Poem by William Butler Yeats

To Ireland in the Coming Times

  Know, that I would accounted be
  True brother of that company,
  Who sang to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
  Ballad and story, rann and song;
  Nor be I any less of them,
  Because the red-rose-bordered hem
  Of her, whose history began
  Before God made the angelic clan,
  Trails all about the written page;
  For in the world's first blossoming age
  The light fall of her flying feet
  Made Ireland's heart begin to beat;
  And still the starry candles flare
  To help her light foot here and there;
  And still the thoughts of Ireland brood
  Upon her holy quietude.

  Nor may I less be counted one
  With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
  Because to him, who ponders well,
  My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
  Of the dim wisdoms old and deep,
  That God gives unto man in sleep.
  For the elemental beings go
  About my table to and fro.
  In flood and fire and clay and wind,
  They huddle from man's pondering mind;
  Yet he who treads in austere ways
  May surely meet their ancient gaze.
  Man ever journeys on with them
  After the red-rose-bordered hem.
  Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon,
  A Druid land, a Druid tune!

  While still I may, I write for you
  The love I lived, the dream I knew.
  From our birthday, until we die,
  Is but the winking of an eye;
  And we, our singing and our love,
  The mariners of night above,
  And all the wizard things that go
  About my table to and fro.
  Are passing on to where may be,
  In truth's consuming ecstasy
  No place for love and dream at all;
  For God goes by with white foot-fall.
  I cast my heart into my rhymes,
  That you, in the dim coming times,
  May know how my heart went with them
  After the red-rose-bordered hem.

1. The Pity of Love
2. The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner
3. The Dedication to a Book of Stories Selected from the Irish Novelists
4. The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water
5. The Ballad of Father Gilligan

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