Music poems
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The Poet Pleads With The Elemental Powers
© William Butler Yeats
The Powers whose name and shape no living creature knows
Have pulled the Immortal Rose;
And though the Seven Lights bowed in their dance and wept,
The Polar Dragon slept,
Shepherd And Goatherd
© William Butler Yeats
Shepherd. He that was best in every country sport
And every country craft, and of us all
Most courteous to slow age and hasty youth,
Is dead.
The Grey Rock
© William Butler Yeats
'The Danish troop was driven out
Between the dawn and dusk,' she said;
'Although the event was long in doubt.
Although the King of Ireland's dead
And half the kings, before sundown
All was accomplished.
The Shadowy Waters: The Harp of Aengus
© William Butler Yeats
Edain came out of Midhir's hill, and lay
Beside young Aengus in his tower of glass,
Where time is drowned in odour-laden winds
A Statesman's Holiday
© William Butler Yeats
I lived among great houses,
Riches drove out rank,
Base drove out the better blood,
And mind and body shrank.
The Countess Cathleen In Paradise
© William Butler Yeats
All the heavy days are over;
Leave the body's coloured pride
Underneath the grass and clover,
With the feet laid side by side.
The Ballad Of The Foxhunter
© William Butler Yeats
'Lay me in a cushioned chair;
Carry me, ye four,
With cushions here and cushions there,
To see the world once more.
Her Triumph
© William Butler Yeats
I did the dragon's will until you came
Because I had fancied love a casual
Improvisation, or a settled game
That followed if I let the kerchief fall:
Baile And Aillinn
© William Butler Yeats
ARGUMENT. Baile and Aillinn were lovers, but Aengus, the
Master of Love, wishing them to he happy in his own land
among the dead, told to each a story of the other's death, so
that their hearts were broken and they died.
The Tower
© William Butler Yeats
IWhat shall I do with this absurdity -
O heart, O troubled heart - this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?
The Old Stone Cross
© William Butler Yeats
A statesman is an easy man,
He tells his lies by rote;
A journalist makes up his lies
And takes you by the throat;
The Leaders Of The Crowd
© William Butler Yeats
They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invent
The Wanderings of Oisin: Book I
© William Butler Yeats
S. Patrick. You who are bent, and bald, and blind,
With a heavy heart and a wandering mind,
Have known three centuries, poets sing,
Of dalliance with a demon thing.
The Wanderings of Oisin: Book II
© William Butler Yeats
S. Patrick. Be still: the skies
Are choked with thunder, lightning, and fierce wind,
For God has heard, and speaks His angry mind;
Go cast your body on the stones and pray,
For He has wrought midnight and dawn and day.
Lapis Lazuli
© William Butler Yeats
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instmment.
A Crazed Girl
© William Butler Yeats
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.'
Sailing To Byzantium
© William Butler Yeats
IThat is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Tombstones in the Starlight
© Dorothy Parker
His little trills and chirpings were his best.
No music like the nightingale's was born
Within his throat; but he, too, laid his breast
Upon a thorn.
The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam Of Naishapur
© Edward Fitzgerald
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.
Tears
© Lizette Woodworth Reese
When I consider Life and its few years --
A wisp of fog betwixt us and the sun;
A call to battle, and the battle done
Ere the last echo dies within our ears;
