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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.

William Butler Yeats

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William Butler Yeats
Age: 73 †
Born: 1865
Born: June 13
Died: 1939
Died: January 28
Astrologer
Mystic
Playwright
Poet
Politician
Writer
Scrooby
Nottinghamshire
W. B. Yeats
William Yeats
W.B. Yeats
Time
God
Like
Behinds
World
Broken
Goads
Behind
Oxen
Feet
Yeast
Black
Tread
Great
Passings
Years
Passing

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We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive.
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Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams I have spread my dreams under your feet Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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Pale brows, still hands and dim hair, I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the old despair Would end in love in the end.
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Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye, In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky With all their ancient faces like rain- beaten stones, And all their helms of silver hovering.
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And when you sigh from kiss to kiss I hear white Beauty sighing, too, For hours when all must fade like dew.
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What if the Church and the State Are the mob that howls at the door! Wine shall run thick to the end, Bread taste sour.
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Was it for this the wild geese spread The gray 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.
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Because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike.
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What can be explained is not poetry.
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Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.
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The blessed spirits must be sought within the self which is common to all
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...How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face... When You Are Old And Gray
William Butler Yeats
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to be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief.
William Butler Yeats
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I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea! We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fadeand flee And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky, Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.
William Butler Yeats
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My wretched dragon is perplexed.
William Butler Yeats
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Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
William Butler Yeats
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I pray-for fashion's word is out And prayer comes round again- That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.
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What do we know but that we face one another in this place?
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Nor bird nor beast Could make me wish for anything this day, Being old, but that the old alone might die, And that would be against God's Providence.
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And there's a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind, Or who have found a painter to make them so for pay And smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind: I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.
William Butler Yeats