Life and Existence

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils, And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile.

Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

My secrets cry aloud. I have no need for tongue. My heart keeps open house, My doors are widely flung.

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, Cut stems struggling to put down feet, What saint strained so much, Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, Cut stems struggling to put down feet, What saint strained so much, Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?

If thou must choose Between the chances, choose the odd; Read the New Yorker; trust in God; And take short views.

And children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

One rational voice is dumb: over a grave The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved.

To us he is no more a person Now but a whole climate of opinion.

Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odor of death Offends the September night.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.

O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed. The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.

The greater the love, the more false to its object, Not to be born is the best for man; After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle, Break the embraces, dance while you can.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart.

Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart.

Let us honor if we can The vertical man Though we value none But the horizontal one.

Patrick Maguire, the old peasant, can neither be damned nor glorified: The graveyard in which he will lie will be just a deep-drilled potato-field Where the seed gets no chance to come through To the fun of the sun. The tongue in his mouth is the root of a yew.

Patrick Maguire, the old peasant, can neither be damned nor glorified: The graveyard in which he will lie will be just a deep-drilled potato-field Where the seed gets no chance to come through To the fun of the sun. The tongue in his mouth is the root of a yew.