W.B. Yeats: Likeness

W.B. Yeats was Irish poet and playwright. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.

W.B. Yeats: 510 quotes285 likes

“Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.”

W.B. Yeats The Land of Heart's Desire

Source: The Land of Heart's Desire

“O do not love too long,
Or you will grow out of fashion
Like an old song.”

W.B. Yeats

O Do Not Love Too Long http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1549/ In The Seven Woods (1904) Context: Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song. All through the years of our youth Neither could have known Their own thought from the other's We were so much at one. But O, in a minute she changed-- O do not love too long, Or you will grow out of fashion Like an old song.

“I loved long and long,
And grew to be out of fashion
Like an old song.”

W.B. Yeats

“Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna's children died.”

W.B. Yeats

St. 1
The Rose (1893), The Rose of the World

“Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.”

W.B. Yeats

Variant: Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

W.B. Yeats

"Earth, Fire and Water" from The Celtic Twilight (1893)
Source: The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

“When one gets quiet, then something wakes up inside one, something happy and quiet like the stars.”

W.B. Yeats

“A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.”

W.B. Yeats

St. 1 In The Seven Woods (1904), Adam's Curse http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1431/

“The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.”

W.B. Yeats

The Countess Cathleen http://www.letras.ufrj.br/veralima/6_referencias/63_e_texts_2005/yeats/countess_cathleen/yeats_countess_cathleen_2005.htm, last lines (1892)

“I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all — the colleges I mean — like an opera.”

W.B. Yeats

Letter to Katharine Tynan (25 August 1888)

“Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?”

W.B. Yeats

No Second Troy http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1548/ The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)

“We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men's souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.”

W.B. Yeats

St. 2
The Rose (1893), The Rose of the World

“Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of Silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.”

W.B. Yeats

The Magi http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1652/ Responsibilities (1914)

“This melancholy London. I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.”

W.B. Yeats

Letter to Katharine Tynan (25 August 1888)

“You say, as I have often given tongue
In praise of what another's said or sung,
'Twere politic to do the like by these;
But was there ever a dog that praised his fleas?”

W.B. Yeats

To A Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1724/ The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)

“Somewhere beyond the curtain
Of distorting days
Lives that lonely thing
That shone before these eyes
Targeted, trod like Spring.”

W.B. Yeats book The Winding Stair and Other Poems

Quarrel In Old Age http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1567/, st. 2 The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)

“Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.”

W.B. Yeats

Long-Legged Fly http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1525/, refrain Last Poems (1936-1939)

“When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea.”

W.B. Yeats

The Fiddler Of Dooney http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1620/, st. 1 The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)