In mockery I have set A powerful emblem up, And sing it rhyme upon rhyme In mockery of a time Half dead at the top.
I sat on cushioned otter-skin: My word was law from Ith to Emain, And shook at Invar Amargin The hearts of the world-troubling seamen, And drove tumult and war away...
I know of the leafy paths that the witches take Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool, And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake...
A tree there is that from its topmost bough Is half all glittering flame and half all green Abounding foliage moistened with the dew; And half is half and yet is all the scene; And half and half consume what they renew...
All the stream that’s roaring by Came out of a needle’s eye...
What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
But Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement. For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.
The wind blows out of the gates of the day, The wind blows over the lonely of heart, And the lonely of heart is withered away.
How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics?
Time can but make her beauty over again.
Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns? I have been changed to a hound with one red ear; I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns...
But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love Of solitary beds, knew what they were, That passion could bring character enough And pressed at midnighht in some public place Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.
When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay; Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side, The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream...
In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.
The Muse is mute when public men Applaud a modern throne.
Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war?
Him who trembles before the flame and the flood, And the winds that blow through the starry ways, Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood Cover over and hide, for he has no part With the lonely, majestical multitude.
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...
All that could run or leap or swim Whether in wood, water or cloud, Acclaiming, proclaiming, declaiming Him.
The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told; I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart...