The code above should put inside tag Top 6 William B. Yeats’ Stoic Poems On Life - Endless Awesome

Top 6 William B. Yeats’ Stoic Poems On Life


William Butler Yeats is one of the known greatest poets of the 20th century. He’s a poet representing people and country in his entire life as an artist, and his brilliant works of poetry have been recognized and widely read by many people across the globe. Here are the top 6 of William B. Yeats’ stoic poems on life that have reached many people’s creative minds and interests. 


A NEEDLE’S EYE

All the stream that’s roaring by

Came out of a needle’s eye;

Things unborn, things that are gone,

From needle’s eye still goad it on.


A MAN YOUNG AND OLD: THE EMPTY CUP

A crazy man that found a cup,

When all but dead of thirst,

Hardly dared to wet his mouth

Imagining, moon-accursed,

That another mouthful

And his beating heart would burst.

October last I found it too

But found it dry as bone,

And for that reason am I crazed

And my sleep is gone.


INTO THE TWILIGHT

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,

Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;

Laugh heart again in the gray twilight,

Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,

Dew ever shining and twilight gray;

Though hope fall from you and love decay,

Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:

For there the mystical brotherhood

Of sun and moon and hollow and wood

And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,

And time and the world are ever in flight;

And love is less kind than the gray twilight,

And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.


Being brilliant in his craft, he is a prose writer, dramatist, and known to be one of the twentieth century’s most famous poets. He also received the well-known Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. Here are some of Yeats’ stoic poems recorded in the history of poetry. 


SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

I

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

–Those dying generations–at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unaging intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.


THE SECOND COMING

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,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at laSt,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


THE PEOPLE 

What have I earned for all that work, I said,

For all that I have done at my own charge?

The daily spite of this unmannerly town,

Where who has served the most is most defamed,

The reputation of his lifetime lost

Between the night and morning. I might have lived,

And you know well how great the longing has been,

Where every day my footfall should have lit

In the green shadow of Ferrara wall;

Or climbed among the images of the past

The unperturbed and courtly images

Evening and morning, the steep street of Urbino

To where the duchess and her people talked

The stately midnight through until they stood

In their great window looking at the dawn;

I might have had no friend that could not mix

Courtesy and passion into one like those

That saw the wicks grow yellow in the dawn;

I might have used the one substantial right

My trade allows: chosen my company,

And chosen what scenery had pleased me best.

Thereon my phoenix answered in reproof,

The drunkards, pilferers of public funds,

All the dishonest crowd I had driven away,

When my luck changed and they dared meet my face,

Crawled from obscurity, and set upon me

Those I had served and some that I had fed;

Yet never have I, now nor any time,

Complained of the people.

All I could reply

Was: You, that have not lived in thought but deed,

Can have the purity of a natural force,

But I, whose virtues are the definitions

Of the analytic mind, can neither close

The eye of the mind nor keep my tongue from speech.

And yet, because my heart leaped at her words,

I was abashed, and now they come to mind

After nine years, I sink my head abashed.

THESE ARE THE TOP 6 WILLIAM B. YEATS’ STOIC POEMS ON LIFE. WHICH ONE IS YOUR FAVORITE?  VISIT OUR CHANNEL ENDLESS AWESOME TO WATCH MORE INSPIRING POEMS LIKE THIS!

Contact us for more information.

Recent Posts

%d bloggers like this: