To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me “weak” or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life…If I had not made m...
The Mother Of God The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare Through the hollow of an ear; Wings beating about the room; The terror of all terrors that I bore The Heavens in my womb. Had I not found content among the shows Every common woman knows,...
To A Squirrel At Kyle-Na-No Come play with me; Why should you run Through the shaking tree As though I'd a gun To strike you dead? When all I would do Is to scratch your head And let you go.
O bid me mount and sail up there Amid the cloudy wrack, For Peg and Meg and Paris' love That had so straight a back, Are gone away, and some that stay Have changed their silk for sack.
An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing,
And now he is singing a bard's curse upon you, O brother abbot, and upon your father and your mother, and your grandfather and your grandmother, nd upon all your relations.' Is he cursing in rhyme?' He is cursing in rhyme, and with two assonances in ...
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
THOUGH you are in your shining days, Voices among the crowd And new friends busy with your praise, Be not unkind or proud, But think about old friends the most: Time's bitter flood will rise, Your beauty perish and be lost For all eyes but these eyes...
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
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 naught.
What can be explained is not poetry.
O cowardly amd tyrannous race of monks, persecutors of the bard, and the gleemen, haters of life and joy! O race that does not draw the sword and tell the truth! O race that melts the bones of the people with cowardice and with deceit! ("The Crucifix...
THE HOST is riding from Knocknarea And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare; Caolte tossing his burning hair And Niamh calling Away, come away: Empty your heart of its mortal dream. The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, Our cheeks are pale, our hair ...
Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-coloured Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.
The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.
The Celt, and his cromlechs, and his pillar-stones, these will not change much – indeed, it is doubtful if anybody at all changes at any time. In spite of hosts of deniers, and asserters, and wise-men, and professors, the majority still are adverse...
Wine enters through the mouth, Love, the eyes. I raise the glass to my mouth, I look at you, I sigh.
