He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven by William Butler Yeats.
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh - - - An Cailín Deas ag Crúite na mBó.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gsu86FltsQM
“Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable”
Oscar Wilde.
Seamus Moore - - - - Life In The Auld Dog Yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIDplIw4wyY
“A man's errors are his portals of discovery.”
- James Joyce.
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
- Oscar Wilde
"I have nothing to declare except my genius."
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) upon arriving at U.S. customs 1882
Julie Feeney performs Impossibly Beautiful in Central Park, New York.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-XB1OI9WJ8
Jerry Fish & The Mudbug Club cover the U2 song 'One'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxRbpwwZ3xE
The Miami Showband - - - - Angel Of Love.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGQOLZkTRXQ
"Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves".
James Joyce. - - Ulysses.
Dickie Rock & The Miami Showband - - - Wait For Me Marianne.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V81gsSQLVvs
Moving Hearts - - - - Irish Ways & Irish Laws.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=havjZ1i0UWw
Christy Moore - - - - They Never Came Home.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcizhnIU2lI
Under Ben Bulben
Swear by what the sages spoke
Round the Mareotic Lake
That the Witch of Atlas knew,
Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.
Swear by those horsemen, by those women
Complexion and form prove superhuman,
That pale, long-visaged company
That air in immortality
Completeness of their passions won;
Now they ride the wintry dawn
Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.
Here s the gist of what they mean.
II
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-diggers' toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong.
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.
III
You that Mitchel's prayer have heard,
'Send war in our time, O Lord!'
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.
IV
Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did.
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right.
Measurement began our might:
Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
Forms that gentler phidias wrought.
Michael Angelo left a proof
On the Sistine Chapel roof,
Where but half-awakened Adam
Can disturb globe-trotting Madam
Till her bowels are in heat,
proof that there's a purpose set
Before the secret working mind:
Profane perfection of mankind.
Quattrocento put in paint
On backgrounds for a God or Saint
Gardens where a soul's at ease;
Where everything that meets the eye,
Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,
Resemble forms that are or seem
When sleepers wake and yet still dream.
And when it's vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That heavens had opened.
Gyres run on;
When that greater dream had gone
Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,
Prepared a rest for the people of God,
Palmer's phrase, but after that
Confusion fell upon our thought.
V
Irish poets, earn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers' randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.
VI
Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
William Butler Yeats
