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Quotes from Michael Robartes and the Dancer — William Butler Yeats

1865–1939 Ireland

← All quotes by William Butler Yeats

17 quotes

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

They say such different things at school.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

Nothing that we love over-much
Is ponderable to our touch.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

Could the impossible come to pass
She would have time to turn her eyes,
Her lover thought, upon the glass
And on the instant would grow wise.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of plenty is undone.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

O when may it suffice?
That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

To be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

All hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise.
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: William Butler Yeats (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.