I bear a burden that might well try Men that do all by rule, And what can I That am a wandering-witted fool But pray to God that He ease My great responsibilities?
Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.
Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.
Maybe the bride-bed brings despair, For each an imagined image brings And finds a real image there...
Pale brows, still hands and dim hair, I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the old despair Would end in love in the end.
People are responsible for their opinions, but Providence is responsible for their morals.
What can books of men that wive In a dragon-guarded land, Paintings of the dolphin-drawn Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons Do, but awake a hope to live...?
All the wild-witches, those most notable ladies For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.
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.
Even the wisest man grows tense With some sort of violence Before he can accomplish fate, Know his work or choose his mate. Poet and sculptor, do the work, Nor let the modish painter shirk
A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
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.
A passion-driven exultant man sings out Sentences that he has never thought.
I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.
"Chaunt in his ear delusions magical, That he may fight the horses of the sea." The Druids took them to their mystery, And chaunted for three days.
I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch.
What shall I do for pretty girls Now my old bawd is dead?
But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love Of solitary beds, knew what they were, That passion could bring character enough And pressed at midnighht in some public place Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.
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 Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart.
Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery.
A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught... Better go down upon your marrow-bones / And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones... For to articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these, and yet / Be thought an idler by the noisy set.
I bring you with reverent hands The books of my numberless dreams.
And learn that the best thing is To change my loves while dancing And pay but a kiss for a kiss.
All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbor knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?
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