Dedication to William Butler Yeats

Letter to W.B. Yeats

I once had an autumn vision:
Woke to your pen,
The bearer of this damnable desire,
Whilst sailing towards
The artifice of eternal Byzantium;

Lost my Maud, or Leda, or Helen, or Deirdre,
(Wherever history has placed her)
To the Rhône where she jogs at dawn
While I stumble beneath the glow of streetlamps;

Have not your rolling hills,
But fabricate their mist
From the rhythm of your verse
And transcend time to greet them;

Dreamt of Coole Park,
The timid, retreating turloughs,
The engravings on the garden wall,
And the flight of its wingéd marvels;

Fled from hallowed time
To watch my skin stretch,
As once your age echoed
Off the stone of Thoor Ballylee;

Born to no revolution,
Only the decay that yellows pages,
And now am heir to the woe,
The solitude that accompanies
This pinch of Irish blood.