19 quotes
If soul may look and body touch,
Which is the more blest?
Last Poems (1936)
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
Last Poems (1936)
Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.
Last Poems (1936)
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
Last Poems (1936)
Because there is safety in derision
I talked about an apparition,
I took no trouble to convince,
Or seem plausible to a man of sense.
Last Poems (1936)
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
Last Poems (1936)
My temptation is quiet.
Here at life’s end
Neither loose imagination,
Nor the mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bone,
Can make the truth known.
Last Poems (1936)
Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
Last Poems (1936)
Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
Last Poems (1936)
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.
Last Poems (1936)
A bloody and a sudden end,
Gunshot or a noose,
For Death who takes what man would keep,
Leaves what man would lose.
Last Poems (1936)
Down the mountain walls
From where pan’s cavern is
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.
Last Poems (1936)
All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia.
Last Poems (1936)
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
Last Poems (1936)
Grant me an old man’s frenzy,
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call.
Last Poems (1936)
You think it horrible that lust and rage
Should dance attention upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young;
What else have I to spur me into song?
Last Poems (1936)
Irish poets, earn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
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.
Last Poems (1936)
I have found nothing half so good
As my long-planned half solitude,
Where I can sit up half the night
With some friend that has the wit
Not to allow his looks to tell
When I am unintelligible.
Last Poems (1936)
Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
Last Poems (1936)