Seven Poems and a FragmentYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
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Seven Poems and a Fragment
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
English poetry -- Irish authors
(motioning to them to stop)
Yet make triumphant music; sing aloud
For coming times will bless what he has blessed
And curse what he has cursed.
OLDEST PUPIL.
No, no, be still;
Or pluck a solemn music from the strings.
You wrong his greatness speaking so of triumph.
YOUNGEST PUPIL.
O silver trumpets, be you lifted up
And cry to the great race that is to come.
Long-throated swans upon the waves of time
Sing loudly, for beyond the wall of the world
That race may hear our music and awake.
OLDEST PUPIL.
(motioning the musicians to lower their trumpets)
Not what it leaves behind it in the light
But what it carries with it to the dark
Exalts the soul; nor song nor trumpet-blast
Can call up races from the worsening world
To mend the wrong and mar the solitude
Of the great shade we follow to the tomb.
(Fedelm and the pupils go out carrying the litter. Some play
a mournful music.)
NOTE ON 'THOUGHTS UPON THE PRESENT STATE OF THE WORLD' SECTION SIX.
The country people see at times certain apparitions whom they name now
'fallen angels' now 'ancient inhabitants of the country,' and describe
as riding at whiles 'with flowers upon the heads of the horses.' I have
assumed in the sixth poem that these horsemen, now that the times
worsen, give way to worse. My last symbol Robert Artisson was an evil
spirit much run after in Kilkenny at the start of the fourteenth
century. Are not those who travel in the whirling dust also in the
Platonic Year?--W. B. Y.
NOTE ON THE NEW END TO 'THE KING'S THRESHOLD'
Upon the revival of this play at the Abbey Theatre a few weeks ago it
was played with this new end. There were a few other changes. I had
originally intended to end the play tragically and would have done so
but for a friend who used to say 'O do write comedy & have a few happy
moments in the Theatre.' My unhappy moments were because a tragic effect
is very fragile and a wrong intonation, or even a wrong light or costume
will spoil it all. However the play remained always of the nature of
tragedy and so subject to vicissitude.
Here ends, 'Seven Poems and a Fragment:' by William Butler Yeats:
with a decoration by T. Sturge Moore. Five hundred copies of this book
have been printed and published by Elizabeth Corbet Yeats on paper made
in Ireland, at the Cuala Press, Churchtown, Dundrum, in the County of
Dublin, Ireland. Finished in the third week of April in the year
nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
End of Project Gutenberg's Seven Poems and a Fragment, by William Butler Yeats
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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