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.

About the headline (FAQ)

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

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 [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

• by Stanley Grill (b. 1953), "Two Songs of a Fool II", copyright © 1977 [soprano and piano], from Six Songs, no. 5, confirmed with an online score [ sung text verified 1 time]

This text (or a part of it) is used in a work

• by Gary Bachlund , "Songs of a Fool", 2010. [medium voice and piano]
  • Go to the full setting 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

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

This text was added to the website: 2011-12-28
Line count: 14
Word count: 99