Meditations in Time of Civil War
I.
Ancestral houses
Surely among a rich man’s flowering
lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious
pains;
And rains down life until the basin
spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more
it rains
As though to choose whatever shape
it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical,
Or servile shape, at others’ beck and
call.
Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet
Homer had not sung
Had he not found it certain beyond
dreams
That out of life’s own self-delight had
sprung
The abounding glittering jet; though
now it seems
As if some marvellous empty sea-shell
flung
Out of the obscure dark of the rich
streams,
And not a fountain, were the symbol
which
Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.
Some violent bitter man, some power-
ful man
Called architect and artist in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in
stone
The sweetness that all longed for night
and day,
The gentleness none there had ever
known;
But when the master’s buried mice
can play,
And maybe the great-grandson of that
house,
For all its bronze and marble, ’s but a
mouse.
Oh what if gardens where the peacock
strays
With delicate feet upon old terraces,
Or else all Juno from an urn dis-
plays
Before the indifferent garden deities;
Oh what if leveled lawns and gravelled
ways
Where slippered Contemplation finds
his ease
And Childhood a delight for every
sense,
But take our greatness with our
violence!
What if the glory of escutcheoned
doors,
And buildings that a haughtier age
designed,
The pacing to and fro on polished
floors
Amid great chambers and long
galleries, lined
With famous portraits of our ancestors;
What if those things the greatest of
mankind,
Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
But take out greatness with our
bitterness!
II.
MY HOUSE
An ancient bridge, and a more ancient
tower,
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its
wall,
An acre of stony ground,
Where the symbolic rose can break in
flower,
Old ragged elms, old thorns innumer-
able,
The sound of the rain or sound
Of every wind that blows;
The stilted water-hen
Crossing stream again
Scared by the splashing of a dozen
cows;
A winding stair, a chamber arched
with stone,
A grey stone fireplace with an open
hearth,
A candle and written page.
Il Penseroso’s Platonist toiled on
In some like chamber, shadowing forth
How the daemonic rage
Imagined everything.
Benighted travelers
From markets and from fairs
Have seen his midnight candle glim-
mering.
Two men have found here. A man-
at-arms
Gathered a score of horse and spent
his days
In this tumultuous spot,
Where through long wars and sudden
night alarms
His dwindling score and he seemed
cast-a-ways
Forgetting and forgot;
And I, that after me
My bodily heirs may find,
To exalt a lonely mind,
Befitting emblems of adversity.
III
MY TABLE
Two heavy tressels, and a board
Where Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,
By pen and paper lies,
That it may moralise
My days out of their aimlessness
A bit of an embroidered dress
Covers its wooden sheath.
Chaucer had not drawn breath
When it was forged. In Sato’s house,
Curved like new moon, moon luminous
It lay five hundred years.
Yet if no change appears
No moon; only an aching heart
Conceives a changeless work of art.
Our learned men have urged
That when and where ’twas forged
A marvellous accomplishment,
In painting or in pottery, went
From father unto son
And through the centuries ran
And seemed unchanging like the
sword.
Soul’s beauty being most adored,
Men and their business took
The soul’s unchanging look;
For the most rich inheritor,
Knowing that none could pass heaven’s
door
That loved inferior art,
Had such an aching heart
That he, although a country’s talk
For silken clothes and stately walk,
Had waking wits; it seemed
Juno’s peacock screamed.
IV
MY DESCENDANTS
Having inherited a vigorous mind
From my old fathers I must nourish
dreams
And leave a woman and a man behind
As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems
Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the
wind,
Scarce spread a glory to the morning
beams,
But the torn petals strew the garden
plot;
And there’s but common greenness
after that.
And what if my descendants lose the
flower
Through natural declension of the soul,
Through too much business with the
passing hour,
Through too much play, or marriage
with a fool?
May this laborious stair and this stark
tower
Become a roofless ruin that the owl
May build in the cracked masonry
and cry
Her desolation to the desolate sky.
The Primum Mobile that fashioned us
Has made the very owls in circles move;
And I, that count myself most
prosperous,
Seeing that love and friendship are
enough,
For an old neighbour’s friendship
chose the house
And decked and altered it for a girl’s
love,
And know whatever flourish and decline
These stones remain their monument
and mine.
V
THE ROAD AT MY DOOR
An affable Irregular,
A heavily built Falstaffan man,
Comes cracking jokes of civil war
As though to die by gunshot were
The finest play under the sun.
A brown Lieutenant and his men,
Half dressed in national uniform,
Stand at my door, and I complain
Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
A pear tree broken by the storm.
I could those feathered balls of soot
The moor-hen guides upon the stream,
To silence the envy in my thought;
And turn towards by chamber, caught
In the cold snows of a dream.
VI
THE STARE’S NEST BY MY WINDOW
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the
stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the
stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the
stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
Most substance in our enmities
Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the
stare.
VII
I SEE PHANTOMS OF HATRED AND OF THE HEART’S FULLNESS AND OF THE COMING EMPTINESS
I climb to the tower top and lean upon
broken stone,
A mist that is like blown snow is
sweeping over all,
Valley, river, and elms, under the light
of a moon
That seems unlike itself, that seems
unchangeable,
A glittering sword out of the east. A
puff of wind
And those white glimmering frag-
ments of the mist sweep by.
Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb
the mind;
Monstrous familiar images swim to
the mind’s eye.
‘Vengeance upon the murderers,’ the
cry goes up,
‘Vengeance for Jacques Molay.’ In
cloud-pale rags, or in lace,
The rage driven, rage tormented, and
rage hungry troop,
Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at
arm or at face,
Plunges towards nothing, arms and
fingers spreading wide
For the embrace of nothing; and I,
my wits astray
Because of all that senseless tumult,
all but cried
For vengeance on the murderers of
Jacques Molay.
Their legs long delicate and slender,
aquamarine their eyes,
Magical unicorns bear ladies on their
backs,
The ladies close their musing eyes.
No prophecies,
Remembered out of Babylonian
almanacs,
Have closed the ladies’ eyes, their
minds are but a pool
Where even longing drowns under its
own excess;
Nothing but stillness can remain when
hearts are full
Of their own sweetness, bodies of their
loveliness.
The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of
aquamarine,
The quivering half-closed eyelids, the
rags of cloud or of lace,
Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms
it has made lean,
Give place to an indifferent multitude,
give place
To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting
reverie,
Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity
for what’s gone,
Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s
complacency,
The innumerable clanging wings that
have put out the moon.
I turn away and shut the door, and on
the stair
Wonder how many times I could have
proved my worth
In something that all others under-
stand or share;
But oh, ambitious heart had such a
proof drawn forth
A company of friends, a conscience set
at ease,
It had but made us pine the more.
The abstract joy,
The half read wisdom of daemonic
images,
Suffice the ageing man as once the
growing boy.
(1923)
The earliest dated edition of this poem is a draft of the poem’s sixth party (“The Stare’s Nest at my Window”) and is dated 1922, entitled “Civil War.” The poem was later featured in the publications The Dial and The London Mercury in 1923 and then was featured in Yeats’s volume The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems in 1924.
A Closer Look: The Dial (1923)
“Meditations in Time of Civil War” was first published in The Dial in 1923. At the time of publication, “Meditations” largely resembled the poem which would appear in The Tower five years later. One noticeable difference occurred in line 10, which read “But that he found more substance there than dreams” in The Dial. In the version of “Meditations” which later appeared in The Tower, this line would be altered to read, “Had he not found it certain beyond dreams.”
An American magazine, The Dial’s readers might not have been as aware of the Civil War and political turmoil occurring in Ireland, but Yeats’s deliberately-political title seems designed to assign the poem an Irish identity.
A Closer Look: The London Mercury (1923)
Concurrently with its publication in The Dial, “Meditations in Time of Civil War” was published in The London Mercury in 1923. Yeats often to chose to publish new material in two circulars at once, generally choosing one American and one British publication. After testing his poem on the small but varied audiences of these publications, he would move onto the private press format, and eventually a wider, commercial release. These staggered publications allowed Yeats time to gather reactions, to respond, and to revise.
As in The Dial, “Meditations” largely resembles its 1928 publication, apart from the change in line 10.
A Closer Look: The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924)
After the poem was published in both The Dial and The London Mercury, it was next featured in the Cuala Press volume The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems, published in 1924.