All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman’s face, or worse — The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil. When I was young, I had not given a penny for a song Did not the poet sing it with such airs That one believed he had a sword upstairs; Yet would be now, could I but have my wish, Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.
Youth and Age
Song Cycle by Lowell Dykstra (b. 1952)
1. All things can tempt me  [sung text checked 1 time]
Authorship:
- by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), "All things can tempt me", appears in Responsibilities and Other Poems, first published 1916
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Confirmed with W. B. Yeats, Responsibilities and Other Poems, New York: The Macmillan company, 1916.
Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]
2. To a Child dancing in the Wind  [sung text checked 1 time]
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?
Authorship:
- by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), "To a child dancing in the wind"
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Note: also sometimes titled "To a Child dancing upon the shore"First published in Poetry, Chicago (December 1912), revised 1913
Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]
3. Two years later  [sung text checked 1 time]
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]1 tongue.
Authorship:
- by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), "Two years later"
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View original text (without footnotes)1 Grill: "different"
Research team for this page: Emily Ezust [Administrator] , Malcolm Wren [Guest Editor]
4. The wild swans at Coole  [sung text checked 1 time]
The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine and fifty swans. The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me Since I first made my count; I saw, before I had well finished, All suddenly mount And scatter wheeling in great broken rings Upon their clamorous wings. I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore. All's changed since I, hearing at twilight, The first time on this shore, The bell-beat of their wings above my head, Trod with a lighter tread. Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold, Companionable streams or climb the air; Their hearts have not grown old; Passion or conquest, wander where they will, Attend upon them still. But now they drift on the still water Mysterious, beautiful; Among what rushes will they build, By what lake's edge or pool Delight men's eyes, when I awake some day To find they have flown away?
Authorship:
- by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), "The wild swans at Coole"
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Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):
- FRE French (Français) (Pierre Mathé) , "Les cygnes sauvages à Coole", copyright © 2015, (re)printed on this website with kind permission
Confirmed with W. B. Yeats, Later Poems, Macmillan and Co., London, 1926, page 237.
First published in Little Review, June 1917Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]
5. He wishes for the cloths of heaven  [sung text checked 1 time]
Had I the [heavens']1 embroidered cloths Enwrought with golden and silver light The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Authorship:
- by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), title 1: "Aedh wishes for the cloths of heaven", title 2: "He wishes for the cloths of heaven", appears in The Wind among the reeds, first published 1899
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Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):
- FRE French (Français) (Pierre Mathé) , copyright © 2015, (re)printed on this website with kind permission
- HUN Hungarian (Magyar) (Tamás Rédey) , copyright © 2015, (re)printed on this website with kind permission
Original title is "Aedh wishes for the cloths of heaven"; revised 1906; re-titled "He wishes for the cloths of heaven".
Confirmed with W. B. Yeats, Later Poems, Macmillan and Co., London, 1926, page 45.
1 Gurney: "Heaven's"Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]
6. The Second Coming  [sung text checked 1 time]
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 blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. 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, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know 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?
Authorship:
- by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), "The Second Coming"
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Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):
- GER German (Deutsch) [singable] (Walter A. Aue) , "Das zweite Kommen", copyright © 2010, (re)printed on this website with kind permission
Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]
7. Youth and age  [sung text checked 1 time]
Much did I rage when young, Being by the world oppressed, But now with flattering tongue It speeds the parting guest.
Authorship:
- by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), "Youth and age"
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Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]8. Men improve with the years  [sung text checked 1 time]
I am worn out with dreams; A weather-worn, marble triton Among the streams; And all day long I look Upon this lady's beauty As though I had found in book A pictured beauty, Pleased to have filled the eyes Or the discerning ears, Delighted to be but wise, For men improve with the years; And yet and yet Is this my dream, or the truth? O would that we had met When I had my burning youth; But I grow old among dreams, A weather-worn, marble triton Among the streams.
Authorship:
- by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), "Men improve with the years", appears in The Wild Swans at Coole
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Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):
- FRE French (Français) (Pierre Mathé) , "Les hommes s'améliorent avec l'âge", copyright © 2015, (re)printed on this website with kind permission
Confirmed with W. B. Yeats, Later Poems, Macmillan and Co., London, 1926, page 246.
First published in Little Review, June 1917Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]
9. The fisherman  [sung text checked 1 time]
Although I can see him still — The freckled man who goes To a gray place on a hill In gray Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his flies — It's long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man. All day I'd looked in the face What I had hoped it would be To write for my own race And the reality: The living men that I hate, The dead man that I loved, The craven man in his seat, The insolent unreproved — And no knave brought to book Who has won a drunken cheer — The witty man and his joke Aimed at the commonest ear, The clever man who cries The catch cries of the clown, The beating down of the wise And great Art beaten down. Maybe a twelve-month since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man, And his sun-freckled face And gray Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark with froth, And the down turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream — A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, “Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.”
Authorship:
- by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), "The fisherman"
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Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]10. The circus animals' desertion  [sung text checked 1 time]
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. 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.
Authorship:
- by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), "The circus animals' desertion"
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Confirmed with The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, ed. by Richard J. Finneran, Macmillan Publishing Company.
Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]