William Butler Yeats

O 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 other’s, We were so much at one. But, O in a minute she changed— O do not love too long, Or you will grow out of fashion Like an old song.

Easter 1916 I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

To the Rose upon the Rood of Time But seek alone to hear the strange things said By God to the bright hearts of those long dead, And learn to chaunt a tongue, men do not know. Come near—I would, before my time to go, Sing of old Eri and the ancient ways: Red Rose, Proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.

There are some poets whose poems can be considered more or less in isolation, for experience and delight. There are others whose poetry, though giving equally experience and delight, has a larger historical importance. Yeats was one of the latter. He was one of the few whose history was the history of our own time, who are part of the consciousness of our age, which cannot be understood without them. T.S. Eliot

Post-Colonialism …he does present another fascinating aspect: that of the indisputably great national poet who articulates the experiences, the aspirations and the vision of a people suffering under the dominion of an offshore power. -Edward Said

How very unlike Ireland this whole place is. I only felt at home once—when I came to a steep lane with a stream in the middle. The rest one noticed with a foreign eye, picking out the stranger and not, as in one’s own country, the familiar things for interest—the fault, by the way, of all poetry about countries not the writer’s own.