Selected Poems of William Butler Yeats

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

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.

Questions for Discussion

1. At the end of "Sailing to Byzantium," the speaker imagines transformation into

A) a woman

B) an auto

C) a mechanical bird

D) a god

2. In "Sailing to Byzantium," the element that death is most associated with is

A) air

B) fire

C) earth

D) water

3. The direction that the spirits would move around the speaker in "Sailing to Byzantium" is in a

A) circle

B) zig-zag

C) straight line

D) gyre

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last, being but a broken man,

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show,

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,

First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose

Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,

Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,

Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,

That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;

But what cared I that set him on to ride,

I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,

'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;

She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,

But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.

I thought my dear must her own soul destroy

So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough

This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread

Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;

Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said

It was the dream itself enchanted me:

Character isolated by a deed

To engross the present and dominate memory.

Players and painted stage took all my love,

And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Leda and the Swan [1924]

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Questions for Discussion

1. "Leda and the Swan" describes an act of

A) murder

B) rape

C) love

D) mercy

2. The swan can be identified with which mythical figure?

A) Mars

B) Hercules

C) Zeus

D) Bacchus

3. In which poetic form is "Leda and the Swan" written?

A) sonnet

B) ballad

C) hymn

D) ode

E) none of the above

The rhyme scheme of the poem is

A) ABAB CDCD EFGEFG

A) erotic imagery

B) allusion

C) metaphor

D) rhetorical questions

E)

A important shift, or turn, in the poem occurs

between the first two stanzas.

between the first eight lines and the final six.

before the last two lines of the final stanza.

4. The tone of this poem is best described as —

A) scholarly

B) cautionary

D)

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