William Butler Yeats

Come near, come near, come near — Ah, leave me still A little space for the rose-breath to fill!

Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate, I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal beauty wandering on her way.

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days! Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways: Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide; The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed, Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;

Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

Words alone are certain good.

The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed; Grey Truth is now her painted toy; Yet still she turns her restless head.

Where dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake The drowsy water rats; There we've hid our faery vats,

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree; But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

The Babylonian starlight brought A fabulous, formless darkness in; Odour of blood when Christ was slain Made all platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline.

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.

The official designs of the Government, especially its designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage, may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors of national taste.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

This country will not always be an uncomfortable place for a country gentleman to live in, and it is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am afraid that Labour disagrees with me in that. On this …

I agree about Shaw — he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.

One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: "Hammer your thoughts into unity." For days I could think of nothing else, and …

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Do what you will. I do not understand stops. I write my work so completely for the ear that I feel helpless when I have to measure pauses by stops & commas.

In dreams begins responsibility.

The friends that have it I do wrong Whenever I remake a song Should know what issue is at stake, It is myself that I remake.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.

The years like great black oxen tread the world, And God the herdsman goads them on behind, And I am broken by their passing feet.

You are still wrecked among heathen dreams.