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Now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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
Last
Twenty
Rocking
Born
Twenties
Cradle
Come
Towards
Centuries
Hour
Nightmare
Century
Beast
Sleep
Rough
Vexed
Hours
Round
Stony
Lasts
Rounds
Bethlehem

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Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost?
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Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds.
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My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd. This Land of Saints, and then as the applause died out, Of plaster Saints his beautiful mischievous head thrown back.
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Many ingenious lovely things are gone / That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude.
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Poetry and music I have banished, But the stupidity Of root, shoot, blossom or clay Makes no demand. I bend my body to the spade Or grope with a dirty hand.
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I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.
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Myself I must remake.
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On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!
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All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.
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An intellectual hatred is the worst.
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Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
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Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
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Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.
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Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.
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It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear and eye, / Can be content with argument and deal / In abstract things or be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel.
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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.
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I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.
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An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.
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now I bring full-flavoured wine out of a barrel found Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.
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