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Brown Penny
O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
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A Dialogue Of Self And Soul
I (My Soul), I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul.
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The Circus Animals' Desertion
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.
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The Seven Sages
Whether they knew or not,
Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne
All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery?
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard's eye.
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The Dawn
I would be ignorant as the dawn
That merely stood, rocking the glittering coach
Above the cloudy shoulders of the horses;
I would be — for no knowledge is worth a straw —
Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.
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Byzantium
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers'song
After great cathedral gong;
a starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
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Crazy Jane Talks With The Bishop
'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul, ' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied. '
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Lapis Lazuli
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
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Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey 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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Crossways
Come away, o human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
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.
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