Wednesday 1 August 2007

The Human Child (excerpt) - WB Yeats

Excerpt from William Butler Yeats beguilingly simple poem about reality and imagination and loss.

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid out faery vats,
Full of berries
And the reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just dropping by to say you're Bringing Sexy Back.

Amazing what the ethnic cleansing of the RSS feed can do.

Lyndon said...

A while ago I was involved staging a set out Shakespeare extracts in Dunedin. There was the witches vision scene from MacBeth, the prologue to Taming of the Shrew, i think that comic trial from Much Ado About Nothing and I kind of cobbled together the love story out of the tempest.

Anyway

I put a printout the refrain from that poem up in the foyer. It seemed appropriate.