“THE REALISTS Hope that you may understand! What can books of men that wive In a dragon-guarded land, Paintings of the dolphin-drawn Sea-nymphs in their pearly waggons Do, but awake a hope to live That had gone With the dragons?” — W.B. Yeats Copy Share Image
“The host is rushing 'twixt day and night, And where is there hope or deed as fair? Caoilte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh… — W.B. Yeats Copy Share Image
“For the good are always the merry, Save by an evil chance, And the merry love the fiddle, And the merry love to dance.” — W.B. Yeats Copy Share Image
“I spit upon the dancers painted by Degas. I spit upon their short bodies, their stiff stays, their toes whereupon they spin like peg-tops,… — W.B. Yeats Copy Share Image
“I had fallen into a profound dream-like reverie in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who communes with only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives in imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he meet with and talk with, and the more does… — W.B. Yeats Copy Share
“Be you still, be you still, trembling heart; Remember the wisdom out of the old days: *Him who trembles before the flame and the… — W.B. Yeats Copy Share Image
“The Nineteenth Century And After Though the great song return no more There's keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on… — W.B. Yeats Copy Share Image
“What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together,… — W.B. Yeats Copy Share
“Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the present, where its elders are so obviously powerful, and no cause seems lost if… — W.B. Yeats Copy Share Image
“On November Eve they are at their gloomiest, for according to the old Gaelic reckoning, this is the first night of winter. This night they dance with the ghosts, and the pooka is abroad, and witches make their spells, and girls set a table with food in the name of the devil, that the fetch of their future lover may… — W.B. Yeats Copy Share
“... Those masterful 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… — W.B. Yeats Copy Share
“The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so… — W.B. Yeats Copy Share
