Selected Poems And Four Plays

William Butler Yeats, M.l. Rosenthal, M.l. Rosenthal

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781451673753
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Since its first appearance in 1962, M. L. Rosenthal's classic selection of Yeats's poems and plays has attracted hundreds of thousands of readers. This newly revised edition includes 211 poems and 4 plays. It adds The Words Upon the Window-Pane, one of Yeats's most startling dramatic works in its realistic use of a seance as the setting for an eerily powerful reenactment of Jonathan Swift's rigorous idealism, baffling love relationships, and tragic madness. The collection profits from recent scholarship that has helped to establish Yeats's most reliable texts, in the order set by the poet himself. And his powerful lyrical sequences are amply represented, culminating in the selection from Last Poems and Two Plays, which reaches its climax in the brilliant poetic plays The Death of Cuchulain and Purgatory. Scholars, students, and all who delight in Yeats's varied music and sheer quality will rejoice in this expanded edition. As the introduction observes, "Early and late he has the simple, indispensable gift of enchanting the ear....He was also the poet who, while very much of his own day in Ireland, spoke best to the people of all countries. And though he plunged deep into arcane studies, his themes are most clearly the general ones of life and death, love and hate, man's condition, and history's meanings. He began as a sometimes effete post-Romantic, heir to the pre-Raphaelites, and then, quite naturally, became a leading British Symbolist; but he grew at last into the boldest, most vigorous voice of this century." Selected Poems and Four Plays represents the essential achievement of the greatest twentieth-century poet to write in English.

FROM THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE
(1919)

THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE

THE trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake’s edge or pool

Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?

(1917)

IN MEMORY OF MAJOR ROBERT GREGORY

I

Now that we’re almost settled in our house

I’ll name the friends that cannot sup with us

Beside a fire of turf in th’ ancient tower,

And having talked to some late hour

Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed:

Discoverers of forgotten truth

Or mere companions of my youth,

All, all are in my thoughts to-night being dead.

II

Always we’d have the new friend meet the old

And we are hurt if either friend seem cold,

And there is salt to lengthen out the smart

In the affections of our heart,

And quarrels are blown up upon that head;

But not a friend that I would bring

This night can set us quarrelling,

For all that come into my mind are dead.

III

Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind,

That loved his learning better than mankind,

Though courteous to the worst; much falling he

Brooded upon sanctity

Till all his Greek and Latin learning seemed

A long blast upon the horn that brought

A little nearer to his thought

A measureless consummation that he dreamed.

IV

And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,

That dying chose the living world for text

And never could have rested in the tomb

But that, long travelling, he had come

Towards nightfall upon certain set apart

In a most desolate stony place,

Towards nightfall upon a race

Passionate and simple like his heart.

V

And then I think of old George Pollexfen,

In muscular youth well known to Mayo men

For horsemanship at meets or at racecourses,

That could have shown how pure-bred horses

And solid men, for all their passion, live

But as the outrageous stars incline

By opposition, square and trine;

Having grown sluggish and contemplative.

VI

They were my close companions many a year,

A portion of my mind and life, as it were,

And now their breathless faces seem to look

Out of some old picture-book;

I am accustomed to their lack of breath,

But not that my dear friend’s dear son,

Our Sidney and our perfect man,

Could share in that discourtesy of death.

VII

For all things the delighted eye now sees

Were loved by him: the old storm-broken trees

That cast their shadows upon road and bridge;

The tower set on the stream’s edge;

The ford where drinking cattle make a stir

Nightly, and startled by that sound

The water-hen must change her ground;

He might have been your heartiest welcomer.

VIII

When with the Galway foxhounds he would ride

From Castle Taylor to the Roxborough side

Or Esserkelly plain, few kept his pace;

At Mooneen he had leaped a place

So perilous that half the astonished meet

Had shut their eyes; and where was it

He rode a race without a bit?

And yet his mind outran the horses’ feet.

IX

We dreamed that a great painter had been born

To cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn,

To that stern colour and that delicate line

That are our secret discipline

Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might.

Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,

And yet he had the intensity

To have published all to be a world’s delight.

X

What other could so well have counselled us

In all lovely intricacies of a house

As he that practised or that understood

All work in metal or in wood,

In moulded plaster or in carven stone?

Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,

And all he did done perfectly

As though he had but that one trade alone.

XI

Some burn damp faggots, others may consume

The entire combustible world in one small room

As though dried straw, and if we turn about

The ...