that din on the horizon's edge

      And ridden towards it, being ignorant.

      TO A WEALTHY MAN WHO PROMISED A SECOND SUBSCRIPTION TO THE DUBLIN MUNICIPAL GALLERY IF IT WERE PROVED THE PEOPLE WANTED PICTURES

      You gave but will not give again

      Until enough of Paudeen's pence

      By Biddy's halfpennies have lain

      To be 'some sort of evidence,'

      Before you'll put your guineas down,

      That things it were a pride to give

      Are what the blind and ignorant town

      Imagines best to make it thrive.

      What cared Duke Ercole, that bid

      His mummers to the market place,

      What th' onion-sellers thought or did

      So that his Plautus set the pace

      For the Italian comedies?

      And Guidobaldo, when he made

      That grammar school of courtesies

      Where wit and beauty learned their trade

      Upon Urbino's windy hill,

      Had sent no runners to and fro

      That he might learn the shepherds' will.

      And when they drove out Cosimo,

      Indifferent how the rancour ran,

      He gave the hours they had set free

      To Michelozzo's latest plan

      For the San Marco Library,

      Whence turbulent Italy should draw

      Delight in Art whose end is peace,

      In logic and in natural law

      By sucking at the dugs of Greece.

      Your open hand but shows our loss,

      For he knew better how to live.

      Let Paudeens play at pitch and toss,

      Look up in the sun's eye and give

      What the exultant heart calls good

      That some new day may breed the best

      Because you gave, not what they would

      But the right twigs for an eagle's nest!

December 1912.

      SEPTEMBER 1913

      What need you, being come to sense,

      But fumble in a greasy till

      And add the halfpence to the pence

      And prayer to shivering prayer, until

      You have dried the marrow from the bone;

      For men were born to pray and save:

      Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,

      It's with O'Leary in the grave.

      Yet they were of a different kind

      The names that stilled your childish play,

      They have gone about the world like wind,

      But little time had they to pray

      For whom the hangman's rope was spun,

      And what, God help us, could they save:

      Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,

      It's with O'Leary in the grave.

      Was it for this the wild geese spread

      The grey wing upon every tide;

      For this that all that blood was shed,

      For this Edward Fitzgerald died,

      And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,

      All that delirium of the brave;

      Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,

      It's with O'Leary in the grave.

      Yet could we turn the years again,

      And call those exiles as they were,

      In all their loneliness and pain

      You'd cry 'some woman's yellow hair

      Has maddened every mother's son':

      They weighed so lightly what they gave,

      But let them be, they're dead and gone,

      They're with O'Leary in the grave.

      TO A FRIEND WHOSE WORK HAS COME TO NOTHING

      Now all the truth is out,

      Be secret and take defeat

      From any brazen throat,

      For how can you compete,

      Being honour bred, with one

      Who, were it proved he lies,

      Were neither shamed in his own

      Nor in his neighbours' eyes?

      Bred to a harder thing

      Than Triumph, turn away

      And like a laughing string

      Whereon mad fingers play

      Amid a place of stone,

      Be secret and exult,

      Because of all things known

      That is