The works of W. B. Yeats

• “A king is but a foolish labourer / Who wastes his blood to be another’s dream.”

  The Coming of Wisdom with Time

“Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth.”

The Magi

…

“And all their helms of silver hovering side by side And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find one more, Being by Cavalry’s turbulence unsatisfied, The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.”

• Interesting… turbulence depends on a cascade of vortexes hovering side by side in mutual exchange and stretch, before dissipating into the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor. We are vortices…
• Unsatisfied…some Buddhist connotations here. Life is characterized by dissatisfaction.

The Irish Airman Foresees his Death

…

Those that I fight I do not hate, That that I guard I do not love,

…

A lonely impulse of delight Drew me to this tumult of clouds;

…

Solomon to Sheba

…

Discovered that my thoughts, not it, Are but a narrow pound.

…

There’s not a thing but love can make The world a narrow pound.

• Wisdom and love. The first, wisdom, recognizing how small we are. The second, love, condensing the world into a tangible point of infinity.

  Tom O’Roughley

‘Though logic-choppers rule the town, And every man and maid and boy Has marked a distant object down, And aimless joy is a pure joy,’

…

‘And wisdom is a butterfly And not a gloomy bird of prey. If little planned is little sinned But little need the grave distress. What’s dying but a second wind?

…

Shepherd and Goatherd

… Knowledge he shall unwind Through victories of the mind, Till, clambering at the cradle-side, He dreams himself his mother’s pride, All knowledge lost in trance Of sweeter ignorance.

• Philonikia (love of victory) unraveling knowledge, making us infantile and relishing the love and recognition from parents, and losing ourselves in that sweet dream of ignorance. Brilliant

The Double Vision of Michael Robartes (II)

On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw
A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,
A Buddha, hand at rest,
Hand lifted up that blest;

And right between these two a girl at play
That, it may be, had danced her life away,
For now being dead it seemed
That she of dancing dreamed.

Although I saw it all in the mind’s eye
There can be nothing solider till I die;
I saw it by the moon’s light
Now at its fifteenth night.

One lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon
Gazed upon all things known, all things unknown,
In triumph of intellect
With motionless head erect.

That other’s moonlit eyeballs never moved,
Being fixed on all things loved, all things unloved,
Yet little peace he had,
For all that love are sad.

O little did they care who danced between,
And little she by whom her dance was seen
So she had outdanced thought.
Body perfection brought,

For what but eye and ear silence the mind
With the minute particulars of mankind?
Mind moved yet seemed to stop
As ’twere a spinning-top.

In contemplation had those three so wrought
Upon a moment, and so stretched it out
That they, time overthrown,
Were dead yet flesh and bone

• Lovely. The sphinx a symbol of knowledge/wisdom (and a sort of intellectual prowess/pride), the Buddha of love, and the carefree girl playfully dancing in between.
• “Yet little peace he had, / For those that love are sad.”
• “Mind moved but seems to stop, / As ‘twere a spinning top.”

Sailing to Byzantium

“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.”

Meditations in time of civil war

VII

“[…]

Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie, Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone, Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency, The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.”

• Lack of delight and wonder, lack of foresight, lack of gratitude, nothing but grasping, ignorance, and restless myopic activity. Getting Buddhist vibes from this. The moon is a symbol for clarity, peace, and enlightenment.

Among School Children

… Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

• Labour blossoms or dances when conditions are cultivated with love (no bruising)
• Beauty is not born out of despairing, nor is wisdom by overworking with little sleep?
• Is the tree the leaf, the blossom, or the trunk? Is the dancer the dance? Is the lover love? Is the wise wisdom?

  Human Dignity

I could recover if I shrieked My heart’s agony To passing bird, but I am dumb From human dignity

• Pride—>stupidity
• Repenting? Praying for mercy? The passing bird—> Holy Spirit? Dove?

All Souls’ Thought

…

Such thought, that in it bound I need no other thing, Wound in mind’s wandering As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.

A Dialogue Between Self and Soul

II.

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more? Endure that toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

The finished man among his enemies?— How in the name of Heaven can he escape That defiling and disfigured shape The mirror of malicious eyes Casts upon his eyes until at last He thinks that shape must be his shape? And what’s the good of an escape If honour find him in the wintry blast?

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, A blind man battering blind men; Or into that most fecund ditch of all, The folly that man does Or must suffer, if he woos A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.

• Love this one. Story of man. Start out ignorant, small, clumsy, envious and impatient. Then, once ‘finished’, attracts envy from enemies, and starts to see himself as they see him. Yet being to content to do it all again, starting out as a mere ignorant tadpole ‘blind battering blind’, and being made a fool by unrequited love. And finally, the beautiful mutual blessedness of life. Laughing, singing, and blessing everything with our attention as its attention blesses us.

Blood and the Moon

… I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair; …

Spilt Milk

We that have done and thought, That have thought and done, Must ramble, and thin out, Like milk spilt on a stone.

Coole Park

… And half a dozen in formation there, That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point, Found certainty upon the dreaming air …

• Talking of swallow formations. But this wonderfully captures turbulent eddies…Found certainty upon the dreaming air… ah…