15 William Butler Yeats Quotes on Poetry

William Butler Yeats quotes on poetry

5. Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

9. We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

22. Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days! Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways.

29. We and the labouring world are passing by: Amid men's souls, that waver and give place Like the pale waters in their wintry race, Under the passing stars, foam of the sky, Lives on this lonely face.

30. Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode: Before you were, or any hearts to beat, Weary and kind one lingered by His seat; He made the world to be a grassy road Before her wandering feet.

31. The Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.

43. Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and the never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that's lovely is but a brief, dreamy, kind of delight. O never give the heart outright, For they, for all smooth lips 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.

56. Some may have blamed you that you took away The verses that could move them on the day When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind With lightning, you went from me, and I could find Nothing to make a song about but kings, Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things That were like memories of you--but now We'll out, for the world lives as long ago; And while we're in our laughing, weeping fit, Hurl helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit. But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone, My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.

60. Have you made greatness your companion, Although it be for children that you sigh: These are the clouds about the fallen sun, The majesty that shuts his burning eye.

63. While I, that reed-throated whisperer Who comes at need, although not now as once A clear articulation in the air, But inwardly, surmise companions Beyond the fling of the dull ass's hoof -Ben Jonson's phrase-and find when June is come At Kyle-na-no under that ancient roof A sterner conscience and a friendlier home, I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs, Those undreamt accidents that have made me -Seeing that Fame has perished that long while, Being but a part of ancient ceremony- Notorious, till all my priceless things Are but a post the passing dogs defile.

131. At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave, Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

134. But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.

159. You think it 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?

165. I have found nothing half so good As my long-planned half solitude, Where I can sit up half the night With some friend that has the wit Not to allow his looks to tell When I am unintelligible.

168. Irish poets, earn your trade, Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds.