Seven Poems and a Fragment

And there he can sleep on, not noticing
Although the world be changed from worse to worse,
Amid the changeless clamour of the curlew.
(They raise the litter on their shoulders and move a few steps)

YOUNGEST PUPIL

(motioning to them to stop)
Yet make triumphant music; sing aloud
For coming times will bless what he has blessed
And curse what he has cursed.

OLDEST PUPIL

No, no, be still;
Or pluck a solemn music from the strings.
You wrong his greatness speaking so of triumph.

YOUNGEST PUPIL

O silver trumpets, be you lifted up
And cry to the great race that is to come.
Long-throated swans upon the waves of time
Sing loudly, for beyond the wall of the world
That race may hear our music and awake.

OLDEST PUPIL

(motioning the musicians to lower their trumpets)
Not what it leaves behind it in the light
But what it carries with it to the dark
Exalts the soul; nor song nor trumpet-blast
Can call up races from the worsening world
To mend the wrong and mar the solitude
Of the great shade we follow to the tomb.
(Fedelm and the pupils go out carrying the litter. Some play a mournful music.)

NOTE ON ‘THOUGHTS UPON THE PRESENT STATE OF THE WORLD’ SECTION SIX

The country people see at times certain apparitions whom they name now ‘fallen angels’ now ‘ancient inhabitants of the country,’ and describe as riding at whiles ‘with flowers upon the heads of the horses.’ I have assumed in the sixth poem that these horsemen, now that the times worsen, give way to worse. My last symbol Robert Artisson was an evil spirit much run after in Kilkenny at the start of the fourteenth century. Are not those who travel in the whirling dust also in the Platonic Year? – W. B. Y.

NOTE ON THE NEW END TO ‘THE KING’S THRESHOLD’

Upon the revival of this play at the Abbey Theatre a few weeks ago it was played with this new end. There were a few other changes. I had originally intended to end the play tragically and would have done so but for a friend who used to say ‘O do write comedy & have a few happy moments in the Theatre.’ My unhappy moments were because a tragic effect is very fragile and a wrong intonation, or even a wrong light or costume will spoil it all. However the play remained always of the nature of tragedy and so subject to vicissitude.

Here ends, ‘Seven Poems and a Fragment:’ by William Butler Yeats: with a decoration by T. Sturge Moore. Five hundred copies of this book have been printed and published by Elizabeth Corbet Yeats on paper made in Ireland, at the Cuala Press, Churchtown, Dundrum, in the County of Dublin, Ireland. Finished in the third week of April in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-two.