What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But thos the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts -- O presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise --
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;
VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
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More Poems by William Butler Yeats
• A Poet To His Beloved
• A Prayer For My Daughter
• A Prayer For My Son
• A Prayer On Going Into My House
• Adam's Curse
• Aedh Wishes For The Clothes Of Heaven
• Among School Children
• An Irish Airman Forsees His Death
• Are You Content?
• Before The World Was Made
• Beggar To Beggar Cried
• Byzantium
• Crazy Jane On God
• Death
• Demon And Beast
• Easter, 1916
• Ephemera
• Fallen Majesty
• He Bids His Beloved Be At Peace
• He Rembers Forgotten Beauty
• He Thinks Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil Of His Beloved
• Imitated From The Japanese
• Lapis Lazuli
• Leda And The Swan
• Long-Legged Fly
• Mohini Chatterjee
• Never Give All The Heart
• No Second Troy
• Responsibilities
• Sailing To Byzantium
• Solomon And The Witch
• Solomon To Sheba
• Spilt Milk
• The Fascination Of What's Difficult
• The Folly Of Being Comforted
• The Gyres
•
The Heart Of The Woman
•
The Indian To His Love
•
The Indian Upon God
•
The Lake Isle Of Innisfree
•
The Lover Asks Forgiveness Because Of His Many Moods
•
The Second Coming
•
The Stolen Child
•
The Two Trees
•
The Wild Swans At Coole
•
To A Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators Of His And Mine
•
When You Are Old
Also read poems by
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Emily Dickinson
• George Gordon, Lord Byron
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Hilaire Belloc
• John Donne
• John Keats
• Lewis Carroll
• Robert Frost
• Robert Browning
• Robert Burns
• Robert Herrick
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Rudyard Kipling
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Sarah Teasdale
• Thomas Hardy
• Walt Whitman
• William Blake
• William Wordsworth
Yeats Among School Children - Poem Lyrics - William Butler Yeats - Among School Children
