Responsibilities, and other poems. William Butler Yeats

blind

      Among the stones and thorn trees, under morning light;

      Until a curlew cried and in the luminous wind

      A curlew answered; and suddenly thereupon I thought

      That on the lonely height where all are in God's eye,

      There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot,

      A single soul that lacks a sweet crystaline cry.

      TO A SHADE

      If you have revisited the town, thin Shade,

      Whether to look upon your monument

      (I wonder if the builder has been paid)

      Or happier thoughted when the day is spent

      To drink of that salt breath out of the sea

      When grey gulls flit about instead of men,

      And the gaunt houses put on majesty:

      Let these content you and be gone again;

      For they are at their old tricks yet.

      A man

      Of your own passionate serving kind who had brought

      In his full hands what, had they only known,

      Had given their children's children loftier thought,

      Sweeter emotion, working in their veins

      Like gentle blood, has been driven from the place,

      And insult heaped upon him for his pains

      And for his open-handedness, disgrace;

      An old foul mouth that slandered you had set

      The pack upon him.

      Go, unquiet wanderer,

      And gather the Glasnevin coverlet

      About your head till the dust stops your ear,

      The time for you to taste of that salt breath

      And listen at the corners has not come;

      You had enough of sorrow before death —

      Away, away! You are safer in the tomb.

September 29th, 1914.

      WHEN HELEN LIVED

      We have cried in our despair

      That men desert,

      For some trivial affair

      Or noisy, insolent sport,

      Beauty that we have won

      From bitterest hours;

      Yet we, had we walked within

      Those topless towers

      Where Helen walked with her boy,

      Had given but as the rest

      Of the men and women of Troy,

      A word and a jest.

      THE ATTACK ON 'THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD,' 1907

      Once, when midnight smote the air,