W. B. Yeats               Under Ben Bulben                             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! 1838