W B Yeats poetry Flashcards
‘turning and turning…’
The Second Coming
(Michael Robartes and the Dancer, 1920)
• 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 ceremony of innocence is drowned’
‘surely some…’
The Second Coming
(Michael Robartes and the Dancer, 1920)
• ‘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: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,’
‘that twenty centuries…’
The Second Coming
(Michael Robartes and the Dancer, 1920)
• ‘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?’
‘ah, Exiles…’
The Dedication to a Book of Stories Selected From the Irish Novelists (in The Rose, 1893)
• ‘Ah, Exiles wandering over land and seas,
And planning, plotting always that some morrow
May set a stone upon ancestral Sorrow!
I also bear a bell-branch full of ease.’
‘that country…’
The Dedication to a Book of Stories Selected From the Irish Novelists (in The Rose, 1893)
• ‘That country where a man can be so crossed…
That he’s a loveless man…
And yet the saddest chimes are best enjoyed’
‘While I wrought…’
To Some I Have Talked With By The Fire (in The Rose, 1893)
• ‘While I wrought out these fitful Danaan rhymes’
a supernatural race in Irish mythology; however, can also refer to ‘Greek people[s]’ of ancient times, showing impact of influence/impossibilitiy of an isolated Irishness
‘the dark folk…’
To Some I Have Talked With By The Fire (in The Rose, 1893)
• ‘the dark folk who live in souls/of passionate men’
‘a line will take…’
Adam’s Curse (from In the Seven Woods, 1904)
‘A line will take us hours maybe:
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.’
Who do poets work harder than?
Adam’s Curse (from In the Seven Woods, 1904)
• Insists that poets ‘work harder’ than ‘bankers, schoolteachers, clergymen’ yet is thought to be ‘an idler’
A Drinking Song (from The Green Helmet and Other Poems, 1912)
• ‘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.’
Refrain of A Song (from The Wild Swans at Coole, 1919)
‘for who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?’
The Double Vision of Michael Robartes (from The Wild Swans at Coole, 1919)
‘on the grey rock of Cashel…’
• On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw
A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,
A Buddha, hand at rest’
The Double Vision of Michael Robartes (from The Wild Swans at Coole, 1919)
‘as though I had been…’
• ‘as though I had been undone
By Homer’s Paragon’
The Double Vision of Michael Robartes (from The Wild Swans at Coole, 1919)
‘being caught between…’
• ‘Being caught between the pull
OF the dark moon and the full,
The commonness of thought and images
That have the frenzy of our western seas’
