William Butler
Yeats (1916)
Maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under
froth,
And the down-turn of his
wrist,
When the flies drop in the
stream,
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream,
And cried, ‘Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.’