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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=537019" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>A Woman Young And Old</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I<br>FATHER AND CHILD<br>SHE hears me strike the board and say<br>That she is under ban<br>Of all good men and women,<br>Being mentioned with a man<br>That has the worst of all bad names;<br>And thereupon replies<br>That his hair is beautiful,<br>Cold as the March wind his eyes.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">II<br>BEFORE THE WORLD WAS MADE</div><div style="margin:10px 0">IF I make the lashes dark<br>And the eyes more bright<br>And the lips more scarlet,<br>Or ask if all be right<br>From mirror after mirror,<br>No vanity's displayed:<br>I'm looking for the face I had<br>Before the world was made.<br>What if I look upon a man<br>As though on my beloved,<br>And my blood be cold the while<br>And my heart unmoved?<br>Why should he think me cruel<br>Or that he is betrayed?<br>I'd have him love the thing that was<br>Before the world was made.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">III<br>A FIRST CONFESSION</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I ADMIT the briar<br>Entangled in my hair<br>Did not injure me;<br>My blenching and trembling,<br>Nothing but dissembling,<br>Nothing but coquetry.<br>I long for truth, and yet<br>I cannot stay from that<br>My better self disowns,<br>For a man's attention<br>Brings such satisfaction<br>To the craving in my bones.<br>Brightness that I pull back<br>From the Zodiac,<br>Why those questioning eyes<br>That are fixed upon me?<br>What can they do but shun me<br>If empty night replies?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">IV<br>HER TRIUMPH</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I DID the dragon's will until you came<br>Because I had fancied love a casual<br>Improvisation, or a settled game<br>That followed if I let the kerchief fall:<br>Those deeds were best that gave the minute wings<br>And heavenly music if they gave it wit;<br>And then you stood among the dragon-rings.<br>I mocked, being crazy, but you mastered it<br>And broke the chain and set my ankles free,<br>Saint George or else a pagan Perseus;<br>And now we stare astonished at the sea,<br>And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">V</div><div style="margin:10px 0">CONSOLATION</div><div style="margin:10px 0">O BUT there is wisdom<br>In what the sages said;<br>But stretch that body for a while<br>And lay down that head<br>Till I have told the sages<br>Where man is comforted.<br>How could passion run so deep<br>Had I never thought<br>That the crime of being born<br>Blackens all our lot?<br>But where the crime's committed<br>The crime can be forgot.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">VI<br>CHOSEN</div><div style="margin:10px 0">THE lot of love is chosen. I learnt that much<br>Struggling for an image on the track<br>Of the whirling Zodiac.<br>Scarce did he my body touch,<br>Scarce sank he from the west<br>Or found a subtetranean rest<br>On the maternal midnight of my breast<br>Before I had marked him on his northern way,<br>And seemed to stand although in bed I lay.<br>I struggled with the horror of daybreak,<br>I chose it for my lot! If questioned on<br>My utmost pleasure with a man<br>By some new-married bride, I take<br>That stillness for a theme<br>Where his heart my heart did seem<br>And both adrift on the miraculous stream<br>Where -- wrote a learned astrologer --<br>The Zodiac is changed into a sphere.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">VII<br>PARTING<br>i{He.} Dear, I must be gone<br>While night Shuts the eyes<br>Of the household spies;<br>That song announces dawn.<br>i{She.} No, night's bird and love's<br>Bids all true lovers rest,<br>While his loud song reproves<br>The murderous stealth of day.<br>i{He.} Daylight already flies<br>From mountain crest to crest<br>i{She.} That light is from the moom.<br>i{He.} That bird...<br>i{She.} Let him sing on,<br>I offer to love's play<br>My dark declivities.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">VIII<br>HER VISION IN THE WOOD</div><div style="margin:10px 0">DRY timber under that rich foliage,<br>At wine-dark midnight in the sacred wood,<br>Too old for a man's love I stood in rage<br>Imagining men. Imagining that I could<br>A greater with a lesser pang assuage<br>Or but to find if withered vein ran blood,<br>I tore my body that its wine might cover<br>Whatever could rccall the lip of lover.<br>And after that I held my fingers up,<br>Stared at the wine-dark nail, or dark that ran<br>Down every withered finger from the top;<br>But the dark changed to red, and torches shone,<br>And deafening music shook the leaves; a troop<br>Shouldered a litter with a wounded man,<br>Or smote upon the string and to the sound<br>Sang of the beast that gave the fatal wound.<br>All stately women moving to a song<br>With loosened hair or foreheads grief-distraught,<br>It seemed a Quattrocento painter's throng,<br>A thoughtless image of Mantegna's thought --<br>Why should they think that are for ever young?<br>Till suddenly in grief's contagion caught,<br>I stared upon his blood-bedabbled breast<br>And sang my malediction with the rest.<br>That thing all blood and mire, that beast-torn wreck,<br>Half turned and fixed a glazing eye on mine,<br>And, though love's bitter-sweet had all come back,<br>Those bodies from a picture or a coin<br>Nor saw my body fall nor heard it shriek,<br>Nor knew, drunken with singing as with wine,<br>That they had brought no fabulous symbol there<br>But my heart's victim and its torturer.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">IX<br>A LAST CONFESSION</div><div style="margin:10px 0">WHAT lively lad most pleasured me<br>Of all that with me lay?<br>I answer that I gave my soul<br>And loved in misery,<br>But had great pleasure with a lad<br>That I loved bodily.<br>Flinging from his arms I laughed<br>To think his passion such<br>He fancied that I gave a soul<br>Did but our bodies touch,<br>And laughed upon his breast to think<br>Beast gave beast as much.<br>I gave what other women gave<br>'That stepped out of their clothes.<br>But when this soul, its body off,<br>Naked to naked goes,<br>He it has found shall find therein<br>What none other knows,<br>And give his own and take his own<br>And rule in his own right;<br>And though it loved in misery<br>Close and cling so tight,<br>There's not a bird of day that dare<br>Extinguish that delight.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">X<br>MEETING</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HIDDEN by old age awhile<br>In masker's cloak and hood,<br>Each hating what the other loved,<br>Face to face we stood:<br>'That I have met with such,' said he,<br>'Bodes me little good.'<br>'Let others boast their fill,' said I,<br>'But never dare to boast<br>That such as I had such a man<br>For lover in the past;<br>Say that of living men I hate<br>Such a man the most.'<br>'A loony'd boast of such a love,'<br>He in his rage declared:<br>But such as he for such as me --<br>Could we both discard<br>This beggarly habiliment --<br>Had found a sweeter word.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">XI<br>FROM THE 'ANTIGONE'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">OVERCOME -- O bitter sweetness,<br>Inhabitant of the soft cheek of a girl --<br>The rich man and his affairs,<br>The fat flocks and the fields' fatness,<br>Mariners, rough harvesters;<br>Overcome Gods upon Parnassus;<br>Overcome the Empyrean; hurl<br>Heaven and Earth out of their places,<br>That in the Same calamity<br>Brother and brother, friend and friend,<br>Family and family,<br>City and city may contend,<br>By that great glory driven wild.<br>Pray I will and sing I must,<br>And yet I weep -- Oedipus' child<br>Descends into the loveless dust.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=William+Butler+Yeats">William Butler Yeats</a><div class=q>
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FATHER AND CHILD
SHE hears me strike the board and say
That she is under ban
Of all good men and women,
Being mentioned with a man
That has the worst of all bad names;
And thereupon replies
That his hair is beautiful,
Cold as the March wind his ..."></div>
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