I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping…I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

You were silly like us.

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase ‘terrible beauty.’ Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson...

He believes, but he does not believe: the impossibility of believing is the impossibility which he accepts most reluctantly, but still it is there with the other impossibilities of this world which is too full...

Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds–who used to be a passionate Yeats fan–is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point...

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Never give all the heart, for loveWill hardly seem worth thinking ofTo passionate women if it seemCertain, and they never dreamThat it fades out from kiss to kiss;For everything that’s lovely isBut a brief, dreamy,...

What can be explained is not poetry.

An Irish Airman foresees his DeathI Know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate Those that I guard I do not love, My...

…I was shocked and astonished when a daring little girl — a cousin I think — having waited under a group of trees in the avenue, where she knew [my grandfather] would pass near four...