greykit.poetry — W B Yeats
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1928
[w-b-yeats]
Sailing to Byzantium
Yeats leaves the country of the young and sensual — dying generations caught in their music — and sails to the holy city of Byzantium, asking its gold-mosaic sages to gather him out of nature into the artifice of eternity, a hammered golden bird singing of what is past, or passing, or to come.
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1920
[w-b-yeats]
The Second Coming
The widening gyre of history unravels ceremony and conviction; out of Spiritus Mundi a rough beast with lion body and human head slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.
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1919
[w-b-yeats]
The Wild Swans at Coole
On his nineteenth October at Coole Park, Yeats counts fifty-nine swans and watches them mount and scatter — unwearied, their hearts not grown old — and wonders where they will delight men's eyes when he wakes to find they have flown away.
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1916
[w-b-yeats]
Easter, 1916
Yeats's elegy for the leaders of the Easter Rising — men he had passed with a nod, transformed utterly by their sacrifice into a terrible beauty that is born.
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1890
[w-b-yeats]
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
Yeats's longing for the simple life on Innisfree — a cabin, nine bean-rows, a hive for the honey-bee — heard even in the deep heart's core while standing on city pavements.