Responsibilities, and Other Poems

“Dance there upon the shore; What need have you to care For wind or water’s roar? And tumble out your hair That the salt drops have wet;Being young you have not known The fool’s triumph, nor yet Love lost as soon as won, Nor the best labourer dead And all the sheaves to bind.What need have you to dread The monstrous crying of wind? Has no one said those daring Kind eyes should be more learn’d? Or warned you how despairing The moths are when they are burned, I could have warned you, but you are young, So we speak a different tongue. O you will take whatever’s offered And dream that all the world’s a friend, Suffer as your mother suffered, Be as broken in the end. But I am old and you are young, And I speak a barbarous tongue.””

— W. B. Yeats

“Why should the faithfullest heart most love The bitter sweetness of false faces?””

— W. B. Yeats

“Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death,””

— W. B. Yeats

“THE REALISTS Hope that you may understand! What can books of men that wive In a dragon-guarded land, Paintings of the dolphin-drawn Sea-nymphs in their pearly waggons Do, but awake a hope to live That had gone With the dragons?””

— W. B. Yeats