Poem by William Butler Yeats

Meditations in Time of Civil War

  I
  Ancestral Houses

  Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns,
  Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
  Life overflows without ambitious pains;
  And rains down life until the basin spills,
  And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
  As though to choose whatever shape it wills
  And never stoop to a mechanical,
  Or servile shape, at others’ beck and call.

  Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not sung
  Had he not found it certain beyond dreams
  That out of life’s own self-delight had sprung
  The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems
  As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung
  Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,
  And not a fountain, were the symbol which
  Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.

  Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
  Called architect and artist in, that they,
  Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
  The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
  The gentleness none there had ever known;
  But when the master’s buried mice can play,
  And maybe the great-grandson of that house,
  For all its bronze and marble, ’s but a mouse.

  Oh, what if gardens where the peacock strays
  With delicate feet upon old terraces,
  Or else all Juno from an urn displays
  Before the indifferent garden deities;
  Oh, what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways
  Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease
  And Childhood a delight for every sense,
  But take our greatness with our violence!

  What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,
  And buildings that a haughtier age designed,
  The pacing to and fro on polished floors
  Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined
  With famous portraits of our ancestors;
  What if those things the greatest of mankind,
  Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
  But take our greatness with our bitterness!


  II
  My House

  An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
  A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
  An acre of stony ground,
  Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
  Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,
  The sound of the rain or sound
  Of every wind that blows;
  The stilted water-hen
  Crossing stream again
  Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;

  A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,
  A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,
  A candle and written page.
  ‘Il Penseroso’s’ Platonist toiled on
  In some like chamber, shadowing forth
  How the daemonic rage
  Imagined everything.
  Benighted travellers
  From markets and from fairs
  Have seen his midnight candle glimmering.

  Two men have founded here. A man-at-arms
  Gathered a score of horse and spent his days
  In this tumultuous spot,
  Where through long wars and sudden night alarms
  His dwindling score and he seemed cast-a-ways
  Forgetting and forgot;
  And I, that after me
  My bodily heirs may find,
  To exalt a lonely mind,
  Befitting emblems of adversity.


  III
  My Table

  Two heavy tressels, and a board
  Where Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,
  By pen and paper lies,
  That it may moralise
  My days out of their aimlessness.
  A bit of an embroidered dress
  Covers its wooden sheath.
  Chaucer had not drawn breath
  When it was forged. In Sato’s house,
  Curved like new moon, moon luminous
  It lay five hundred years.
  Yet if no change appears
  No moon; only an aching heart
  Conceives a changeless work of art.
  Our learned men have urged
  That when and where ’twas forged
  A marvellous accomplishment,
  In painting or in pottery, went
  From father unto son
  And through the centuries ran
  And seemed unchanging like the sword.
  Soul’s beauty being most adored,
  Men and their business took
  The soul’s unchanging look;
  For the most rich inheritor,
  Knowing that none could pass heaven’s door
  That loved inferior art,
  Had such an aching heart
  That he, although a country’s talk
  For silken clothes and stately walk,
  Had waking wits; it seemed
  Juno’s peacock screamed.


  IV
  My Descendants

  Having inherited a vigorous mind
  From my old fathers I must nourish dreams
  And leave a woman and a man behind
  As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems
  Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
  Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
  But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
  And there’s but common greenness after that.

  And what if my descendants lose the flower
  Through natural declension of the soul,
  Through too much business with the passing hour,
  Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?
  May this laborious stair and this stark tower
  Become a roofless ruin that the owl
  May build in the cracked masonry and cry
  Her desolation to the desolate sky.

  The Primum Mobile that fashioned us
  Has made the very owls in circles move;
  And I, that count myself most prosperous,
  Seeing that love and friendship are enough,
  For an old neighbour’s friendship chose the house
  And decked and altered it for a girl’s love,
  And know whatever flourish and decline
  These stones remain their monument and mine.


  V
  The Road at My Door

  An affable Irregular,
  A heavily built Falstaffan man,
  Comes cracking jokes of civil war
  As though to die by gunshot were
  The finest play under the sun.

  A brown Lieutenant and his men,
  Half dressed in national uniform,
  Stand at my door, and I complain
  Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
  A pear tree broken by the storm.

  I count those feathered balls of soot
  The moor-hen guides upon the stream,
  To silence the envy in my thought;
  And turn towards my chamber, caught
  In the cold snows of a dream.


  VI
  The Stare’s Nest by My Window

  The bees build in the crevices
  Of loosening masonry, and there
  The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
  My wall is loosening; honey-bees
  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  We are closed in, and the key is turned
  On our uncertainty; somewhere
  A man is killed, or a house burned,
  Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  A barricade of stone or of wood;
  Some fourteen days of civil war;
  Last night they trundled down the road
  That dead young soldier in his blood:
  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  We had fed the heart on fantasies,
  The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
  More substance in our enmities
  Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
  Come build in the empty house of the stare.


  VII
  I See Phantoms of Hatred and 
  of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness

  I climb to the tower top and lean upon broken stone,
  A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
  Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
  That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
  A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
  And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.
  Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
  Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.

  ‘Vengeance upon the murderers,’ the cry goes up,
  ‘Vengeance for Jacques Molay.’ In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,
  The rage driven, rage tormented, and rage hungry troop,
  Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,
  Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide
  For the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astray
  Because of all that senseless tumult, all but cried
  For vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.

  Their legs long delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,
  Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs,
  The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,
  Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,
  Have closed the ladies’ eyes, their minds are but a pool
  Where even longing drowns under its own excess;
  Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full
  Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

  The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,
  The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,
  Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,
  Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place
  To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,
  Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone,
  Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency,
  The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.

  I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
  Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
  In something that all others understand or share;
  But oh, ambitious heart had such a proof drawn forth
  A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
  It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,
  The half read wisdom of daemonic images,
  Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.

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

Print

1683 Views

Last Poems

To Russian version