Under Ben Bulben

by William Butler Yeats

 I
 SWEAR by what the sages spoke
 Round the Mareotic Lake
 That the Witch of Atlas knew,
 Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.
 
 Swear by those horsemen, by those women
 Complexion and form prove superhuman,
 That pale, long-visaged company
 That air in immortality
 Completeness of their passions won;
 Now they ride the wintry dawn
 Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.
 
 Here's the gist of what they mean.
 
II
 Many times man lives and dies
 Between his two eternities,
 That of race and that of soul,
 And ancient Ireland knew it all.
 Whether man die in his bed
 Or the rifle knocks him dead,
 A brief parting from those dear
 Is the worst man has to fear.
 Though grave-diggers' toil is long,
 Sharp their spades, their muscles strong.
 They but thrust their buried men
 Back in the human mind again.
 
III
 You that Mitchel's prayer have heard,
 "Send war in our time, O Lord!'
 Know that when all words are said
 And a man is fighting mad,
 Something drops from eyes long blind,
 He completes his partial mind,
 For an instant stands at ease,
 Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
 Even the wisest man grows tense
 With some sort of violence
 Before he can accomplish fate,
 Know his work or choose his mate.
 
  IV
 Poet and sculptor, do the work,
 Nor let the modish painter shirk
 What his great forefathers did.
 Bring the soul of man to God,
 Make him fill the cradles right.
 
 Measurement began our might:
 Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
 Forms that gentler phidias wrought.
 Michael Angelo left a proof
 On the Sistine Chapel roof,
 Where but half-awakened Adam
 Can disturb globe-trotting Madam
 Till her bowels are in heat,
 proof that there's a purpose set
 Before the secret working mind:
 Profane perfection of mankind.
 
 Quattrocento put in paint
 On backgrounds for a God or Saint
 Gardens where a soul's at ease;
 Where everything that meets the eye,
 Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,
 Resemble forms that are or seem
 When sleepers wake and yet still dream.
 And when it's vanished still declare,
 With only bed and bedstead there,
 That heavens had opened.
 Gyres run on;
 When that greater dream had gone
 Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,
 Prepared a rest for the people of God,
 Palmer's phrase, but after that
 Confusion fell upon our thought.

  V
 Irish poets, earn your trade,
 Sing whatever is well made,
 Scorn the sort now growing up
 All out of shape from toe to top,
 Their unremembering hearts and heads
 Base-born products of base beds.
 Sing the peasantry, and then
 Hard-riding country gentlemen,
 The holiness of monks, and after
 Porter-drinkers' randy laughter;
 Sing the lords and ladies gay
 That were beaten into the clay
 Through seven heroic centuries;
 Cast your mind on other days
 That we in coming days may be
 Still the indomitable Irishry.
 
VI
 Under bare Ben Bulben's head
 In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
 An ancestor was rector there
 Long years ago, a church stands near,
 By the road an ancient cross.
 
 No marble, no conventional phrase;
 On limestone quarried near the spot
 By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!