“City of mist and rain and blown gray spaces, / Dashed with wild wet color and gleam of tears”

So this is a Poetry Monday post on a Tuesday, because I was off yesterday for a holiday and my memory slid into the twilight:

Into the Twilight, William Butler Yeats

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight gray;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the gray twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.


NGL the joke of calling W.B. “brother of the more famous Jack” never gets old. This is from his 1899 collection The Wind Among the Reeds, when he was going hard on the Celtic Twilight. His spouse was neither a husband nor an author, though she was into automatic writing for a while.

(Okay, maaaybe it’s time to retire the running joke about poets marrying writers.)

---L.

Subject quote from Edinburgh, Alfred Noyes.