A Man Young And Old: VI. His Memories

We should be hidden from their eyes,

Being but holy shows

And bodies broken like a thorn

Whereon the bleak north blows,

To think of buried Hector

And that none living knows.

The women take so little stock

In what I do or say

They'd sooner leave their cosseting

To hear a jackass bray;

My arms are like the twisted thorn

And yet there beauty lay;

The first of all the tribe lay there

And did such pleasure take -

She who had brought great Hector down

And put all Troy to wreck -

That she cried into this ear,

'Strike me if I shriek.'

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats, (born June 13, 1865, Sandymount, Dublin, Ireland—died January 28, 1939, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France), Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize. Whereas he received the Prize chiefly for his dramatic works, his significance today rests on his lyric achievement. His poetry, especially the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life (the symbol of the winding stairs), and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life.

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A Song From 'The Player Queen' A Drinking Song A Man Young And Old: III. The Mermaid A Man Young And Old: VII. The Friends Of His Youth A Man Young And Old: XI. From Oedipus At Colonus

A Man Young And Old: VI. His Memories

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