 Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to this World Poetry Day special event. We're also celebrating WBE8's having won the Nobel Prize exactly 100 years ago and to open the evening please welcome his Excellency the Ambassador of Ireland Martin Fraser. Thank you Siobhan and thank you to everybody for coming along to this this wonderful occasion. I thank the Joffine Hart Poetry Foundation and Siobhan and all her colleagues and our wonderful readers who will be on in a few moments for joining us tonight. I suppose we're marking two important occasions. The first is the 100th anniversary of the award of Nobel Prize for Literature to William Butler Yeats, a great figure in English literature, a quintessential Irish person I would say and yet an Anglo-Irish figure, a Protestant, a nationalist, a great writer in English language, a man who lived and worked in Ireland and in England and someone whose work has treasured all over the world and in that sense I think he's a perfect person to celebrate 100 years on and also a perfect person to celebrate on World Poetry Day which is about sharing shared values and things we all love and the values of peace and respect and tolerance that we treasure so much and that are attacked under attacks sometimes in the world so I think what Yeats stands for and what Poetry stands for are so well recognized in what we're going to hear this evening so on that note I'd just like to say thank you to all for coming along and I hope you have a wonderful enjoyable evening thank you. Thank you Ambassador. Excuse me, thank you. So traditionally I say a few words that Josephine Hart wrote for her last event which was a week at the Dumber Warehouse before she sadly died and as you probably know most of you are very familiar faces Josephine Hart started the Poetry Hour back in the 1980s and the British Library very kindly welcomed us here since 2004 and we do two, three events a year and I'm just going to read Josephine's introduction after I've welcomed the actors to the stage so please put your hands together for Mariela Frostrop, Gavin Dre and Bob Geldof. Hello. All Yeats fanatics as I guess most of us here tonight are. So I don't know if I introduce myself I'm Siobhan Wilder and what Josephine described these Poetry Hours are as a public performance of the great poetry of the dead poets read by actors she wanted that to be the norm in London unfortunately not only did her Poetry Hour take off but other people have followed suit and it's something that's very healing and very beneficial socially as well for people and the philosophy behind the Poetry Hours can be simply expressed in three parts first the life of the poet Josephine Hart agreed with T.S. Eliot that we understand the work better if we understand something of the poet's life as Eliot said the poet always writes out of his personal life in his finest work out of its tragedy whatever it may be remorse lost love or loneliness therefore Josephine Hart's introductions to the poets are always an important part of these evenings all of her introductions to the great poets are published by Virago in life-saving why we need poetry and in words that burn and catching life by the throat second the poets read aloud as Josephine saw it poetry startled us into a more full sense of life it is a trinity of sound sense and sensibility and the sense of sound what Robert Frost called the sound of sense will be lost unless we hear it language caught alive the gold in the oar is the sound. Seamus Heaney as an undergraduate at Queens found that on hearing Eliot's four quartets read by the actor Robert Spate what had been perplexing when sight read for meaning only was hypnotic when read aloud Yates in his 70s said he spent his life clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye alone and bringing all back to syntax that is for the ear alone. Ordon put it more bluntly no poem which is not better heard than read is good poetry and third poetry read by great actors again Josephine Hart agrees with TS Eliot that poetry should be read to us by skilled readers the feeling for syllable and rhythm penetrating far below the conscious level of thought and feeling invigorating every word. I'm going to hand over to our wonderful readers now but before I do I need to tell you that Denise Goff who was to be with us this evening had a COVID test at 4 p.m. this afternoon and was positive so you'll have to put up with me reading in for Denise but the rest will make up for that so please enjoy the evening. Good evening and apologies for my lack of thespian skills and hopefully my reading will just about suffice. When he died in 1939 at the age of 73 in his house in Capemartin in the south of France William Butler Yates was buried in the local churchyard. If I die here he'd said bury me here then in a year's time when the papers have forgotten me dig me up and plant me in Sligo. Well it took rather longer than a year almost a decade in 1948 his body was returned to be buried as he'd requested in drumcliff churchyard under Bear Ben Bulbin's head in the Sligo he'd loved since childhood. His headstone famously reads cast a cold eye on life on death horsemen pass by. It is a compelling and enigmatic epitaph for the man who advises us to cast a cold eye as he had engaged with life with love and with art with an almost overwhelming passion. That tension perhaps the fulcrum in which the poetry was created poetry he once said is made out of the quarrel with oneself. He was born on the 13th of June 1865 in Sandymount Dublin. His father a solicitor was John Butler Yates son and grandson of Rectors in the Church of Ireland. His mother Susan Pollock's fan whose shipbuilding family came from Sligo drenched his mind with the fairy folklore of the area. In 1868 his father gave up his practice to study painting in London specifically pre-Raphaelite not an easy decision with a growing family. It was a lived lesson about what matters in life. One of Yates sisters said when I look back on Papa's life I marvel at his gay courage talking literature and art and life and no income at all. Well he lived to see one son become one of the world's greatest poets another Jack B Yates one of Ireland's greatest painters and his two daughters Lily and Lolly set up and run the famous koala press. That's what I call achievement. Yates eventually attended the Godolphan school in Hammersmith not happily where and this is an utterly irrelevant piece of information but one which I find father enchanting. He became the best high diver in the school. Since years later Ezra Pound taught him defense and he was an excellent fisherman Yates the poet sportsman just begs to be written. Literature's luckiest vault fast though he turned instead to poetry and age 24 published The Wanderings of Usheen written in English based on Irish mythology the richness of which he believed rivaled that of Greece. His early poetry was as Seamus Heaney points out counter-cultural to the realism of the Victorians. In that counter-culturalism the soul of 20th century Ireland was formed. The mystical is at the center of all that I do all that I think and all that I write. His acknowledged influences from the apocalyptic Blake and Shelley also obsessed with the occult Swedenborg the 18th century philosopher and mystic and notorious Madame Blavatsky holder of seances and founder of the Theosophical Society. You were silly like us. Orden wrote in his wonderful poem in memory of W.B. Yates but it is not silly to know what it is your genius requires to nourish its roots. It is in fact a form of genius and all his life Yates pushed at the doors of perception in pursuit of art and truth. The three early dream poems with which we open the stolen child the host of the air and the song of wandering Angus are poems in which the repetition of sound and image are designed to suggest a mood to lure the listener to the threshold of sleep. Don't doos off on us. In each someone has been stolen away. Yates was eight when his brother Robert died and he remembered his mother crying and the sound of horses hooves galloping away to get the doctor. A poet he said always writes out of his personal life in his finest work out of its tragedy. He never speaks directly. There is always phantasma goria. There was indeed Yates often wrote in assumed persona the concept of the mask crucial to him. James Joyce who incidentally when he met Yates said I have met you too late. You were too old for me. Noted that Yates had a surrealist imagination few painters could match. That imagination is clear in these strange and haunting poems. The stolen child where dips the rocky highland of sleuth wood in the lake there lies a leafy island where flapping herons wake the drowsy water rats. There we've hid our fairy vats full of berries and of reddest stolen cherries come away O human child to the waters and the wild with a fairy hand in hand for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. Where the wave of moon light glosses the dim gray sands with light far off by furthest rosses we foot it all the night weaving olden dances mingling hands and mingling glances till the moon has taken flight to and fro we leap and chase the frothy bubbles while the world is full of troubles and anxious in its sleep come away O human child to the waters and the wild with a fairy hand in hand for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. Where the wandering water rushes from the hills above Glen Carr in pools among the rushes that scarce could bathe the star we seek for slumbering trout and whispering in their ears give them unquiet dreams leaning softly out from ferns that drop their tears over the young streams come away O human child to the waters and the wild with a fairy hand in hand for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. The solemn eyed he'll hear no more the lowing of the calves on the warm hillside or the kettle on the hob sing peace into his breast or see the brown mice bob round and round the oatmeal chest for he comes the human child to the waters and the wild with a fairy hand in hand for the world's more full of weeping than he can understand. The host of the air O'Driscoll drove with a song the wild duck in the drake from the tall and the tufted reeds of the drear heart lake and he saw how the reeds grew dark at the coming of the night tide and dreamed of the long dim hair of Bridget his bride. He heard while he sang and dreamed a piper piping away and never was piping so sad and never was piping so gay and he saw young men and young girls who danced on a level place and Bridget his bride among them with a sad and gay face the dancers crowded about him and many a sweet thing said and a young man brought him red wine and a young girl white bread but Bridget drew him by the sleeve away from the merry bands to old men playing at cards with the twinkling of ancient hands the bread and the wine had a doom for these were the host of the air he sat and played in a dream of her long dim hair he played with the merry old men and thought not of evil chance until one bore Bridget his bride away from the merry dance he bore her away in his arms the handsomest young man there and his neck and his breast in his arms were drowned in her long dim hair O'Driscoll scattered the cards and out of his dream awoke old men and young men and young girls were gone like a drifting smoke but he heard high up in the air a piper piping away and never was piping so sad and never was piping so gay the song of wandering Angus I went out to the hazel wood because a fire was in my head and cut and peeled a hazel wand and hooked a berry to a thread and when white moths were on the wing and moth-like stars were flickering out I dropped the berry in a stream and caught a little silver trout when I had laid it on the floor I went to blow the fire of flame but something rustled on the floor and someone called me by my name it had become a glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair who called me by my name and ran and faded through the brightening air though I'm old with wandering through hollow lands and hilly lands I will find out where she is gone and kiss her lips and take her hands and walk among long dappled grass and pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon the golden apples of the sun Yates knows life he learns by emotion and is one of the few people who knows what violent emotion really is like who sees from the center of it instead of trying to look in from the rim as a pound well the violent emotion was inspired by Maud Gawne in 1889 she arrived in the Yates household and instantly took possession of his soul when the soul is lost to woman all is lost he was 24 a just published poet she had read an earlier play The Isle of Statues which obsessed her there is something of Lizzie Sedal in his description of her she stood there in her youthful beauty 22 an ex debutante extremely tall flaming red hair and strange angry eyes he saw her as a luminous vision but it was her passionate nature which began all the trouble of my life and which was to inspire some of the greatest love poetry ever written he'd found the love of his life she had found a poet for the cause he was doomed from the start for though he did not know it at the time and would later say she was complete when I met her I was not she was in love with the married Lucian Milivoy with whom she would have two children out of wedlock a boy who died and a daughter Isolt of whom more later Milivoy was a French right-wing revolutionary writer as involved with politics as she was including the Irish nationalist cause Yates obsession with Maud Gawne lasted all his life he proposed endlessly but she would become neither mistress nor wife though years later the relationship was consummated Maud's suggestion that they pledge themselves afterwards to a mystical union of brother and sister could not have been reassuring this magnificent brave and talented woman who took the lead in the Countess Kathleen was also dangerous and violent with a fanatical love of Ireland although not Irish herself she was twice imprisoned for her activities and was eventually buried in Glasnevan cemetery with Ireland's heroes Yates wrote of her she lived in storm and strife her soul had such desire for what proud death may bring that it could not endure the common good of life and therein lies the pity and yet for all the pain she caused there is I think little regret here is a fascinating quote about him from him about the nature of obsession all our lives long as Da Vinci says we long for our destruction and how when we find it in the shape of a most fair woman can we do less than leave all others for her do we not seek our dissolution from her lips he understood the erotic of Olivia Shakespeare the married woman with whom Yates first experienced sexual love he wrote she was too wholesome to my inmost being an insight of which Freud would have been proud tragic ecstasy Yates believed was the best that art perhaps life can give us well there was much tragic ecstasy with mord gone her eventual marriage to major Sean McBride a man she believed had a stronger will than she had which must have been something was terrible for him like lightning through me he said McBride was a revolutionary as extreme as she was professor Foster tells us they spent part of their honeymoon allegedly reconnoitering assassination attempts for an impending royal visit to Gibraltar their union was a disaster and they separated after five years Sean McBride was executed with the leaders of the 1916 rebellion and is named by Yates in Easter 1916 again Yates now 51 proposed and yet again he was rejected in a strange Jamesian episode Yates in despair proposed to her daughter by millervoy assault who wisely turned him down finally Yates married Georgie Hyde Lees who happily discovered her talent for automatic writing on her honeymoon and worked with Yates on the extraordinary book a vision they had two adored children Michael and Anne marriage in the shadow of mord gone was not easy Yates once apologized to his wife for the persistence of her image in his imagination he said he went to sleep with the endeavor to send his soul to her however on his deathbed having read mord gone's ironically titled a servant to the queen the man who is deaf and blind and dumb with love commented with considerable coolness to Olivia Manning she had a remarkable intellect at the service of the will no will at the service of the intellect quite brilliant sharp we open with short passionate cries of hopeless love cries of the heart against necessity and in this section also Adams curse a conversation between Yates mord gone and her sister about art and beauty and love and the hidden labor in each lady and the swan the mythological savagery of the erotic then two short poems in the voice of a woman the mermaid and before the world was made we end with friends now must I these three praise the three are Olivia Shakespeare Lady Gregory and of course mord gone 27 years after he'd met her her very image makes him shake from head to foot long love indeed now to the pity of love the pity of love a pity beyond all telling is hidden the heart of love the folk who are buying and selling the clouds on their journey above the cold wet winds ever blowing and the shadowy hazel grove where mouse gray waters are flowing threaten the head that I love when you are old when you are old and gray and full of sleep and nodding by the fire take down this book and slowly read and dream of the soft look your eyes had once and of their shadows deep how many loved your moments of glad grace and loved your beauty with love false or true but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you and loved the sorrows of your changing face and bending down beside the glowing bars murmur a little sadly how love fled and paced upon the mountains overhead and hid his face among a crowd of stars he wishes for the clots of heaven had I the heavens embroidered clots and wrought with golden and silver life the blue and the dim and the dark clots of night and life and the half light I would spread the clots under your feet but I being poor of only my dreams I have spread my dreams under your feet tread softly because you tread on my dreams the folly of being comforted one that is ever kind said yesterday your well beloved's hair is threads of gray and little shadows come about your eyes time can but make it easier to be wise though now it seems impossible and so all that you need is patience heart cries no I have not a crumb of comfort not a grain time can but make her beauty over again because of that great nobleness of hers the fire that stirs about her when she stirs burns but more clearly oh she had not these ways when all the wild summer was in her gaze oh heart oh heart if she'd but turn her head you'd know the folly have been comforted Adam's curse we sat together at one summer's end that beautiful mild woman your close friend and you and I and talked of poetry I said a line will take us hours maybe yet if it does not seem a moment's thought our stitching and unstitching has been nought better go down upon your marrow bones and scrub a kitchen pavement or break stone stones like an old pauper in all kinds of weather for to articulate sweet sounds together is to work harder than all of these and yet be thought a nightler by the noisy set of bankers school masters and clergymen the martyr martyrs call the world and there upon that beautiful mild woman for whose sake there's many a one she'll find out all heartache on finding that her voice was sweet and low replied to be born a woman is to know although they do not talk of it in school that we must labor to be beautiful I said it's certain there is no fine thing since Adam's fall but needs much laboring there have been lovers who thought love should be so much compounded of high courtesy that they would sigh and quote with learned looks precedence out of the beautiful old books yet now it seems an idle trade enough we sat grown quiet at the name of love we saw the last embers of daylight die and in the trembling blue green of the sky a moon worn as if it had been a shell washed by time's waters as they rose and fell about the stars and broke in days and years I had a thought for no one's but your ears that you were beautiful and that I strove to love you in the old highway of love that it all seemed happy and yet I've grown as weary hearted as that yellow moon never give all the heart never give all the heart for love will hardly seem more thinking of to passionate women if it seems certain and they never dreamed that it fades out from kiss to kiss for everything that's lovely is but a brief dreamy kind delight I'll never give the heart outright for they for all smooth ellipse can say have given their hearts up to the play and who could play it well enough if deaf and dumb and blind with love he that made this knows all the cost for he gave all his heart and lost oh do not love too long sweetheart do not love too long I loved long and long and grew to be out of fashion like an old song all through the years of our youth neither could have known their own thought from the others we were so much at one but oh in a minute she changed oh do not love too long or you will grow out of fashion like an old song no second Troy why should I blame her that she filled my days with misery or that she would have late have taught to ignorant men most violent ways or hurled the little streets upon the great had they but courage equal to desire what could have made her peaceful with a mind that noble has made simple as a fire with beauty like a tightened bow a kind that is not natural in an age like this being high and solitary and most stern why what could she have done being what she is was there another Troy for her to burn a woman Homer some if any man drew near when I was young I thought he holds her dear and shook with hate and fear but oh it was bitter wrong if he could pass her by with an indifferent eye where on I wrote and wrote and now being gray I dream that I have brought to such a pitch my thought that coming time can say he shadowed in the glass what thing her body was for she had fiery blood when I was young and trod so sweetly proud as to work on a cloud a woman Homer song that life and letters seemed but an heroic dream why did I get all the poems about old people you know I wonder must be a mistake so this is for everybody out there a drinking song wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the eye that's all we shall know for truth before we grow old and die I lift the glass to my mouth I look at you and I sigh laid in the swan a sudden blow the great wings beating still above the staggering girl her thighs caressed by the dark webs her nape caught in his bill he holds her helpless breast upon his breast how can those terrified vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening ties and how can body laid in that white rush but feel the strange heart beating where it lies a shutter in the loins engendered there the broken wall the burning roof and tower the agamen men dead in so caught up so mastered by the brute of the air did she put on his knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her drop before the world was made if I make the lashes dark and the eyes more bright and the lips more scarlet or ask if all be right from mirror after mirror no vanities displayed I'm looking for the face I had before the world was made what if I look upon a man as though on my beloved and my blood be cold the while and my heart unmoved why should he think me cruel or that he is betrayed I'd have him love me for the thing that was before the world was made friends now must I these three praise three women that have wrought what joy is in my days one because no thoughts nor those on passing cares no not in these 15 many times troubled years could ever come between mind and delighted mind and one because her hand had strength that could unbind that none could understand that none could have and thrive youth's dreamy load so she so changed me that I live laboring in ecstasy and what of her that took all till my youth was gone with scarce a pity and look how could I praise that one when days begin to break I count my good and bad being wakeful for her sake remembering what she had what eagle look still shows well up from the heart's root so greater sweetness flows I shake from head to foot yates wrote aliot is one of those few poets whose history is the history of their own time who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them and he continued this is a very high position to assign him but I believe it is one which is secure aliot of course is right yates not only in his poetry but in the plays which he wrote and commissioned for the abbey theater which he founded with lady gregarie was central to the creation of modern Ireland and in 1923 when yates was 58 he was awarded the Nobel Prize the subject of his speech a modest and generous speech calling up the ghost of sing to stand beside him was not poetry I have chosen as my theme the Irish dramatic movement adding that had my lyric poetry not had the quality of speech spoken on the stage I would not be here nor would I be here where I'm not the symbol of a movement when we thought of the plays we would like to perform we thought of everything that was romantic and poetical for the nationalism we had called up in moments of discouragement was romantic and poetical well up to a point these romantic and poetical plays were to cause riots you've been a very good audience so far tonight yates had a genius for spotting and encouraging genius in others sing whom he met in Paris was very delicate he was persuaded by yates to go to the bleak and bitter aran islands to write the playboy of the western world when sing protested but I'll die there yates replied not before you've written your masterpiece masterpiece it is but the abbey audience hated it and rioted they did not wish to be portrayed as sing portrayed them on the first night of the plow and the star's bio casey who yates believed had a mind like Dostoevsky another riot occurred in the abbey theater which had possibly the most hypersensitive audience in history riots were common yates fought back famously haranguing them from the stage you have disgraced yourselves again and he persevered he had great strength of character throwing himself into life poet playwright theater fander and manager senator he tried and failed notoriously to get a bill of divorcement through the irish senate that he tried at all is astonishing the poems you're about to hear are in a sense public poems reactions to events in the case of september 1913 to public resistance to the cost of building an art gallery to house the lane collection of impressionist paintings the refrain romantic ireland's dead and gone calls up the vision of o'leary's the fenian leader for whose moral qualities yates had great respect often quoting a line by o'leary which resonates today there are things a man must not do to save a nation of the easter rebellion 1916 and the execution of the leaders yates wrote to lady gregory i had no idea any public event could move me so deeply eastern 1916 is one of the greatest political poems in this or any language in this or any century the second coming a precursor to the wasteland was written in early 1919 after the first world war yet it doesn't look back on horror but forward it is imbued with an apocalyptic vision of what is to come what is to come has always been there the rough beast the beast of the apocalypse i began to imagine as always at my left side just out of the range of sight a brazen winged beast which i associated with laughing ecstatic destruction that beast is described in my poem the second coming it is a frightening subversive masterpiece as always there was tension between these public poems and the longing for the stillness essential to art of which he had once said it is a solitary man that tension is clear in the lovely poem the fisherman for whom he wishes to write one poem as cold and passionate as the dawn there's also tension in his mesmerizing allergy for two beautiful sisters Constance Markovich and Ava Gore Booth first evoked in their lovely youth and then with some bitterness in their lives of political turbulence before their early deaths but the disillusionment here is his rather than theirs and he finds consolation elsewhere sailing to Byzantium with its marvelous opening line this is no country for old men the last poem in this section like the fisherman celebrates art which may gather us into the artifice of eternity and thus on a golden bow to sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium but first to September 1913 September 1913 what need you being come to sense but fumble in a greasy till and add the half pence to the pence and prayer to shivering prayer until you have dried the marrow from the bone for men were born to pray and save romantic Ireland's dead and gone it's with O'Leary in the grave yet they were of a different kind the names that still your childish play they have gone about the world like wind but little time had they to pray for whom the hangman's rope was spun and what god help us could they save romantic Ireland's dead and gone it's with O'Leary in the grave was it for this the wild geese spread the gray wing upon every tide for this that all that blood was shed for this Edward Fitzgerald died and Robert Emmett and wolf tone all that delirium of the brave romantic Ireland's dead and gone it's with O'Leary in the grave yet could we turn the years again and call those exiles as they were in all their loneliness and pain you'd cry some woman's yellow hair has maddened every woman's son they weighed so likely what they gave but let them be they're dead and gone they're with O'Leary in the grave Easter 1916 I have met them a close of day coming with vivid faces from counter or desk among gray 18th century houses I have passed with a nod of the head or polite meaningless words or have lingered a while and said polite meaningless words and thought before I'd done of a mocking tale or a jive to please a companion around the fire at the club being certain that they and I but lived where Mockley is worn well changed changed utterly a terrible beauty is born that woman's days were spent in ignorant good will her nights in argument until her voice grew shrill what voice more sweet than hers when young and beautiful she rode to Harriers this man had kept a school and rode our winged horse this other his helper and friend was coming into his force he might have one fame in the end so sensitive his nature seemed so daring and sweet his thought this other man I had dreamed a drunken vain glorious lout he had done most bitter wrong to some who are near my heart yet I number him in the song he too has resigned his part in the casual comedy he too has been changed in his turn transformed utterly a terrible beauty is born hearts with one purpose alone through summer and winter seem enchanted to a stone to trouble the living stream the horse that comes from the road the rider the birds that range from cloud to tumbling cloud minute by minute they change a shadow of cloud on the stream changes minute by minute a horse hoof slides on the brim and a horse plashes within it the long legged more hands dive and hands to more cocks call minute by minute they live the stones in the midst of all too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart oh when may it suffice that is heaven's part our part to murmur name upon name as a mother names her child when sleep at last has come on limbs that had run wild what is it but nightfall no no not night but death wasn't needless death after all for england may keep faith for all that is done and said we know their dream enough to know they dreamed and are dead and what if excess of love bewildered them till they died i write it out in a verse mcdonough and mcbride and connolly and pierce now and in time to be wherever green is worn are changed changed utterly the terrible beauty is born the fisherman although i can see him still the freckled man who goes to a gray place on a hill and gray connemara clothes adorned to cast his flies it's long since i began to call up to the eyes this wise and simple man all day i'd looked in the face what i had hoped it would be to write for my own race and the reality the living men that i hate the dead man that i loved the craven man in his seat the insolent unapproved a no-nave brought to book who has won a drunken cheer the witty man in his joke aimed at the commonest ear the clever man who cries the catch cries of the clown the beating down of the wise and the great art beaten down maybe a 12 months since suddenly i began in scorn of this audience imagining a man and his son freckled face and gray connemara cloth climbing up to a place where stone is dark under froth and the downturn in his wrist when the flies drop in the stream a man who does not exist a man who is but a dream and cried before i am old i shall have written him one poem maybe as cold and as passionate as the dawn in memory of Eva Gorbuth and Kon Markovich the light of evening lissadel great windows open to the south two girls and silk kimonas both beautiful one a gazelle but a raving autumn shears blossom from the summer's wreath the older is condemned to death pardoned drags out lonely years conspiring among the ignorant i know not what the younger dreams some vague utopia and she seems when withered old and skeleton gaunt an image of such politics many a time i think to seek one or the other out and speak of that old georgian mansion mix pictures of the mind recall that table and the talk of youth two girls in silk kimonas both beautiful one a gazelle dear shadows now you know it all all the folly of a fight with a common wrong or right the innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time arise and bid me strike a match and strike another till time catch should the conflagration climb run till all the sages know we the great gazebo built they convicted us of guilt bid me strike a match and blow the second coming turning and turning and the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer things fall apart the center cannot hold mere anarchy is loosed upon the world the blood din tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned the best lack all conviction what 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 reels shadows of the dignity desert birds the darkness drops again but now i know that 20 centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle and what rough beast it's our come round at last slouches towards Bethlehem to be born sailing to Byzantium 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 foul commend all summer long whatever is begotten born and dies caught in that sensual music all neglect monuments of unaging intellect an aged man is but a paltry thing a tattered coat upon a stick unless all 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 oh sage is standing in god's holy fire as in the gold mosaic of a wall come from the holy fire pern in a gyre and by 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 into the artifice of eternity once out of nature i shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing but such a form as grecian goldsmiths make of hammering gold and gold enameline to keep a drowsy emperor awake or set upon a golden bow to sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past or passing or to come one never tires of life he wrote and at the last must die of thirst with the cup at one's lip late yates is extraordinary some of his finest poems were written in the last six or seven years of his life the courage rooted in his capacity for experience he now gives us the barbarism of truth in dreams he once wrote begins responsibility and the summing up is harsh in many of them did that play of mine send out certain men the english shot the echo answers lie down and die some of the most quoted lines in Elliot's masterpiece four quartets are spoken in the voice of the older yates they concern the gifts reserved for age the cold friction of expiring sense the impetus impotence of rage at human folly the laceration of laughter at what ceases to amuse the rending pain of reenactment of all that you have done and been of yates last poems Elliot said to what honest man old enough can these sentiments be alien the poems what then sang Plato's ghost the spur why should not old men be mad meru but man's life is thought and he despite his terror cannot cease ravening through century after century ravening raging and uprooting that he may come into the desolation of reality the municipal gallery revisited with its lovely last line about friendship is a kinder summing up then we have the mysterious or steer long-legged fly suggesting as it does that violent historical events and art may begin in strange stillness underneath which as he tells us lies in this poem an implacable artistic drive it's a difficult poem but worth the time the circus animals desertion is possibly the truest poem ever written about creativity we end with the ironically titled politics the last poem he wrote in which yates returns with an exhausted sweetness to the universal theme of love agreeing it would seem with browning love is best but first to what then what then his chosen comrades thought at school he must grow a famous man he thought the same and live by rule all his 20s crowned with toil what then sang Plato's ghost what then everything he wrote was read after certain years he won sufficient money for his need friends that have been friends indeed what then sang Plato's ghost what then all his happier dreams came true a small old house wife daughter son grounds where plum and cabbage grew poets and wits about him drew what then sang Plato's ghost what then the work is done grown old he thought according to my boyish plan let the fools rage i swerved in north something to perfection brought but louder sang that ghost what then yeah here we go how do you know typecasting yeah except it's all true the spur you think it's horrible that lust and rage should dance attention upon my old age they were not such a plague when i was young what else have i to spur me into song it'll come to you it'll come to you governor laugh don't chuckle too largely dude i'm just reading the title of the next one why should not old men be mad that insult to injury mom why should not old men be mad some have known a likely lad that had a sound fly fish's wrists turned to a drunken journalist a girl that knew old dante once lived to bear children to a dance a hellen of social welfare dream climb onto a wagonette to scream some think it a matter of course a chance should starve good men and bad advance that if their neighbors figured plain as though upon a lighted screen no single story would they find of an unbroken happy mind a finish worthy of the start young men know nothing of the sort observant old men know it well and when they know what old books tell and that no better can be had no then why old men should be mad maru civilization is hooped together brought under a rule under the semblance of peace by manifold illusion a man's life is thought and he despite his terror cannot cease ravening through centuries after century ravening raging and uprooting that he may come into the desolation of reality egypt and greece goodbye and goodbye rome hermits upon mount maru or everest caverned in night under the drifted snow or where that snow and winter's dreadful blast beat down upon their naked bodies know the day bring round the night that before dawn his glory and his monuments are gone the municipal gallery revisited around me the images of 30 years an ambush pilgrims at the water side casement upon trial half hidden by the bars guarded griffith staring in hysterical pride kevin o higgins countenance that wears a gentle questioning look that cannot hide a soul incapable of remorse or rest a revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed an abbot or archbishop with an upraised hand blessing the tricolor this is not i say the dead ireland of my youth but an ireland the poets have imagined terrible and gay before a woman's portrait suddenly i stand beautiful and gentle in her venetian way i met her all but 50 years ago for 20 minutes in some studio heart smitten with emotion i sink down my heart recovering with covered eyes wherever i had looked i had looked upon my permanent or impermanent images augusta greggory's son her sister's son hulane only baguette her of all these hazel lavory living and dying that tale as though some ballad singer had sung at all mancini's portrait of augusta greggory greatest since rembrandt according to john sing a great ebullant portrait certainly but where is the brush that could show anything of all that pride and that humanity and i am in despair that time may bring approved patterns of women or of men but not that self-same excellence again my medieval knees lack health until they bend but in that woman in that household where honor had lived so long all lacking found childless i thought my children may find here deep-rooted things but never foresaw its end and now that end has come i have not wept no fox can foul the lair the badger swept an image out of spencer and the common tongue john sing i and augusta greggory thought all that we did all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil from that contact everything and tales like grew strong we three alone in modern times had brought everything down to that soul test again dream of the noble and the beggar man and here's john sing himself that rooted man forgetting human words a grave deep face you that would judge me do not judge alone this book or that come to this hallowed place where my friends portraits hang and look there on ireland's history in their linman's trace think where man's lorry most begins and ends and say my glory was i had such friends long legged fly that civilization may not sink its great battle lost quiet the dog tethered the pony to a distant post our master caesar is in the tent where the maps are spread his eyes fixed upon nothing a hand under his head like a long legged fly upon the stream his mind moves upon silence that the topless towers be burnt and men recall that face move most gently if move you must in this lonely place she thinks part woman three parts a child but nobody looks her feet practice a tinker shuffle picked up on a street like a long legged fly upon the stream her mind moves upon silence that girls of puberty might find the first adam in their thoughts shut the door of the pope's chapel keep those children out there on that scaffolding reclines michael angelo with no more sound than the mice make his hands move to and fro like a long legged fly upon the stream his mind moves upon silence the circus animal's desertion i sought a theme and sought for it in vain i sought a daily for six weeks or so maybe at last being but a broken man i must be satisfied with my heart although winter and summer till old age began my circus animals were all on show those stilted boys that burnish chariot lion and woman and the lord knows what what can i but enumerate old themes first that sea rider ushing led by the nose through three enchanted islands allegorical dreams vain gaiety vain battle vain repose themes of the embittered heart or so it seems that might adorn old songs or courtly shows but what cared i that set him on to ride i starved for the bosom of his very bride and then a counter truth filled out its play the countess cathleen was the name i gave it she pity crazed had given her soul away but mastable heaven had intervened to save it i thought my dear must her own soul destroy so did fanaticism and hate enslave it and this brought forth a dream and soon enough this dream itself had all my thought and love and when the fool and blind man stole the bread kuhalan fought the ungovernable sea heart mysteries there and yet when all is said it was a dream itself enchanted me character isolated by a deed to engross the present and dominate memory players and painted stage took all my love and not those things that they were emblems of those mastable images because complete grew in pure mind but out of what began a mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street old kettles old bottles and a broken can old iron old bones old rags that raving slut who keeps the till now that my ladder's gone i must lie down where all the ladders start in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart politics ambassador how can i that girl standing there my attention fix on roman or on russian or on spanish or ukrainian politics yet here's a travel man that knows what he talks about and there's a politician that has read and thought and maybe what they say is true of war and war's alarms oh that i were young again and held her in my arms thank you thank you