TO A SHADE
by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)
- F you have revisited the town,
thin Shade,
- Whether to look upon your monument
- (I wonder if the builder has been paid)
- Or happier-thoughted when the day is spent
- To drink of that salt breath out of the sea
- When grey gulls flit about instead of men,
- And the gaunt houses put on majesty:
- Let these content you and be gone again;
- For they are at their old tricks yet.
-
- A man
- Of your own passionate serving kind who had brought
- In his full hands what, had they only known,
- Had given their children's children loftier thought,
- Sweeter emotion, working in their veins
- Like gentle blood, has been driven from the place,
- And insult heaped upon him for his pains,
- And for his open-handedness, disgrace;
- Your enemy, an old foul mouth, had set
- The pack upon him.
-
- Go, unquiet wanderer,
- And gather the Glasnevin coverlet
- About your head till the dust stops your ear,
- The time for you to taste of that salt breath
- And listen at the corners has not come;
- You had enough of sorrow before death--
- Away, away! You are safer in the tomb.
-
- September 29, 1913
"To a Shade" is reprinted
from Responsibilities. W.B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan,
1916. |
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POEMS BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS |
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