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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=537124" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Meditations In Time Of Civil War</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I<br>Ancestral Houses<br>SURELY among a rich man s flowering lawns,<br>Amid the rustle of his planted hills,<br>Life overflows without ambitious pains;<br>And rains down life until the basin spills,<br>And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains<br>As though to choose whatever shape it wills<br>And never stoop to a mechanical<br>Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.<br>Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not Sung<br>Had he not found it certain beyond dreams<br>That out of life's own self-delight had sprung<br>The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems<br>As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung<br>Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,<br>And not a fountain, were the symbol which<br>Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.<br>Some violent bitter man, some powerful man<br>Called architect and artist in, that they,<br>Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone<br>The sweetness that all longed for night and day,<br>The gentleness none there had ever known;<br>But when the master's buried mice can play.<br>And maybe the great-grandson of that house,<br>For all its bronze and marble, 's but a mouse.<br>O what if gardens where the peacock strays<br>With delicate feet upon old terraces,<br>Or else all Juno from an urn displays<br>Before the indifferent garden deities;<br>O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways<br>Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease<br>And Childhood a delight for every sense,<br>But take our greatness with our violence?<br>What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,<br>And buildings that a haughtier age designed,<br>The pacing to and fro on polished floors<br>Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined<br>With famous portraits of our ancestors;<br>What if those things the greatest of mankind<br>Consider most to magnify, or to bless,<br>But take our greatness with our bitterness?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">II<br>My House<br>An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,<br>A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,<br>An acre of stony ground,<br>Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,<br>Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,<br>The sound of the rain or sound<br>Of every wind that blows;<br>The stilted water-hen<br>Crossing Stream again<br>Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;<br>A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,<br>A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,<br>A candle and written page.<br>Il Penseroso's Platonist toiled on<br>In some like chamber, shadowing forth<br>How the daemonic rage<br>Imagined everything.<br>Benighted travellers<br>From markets and from fairs<br>Have seen his midnight candle glimmering.<br>Two men have founded here. A man-at-arms<br>Gathered a score of horse and spent his days<br>In this tumultuous spot,<br>Where through long wars and sudden night alarms<br>His dwinding score and he seemed castaways<br>Forgetting and forgot;<br>And I, that after me<br>My bodily heirs may find,<br>To exalt a lonely mind,<br>Befitting emblems of adversity.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">III<br>My Table<br>Two heavy trestles, and a board<br>Where Sato's gift, a changeless sword,<br>By pen and paper lies,<br>That it may moralise<br>My days out of their aimlessness.<br>A bit of an embroidered dress<br>Covers its wooden sheath.<br>Chaucer had not drawn breath<br>When it was forged. In Sato's house,<br>Curved like new moon, moon-luminous<br>It lay five hundred years.<br>Yet if no change appears<br>No moon; only an aching heart<br>Conceives a changeless work of art.<br>Our learned men have urged<br>That when and where 'twas forged<br>A marvellous accomplishment,<br>In painting or in pottery, went<br>From father unto son<br>And through the centuries ran<br>And seemed unchanging like the sword.<br>Soul's beauty being most adored,<br>Men and their business took<br>Me soul's unchanging look;<br>For the most rich inheritor,<br>Knowing that none could pass Heaven's door,<br>That loved inferior art,<br>Had such an aching heart<br>That he, although a country's talk<br>For silken clothes and stately walk.<br>Had waking wits; it seemed<br>Juno's peacock screamed.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">IV<br>My Descendants<br>Having inherited a vigorous mind<br>From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams<br>And leave a woman and a man behind<br>As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems<br>Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,<br>Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,<br>But the torn petals strew the garden plot;<br>And there's but common greenness after that.<br>And what if my descendants lose the flower<br>Through natural declension of the soul,<br>Through too much business with the passing hour,<br>Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?<br>May this laborious stair and this stark tower<br>Become a roofless min that the owl<br>May build in the cracked masonry and cry<br>Her desolation to the desolate sky.<br>The primum Mobile that fashioned us<br>Has made the very owls in circles move;<br>And I, that count myself most prosperous,<br>Seeing that love and friendship are enough,<br>For an old neighbour's friendship chose the house<br>And decked and altered it for a girl's love,<br>And know whatever flourish and decline<br>These stones remain their monument and mine.<br> V<br>The Road at My Door<br>An affable Irregular,<br>A heavily-built Falstaffian man,<br>Comes cracking jokes of civil war<br>As though to die by gunshot were<br>The finest play under the sun.<br>A brown Lieutenant and his men,<br>Half dressed in national uniform,<br>Stand at my door, and I complain<br>Of the foul weather, hail and rain,<br>A pear-tree broken by the storm.<br>I count those feathered balls of soot<br>The moor-hen guides upon the stream.<br>To silence the envy in my thought;<br>And turn towards my chamber, caught<br>In the cold snows of a dream.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">VI<br>The Stare's Nest by My Window<br>The bees build in the crevices<br>Of loosening masonry, and there<br>The mother birds bring grubs and flies.<br>My wall is loosening; honey-bees,<br>Come build in the empty house of the state.<br>We are closed in, and the key is turned<br>On our uncertainty; somewhere<br>A man is killed, or a house burned,<br>Yet no cleat fact to be discerned:<br>Come build in he empty house of the stare.<br>A barricade of stone or of wood;<br>Some fourteen days of civil war;<br>Last night they trundled down the road<br>That dead young soldier in his blood:<br>Come build in the empty house of the stare.<br>We had fed the heart on fantasies,<br>The heart's grown brutal from the fare;<br>More Substance in our enmities<br>Than in our love; O honey-bees,<br>Come build in the empty house of the stare.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">VII<br>I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's<br>Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness<br>I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,<br>A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,<br>Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon<br>That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,<br>A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind<br>And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.<br>Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;<br>Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind's eye.<br>'Vengeance upon the murderers,' the cry goes up,<br>'Vengeance for Jacques Molay.' In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,<br>The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop,<br>Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,<br>Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide<br>For the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astray<br>Because of all that senseless tumult, all but cried<br>For vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.<br>Their legs long, delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,<br>Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs.<br>The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,<br>Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,<br>Have closed the ladies' eyes, their minds are but a pool<br>Where even longing drowns under its own excess;<br>Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full<br>Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.<br>The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,<br>The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,<br>Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,<br>Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place<br>To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,<br>Nor hate of what's to come, nor pity for what's gone,<br>Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye's complacency,<br>The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.<br>I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair<br>Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth<br>In something that all others understand or share;<br>But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth<br>A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,<br>It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,<br>The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,<br>Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.</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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Ancestral Houses
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 choos..."></div>
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