

#Meditations in Time of Civil War


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#### Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition


### Background details and bibliographic information


Meditations in Time of Civil War
================================


Author: William Butler Yeats
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### File Description

Electronic edition compiled and proof-read by Beatrix Färber, Rebecca Daly

Funded by School of History, University College, Cork 1. First draft.Extent of text: 
2268 words
#### Publication


CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College, Cork  
College Road, Cork, Ireland — http://www.ucc.ie/celt

 (2014) Distributed by CELT online at University College, Cork, Ireland.  
Text ID Number: E910001-055Availability [RESTRICTED] 
The works by W. B. Yeats are in the public domain. This electronic text is available with prior consent of the CELT programme for purposes of private or academic research and teaching.


#### Notes

First published 1896 in the journal *London Mercury* 7, (January 1923), 232–38 and in *The Dial* 74.1 (January 1923), 50–56.

#### Sources


**Literature (a small selection)**2. W. B. Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, consisting of Reveries over childhood and youth, The trembling of the veil, and Dramatis personae (New York 1938).
3. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks. Corrected edition with a new preface (Oxford 1979). [First published New York 1948; reprinted London 1961.]
4. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, The variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan 1957).
5. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan 1961).
6. W. B. Yeats, Explorations: selected by Mrs W. B.Yeats (London/New York: Macmillan 1962).
7. Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York 1964).
8. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats (Stanford 1984).
9. Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford/New York 2007).
10. A general bibliography is available online at the official web site of the Nobel Prize. See: http://nobelprize.org/nobel\_prizes/literature/laureates/1923/yeats-bibl.html
**The edition used in the digital edition**2. William Butler Yeats Meditations in Time of Civil War in , Ed. William Butler Yeats The Cat and the Moon: and certain Poems. Cuala Press, Dublin, (1924) page 16–25

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Created: By William Butler Yeats (1865–1939).

 Date range: c.1922.
#### Use of language


##### Language: [EN] The poem is in English.


### Revision History


* (2015-02-11) Beatrix Färber (ed.)

* Typo submitted by Takeo Yamamoto corrected.
* (2014-02-01) Beatrix Färber (ed.)

* SGML and HTML files created.
* (2014-01-28) Beatrix Färber (ed.)

* TEI header created; file parsed and validated.
* (2014-01-24) Rebecca Daly (ed.)

* Structural markup applied according to CELT practice; bibliographical details provided.
* (1996) Students at the CELT Project, UCC (ed.)

* First proofing.
* (1996) Donnchadh Ó Corráin (data capture)

* Text captured




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#### Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition: E910001-055


### Meditations in Time of Civil War: Author: William Butler Yeats


Meditations in Time of Civil War
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### Ancestral Houses




---

p.16


1. SURELY among a rich man s flowering lawns, 
  
Amid the rustle of his planted hills, 
  
Life overflows without ambitious pains; 
  
And rains down life until the basin spills, 
  
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains 
  
As though to choose whatever shape it wills 
  
And never stoop to a mechanical 
  
Or servile shape, at others' beck and call. 


---

p.17


Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not Sung 
  
Had he not found it certain beyond dreams 
  
That out of life's own self-delight had sprung 
  
The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems 
  
As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung 
  
Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams, 
  
And not a fountain, were the symbol which 
  
Shadows the inherited glory of the rich. 
  
Some violent bitter man, some powerful man 
  
Called architect and artist in, that they, 
  
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone 
  
The sweetness that all longed for night and day, 
  
The gentleness none there had ever known; 
  
But when the master's buried mice can play. 
  
And maybe the great-grandson of that house, 
  
For all its bronze and marble, 's but a mouse. 
  
O what if gardens where the peacock strays 
  
With delicate feet upon old terraces, 
  
Or else all Juno from an urn displays 
  
Before the indifferent garden deities; 
  
O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways 
  
Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease 
  
And Childhood a delight for every sense, 
  
But take our greatness with our violence? 


---

p.18


What if the glory of escutcheoned doors, 
  
And buildings that a haughtier age designed, 
  
The pacing to and fro on polished floors 
  
Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined 
  
With famous portraits of our ancestors; 
  
What if those things the greatest of mankind 
  
Consider most to magnify, or to bless, 
  
But take our greatness with our bitterness?
My House
--------

1. An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower, 
  
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall, 
  
An acre of stony ground, 
  
Where the symbolic rose can break in flower, 
  
Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable, 
  
The sound of the rain or sound 
  
Of every wind that blows; 
  
The stilted water-hen 
  
Crossing Stream again 
  
Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows; 
  
A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone, 
  
A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth, 
  
A candle and written page. 
  
i{Il Penseroso's} Platonist toiled on 
  
In some like chamber, shadowing forth 


---

p.19


How the daemonic rage 
  
Imagined everything. 
  
Benighted travellers 
  
From markets and from fairs 
  
Have seen his midnight candle glimmering. 
  
Two men have founded here. A man-at-arms 
  
Gathered a score of horse and spent his days 
  
In this tumultuous spot, 
  
Where through long wars and sudden night alarms 
  
His dwinding score and he seemed castaways 
  
Forgetting and forgot; 
  
And I, that after me 
  
My bodily heirs may find, 
  
To exalt a lonely mind, 
  
Befitting emblems of adversity.


---

p.20


My Table
--------

1. Two heavy trestles, and a board 
  
Where Sato's gift, a changeless sword, 
  
By pen and paper lies, 
  
That it may moralise 
  
My days out of their aimlessness. 
  
A bit of an embroidered dress 
  
Covers its wooden sheath. 
  
Chaucer had not drawn breath 
  
When it was forged. In Sato's house, 
  
Curved like new moon, moon-luminous 
  
It lay five hundred years. 
  
Yet if no change appears 
  
No moon; only an aching heart 
  
Conceives a changeless work of art. 
  
Our learned men have urged 
  
That when and where 'twas forged 
  
A marvellous accomplishment, 
  
In painting or in pottery, went 
  
From father unto son 
  
And through the centuries ran 
  
And seemed unchanging like the sword. 
  
Soul's beauty being most adored, 
  
Men and their business took 
  
Me soul's unchanging look; 
  
For the most rich inheritor, 
  
Knowing that none could pass Heaven's door, 


---

p.21


That loved inferior art, 
  
Had such an aching heart 
  
That he, although a country's talk 
  
For silken clothes and stately walk. 
  
Had waking wits; it seemed 
  
Juno's peacock screamed.
My Descendants
--------------

1. Having inherited a vigorous mind 
  
From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams 
  
And leave a woman and a man behind 
  
As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems 
  
Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind, 
  
Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams, 
  
But the torn petals strew the garden plot; 
  
And there's but common greenness after that. 
  
And what if my descendants lose the flower 
  
Through natural declension of the soul, 
  
Through too much business with the passing hour, 
  
Through too much play, or marriage with a fool? 
  
May this laborious stair and this stark tower 
  
Become a roofless ruin that the owl 
  
May build in the cracked masonry and cry 
  
Her desolation to the desolate sky. 


---

p.22


The primum Mobile that fashioned us 
  
Has made the very owls in circles move; 
  
And I, that count myself most prosperous, 
  
Seeing that love and friendship are enough, 
  
For an old neighbour's friendship chose the house 
  
And decked and altered it for a girl's love, 
  
And know whatever flourish and decline 
  
These stones remain their monument and mine.
The Road at My Door
-------------------

1. An affable Irregular, 
  
A heavily-built Falstaffian man, 
  
Comes cracking jokes of civil war 
  
As though to die by gunshot were 
  
The finest play under the sun. 
  
A brown Lieutenant and his men, 
  
Half dressed in national uniform, 
  
Stand at my door, and I complain 
  
Of the foul weather, hail and rain, 
  
A pear-tree broken by the storm. 
  
I count those feathered balls of soot 
  
The moor-hen guides upon the stream. 
  
To silence the envy in my thought; 


---

p.23


And turn towards my chamber, caught 
  
In the cold snows of a dream.
The Stare's Nest by My Window
-----------------------------

1. The bees build in the crevices 
  
Of loosening masonry, and there 
  
The mother birds bring grubs and flies. 
  
My wall is loosening; honey-bees, 
  
Come build in the empty house of the state. 
  
We are closed in, and the key is turned 
  
On our uncertainty; somewhere 
  
A man is killed, or a house burned, 
  
Yet no cleat fact to be discerned: 
  
Come build in he empty house of the stare. 
  
A barricade of stone or of wood; 
  
Some fourteen days of civil war; 
  
Last night they trundled down the road 
  
That dead young soldier in his blood: 
  
Come build in the empty house of the stare. 
  
We had fed the heart on fantasies, 
  
The heart's grown brutal from the fare; 
  
More Substance in our enmities 
  
Than in our love; O honey-bees, 
  
Come build in the empty house of the stare.


---

p.24


I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's

 Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone, 
  
A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all, 
  
Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon 
  
That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable, 
  
A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind 
  
And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by. 
  
Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind; 
  
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind's eye. 
  
'Vengeance upon the murderers,' the cry goes up, 
  
'Vengeance for Jacques Molay.' In cloud-pale rags, or in lace, 
  
The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop, 
  
Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face, 
  
Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide 
  
For the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astray 
  
Because of all that senseless tumult, all but cried 
  
For vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay. 
  
Their legs long, delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes, 
  
Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs. 
  
The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies, 
  
Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs, 
  
Have closed the ladies' eyes, their minds are but a pool 
  
Where even longing drowns under its own excess; 


---

p.25


Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full 
  
Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness. 
  
The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine, 
  
The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace, 
  
Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean, 
  
Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place 
  
To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie, 
  
Nor hate of what's to come, nor pity for what's gone, 
  
Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye's complacency, 
  
The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon. 
  
I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair 
  
Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth 
  
In something that all others understand or share; 
  
But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth 
  
A company of friends, a conscience set at ease, 
  
It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy, 
  
The half-read wisdom of daemonic images, 
  
Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.












