Singing School

—Photo by Robert Lee Haycock, Antioch

SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

—William Butler Yeats

I

That 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,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

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,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

In the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

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TO A FRIEND WHOSE WORK HAS COME TO NOTHING
—William Butler Yeats

Now all the truth is out,

Be secret and take defeat

From any brazen throat,

For how can you compete,

Being honor bred, with one

Who, were it proved he lies,

Were neither shamed in his own

Nor in his neighbours' eyes?

Bred to a harder thing

Than Triumph, turn away

And like a laughing string

Whereon mad fingers play

Amid a place of stone,

Be secret and exult,

Because of all things known

That is most difficult.

—Photo by Robert Lee Haycock

SOLOMON AND THE WITCH

—William Butler Yeats

And thus declared that Arab lady:

"Last night, where under the wild moon

On grassy mattress I had laid me,

Within my arms great Solomon,

I suddenly cried out in a strange tongue

Not his, not mine."

                             Who understood

Whatver has been said, sighed, sung,

Howled, miau-d, barked, brayed, belled, yelled, cried, crowed,

Thereon replied: "A cockerel

Crew from a blossoming apple bough

Three hundred years before the Fall,

And never crew again till now,

And would not now but that he thought,

Change being at one with Choice at last,

All that the brigand apple brought

And this foul world were dead at least.

He that crowed out eternity

Thought to have crowed it in again.
For though love has a spider's eye

To find out some appropriate pain—

Aye, though all passion's in the glance—

For every nerve, and tests a lover

With cruelties of Choice and Chance;

And when at last that murder's over

Maybe the bride-bed brings despair,

For each an imagined image brings

And finds a real image there:

Yet the world ends when these two things,

Though several, are a single light,

When oil and wick are burned in one;

Therefore a blessed moon last night

Gave Sheba to her Solomon."

"Yet the world stays."

                              "If that be so,

Your cockerel found us in the wrong

Although he thought it worth a crow.

Maybe an image is too strong

Or maybe is not strong enough."

"The night has fallen; not a sound

In the forbidden sacred grove

Unless a petal hit the ground,

Nor any human sight within it

But the crushed grass where we have;

And the moon is wilder every minute.

O! Solomon! let us try again."

_________________________

THE SECOND COMING
—William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but 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?

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Today's LittleNip:

AT GALWAY RACES
—William Butler Years

There where the course is,
Delight makes all of the one mind,
The riders upon the galloping horses,
The crowd that closes in behind:
We, too, had good attendance once,
Hearers and hearteners of the work;
Aye, horsemen for companions,
Before the merchant and the clerk
Breathed on the world with timid breath.
Sing on: somewhere at some new moon,
We'll learn that sleeping is not death,
Hearing the whole earth change its tune,
Its flesh being wild, and it again
Crying aloud as the racecourse is,
And we find hearteners among men
That ride upon horses.

_______________________

—Medusa

—Photo by Robert Lee Haycock