"There are no strangers here; only friends we haven't yet met." - W. B. Yeats

"There are no strangers here; only friends we haven't yet met." - W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was far more than just another cranky Irish egghead. He was, and remains, a literary giant of the first order, awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in literature and his poetry has endured for a century and more. As such, he is worthy of a lingering look back. Without further ado, a selection of the wit and wisdom of W.B.Yeats.

"Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party." 

"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”

 "The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober."

"My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that somebody has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum-- however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology-- he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him."

"The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.” 

"What can be explained is not poetry."

"There is another world, but it is in this one."

"I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made."

"Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry."

"In dreams begin responsibilities."

"Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!"

"I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters".

"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."

"For he would be thinking of love/Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon.”

"Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing."

"One loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps." 

I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them.

- Celtic Twilight

"Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That's all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh." - A Drinking Song

“Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

―  The Wind Among the Reeds

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping 

than you can understand.” 
- The Stolen Child (excerpt)

Think where man's glory

Most begins and ends
And say my glory was
That I had such friends.” 

- The Municipal Gallery Revisited (excerpt)

A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him up for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.” 
- The Mermaid (excerpt)

    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: a waste of desert sand;

    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

    Wind 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 Second Coming (1920)

An Irish Airman foresees his Death

I Know that I shall meet my fate 

Somewhere among the clouds above; 

Those that I fight I do not hate 

Those that I guard I do not love, 

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, 

No likely end could bring them loss 

Or leave them happier than before. 

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, 

Nor public man, nor cheering crowds, 

A lonely impulse of delight 

Drove to this tumult in the clouds; 

I balanced all, brought all to mind, 

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind 

In balance with this life, this death.” 

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.