William Butler Yeats 1865-1939

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William Butler Yeats1865-1939
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O Do Not Love Too Long

• Sweetheart, do not love too long
• I loved long and long
• And grew to be out of fashion
• Like an old song.
• All through the years of our youth
• Neither could have known
• Their own thought from the others,
• We were so much at one.
• But, O in a minute she changed
• O do not love too long,
• Or you will grow out of fashion
• Like an old song.

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Easter 1916

• I write it out in a verse
• MacDonagh and MacBride
• And Connolly and Pearse
• Now and in time to be,
• Wherever green is worn,
• Are changed, changed utterly
• A terrible beauty is born.

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To the Rose upon the Rood of Time

• But seek alone to hear the strange things said
• By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,
• And learn to chaunt a tongue, men do not know.
• Come nearI would, before my time to go,
• Sing of old Eri and the ancient ways
• Red Rose, Proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.

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There are some poets whose poems can be
considered more or less in isolation, for
experience and delight. There are others whose
poetry, though giving equally experience and
delight, has a larger historical importance.
Yeats was one of the latter. He was one of the
few whose history was the history of our own
time, who are part of the consciousness of our
age, which cannot be understood without them.
T.S. Eliot
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Post-Colonialism

• he does present another fascinating aspect that
  of the indisputably great national poet who
  articulates the experiences, the aspirations and
  the vision of a people suffering under the
  dominion of an offshore power. -Edward Said

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• How very unlike Ireland this whole place is. I
  only felt at home oncewhen I came to a steep
  lane with a stream in the middle. The rest one
  noticed with a foreign eye, picking out the
  stranger and not, as in ones own country, the
  familiar things for interestthe fault, by the
  way, of all poetry about countries not the
  writers own.