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Songs of a Fool

Set by Gary Bachlund (b. 1947), "Songs of a Fool", 2010 [ medium voice and piano ] [Sung Text]

Note: this setting is made up of several separate texts.

Translations available : FRE 


A speckled cat and a tame hare
Eat at my hearthstone
And sleep there;
And both look up to me alone
For learning and defence
As I look up to Providence.

I start out of my sleep to think
Some day I may forget
Their food [and] drink;
Or, the house door left unshut,
The hare may run till it's found
The horn's sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

I bear a burden that might well try
Men that do all by rule,
And what can I
That am a wandering-witted fool
But pray to God that He ease
My great responsibilities?

Text Authorship:

  • by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), no title, appears in The Wild Swans at Coole, in Two Songs of a Fool, no. 1, first published 1919

See other settings of this text.

Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):

  • FRE French (Français) (Pierre Mathé) , copyright © 2015, (re)printed on this website with kind permission

Confirmed with W. B. Yeats, Later Poems, Macmillan and Co., London, 1926, page 313.

Grill: "or"

Research team for this page: Emily Ezust [Administrator] , Malcolm Wren [Guest Editor]



I slept on my three-leged stool by the fire,
The speckled cat slept on my knee;
We never thought to enquire
Where the brown hare might be,
And whether the door were shut.
Who knows how she drank the wind
Stretched up on two legs from the mat,
Before she had settled her mind
To drum with her heel and to leap:
Had I but awakened from sleep
And called her name, she had heard,
It may be, and not have stirred,
That now, it may be, has found
The horn's sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

Text Authorship:

  • by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), no title, appears in The Wild Swans at Coole, in Two Songs of a Fool, no. 2, first published 1919

See other settings of this text.

Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):

  • FRE French (Français) (Pierre Mathé) , copyright © 2015, (re)printed on this website with kind permission

Confirmed with W. B. Yeats, Later Poems, Macmillan and Co., London, 1926, page 314.


Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]


Author(s): William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939)
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