Status Updates From Selected Poems of W.B. Yeats

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

In three days' time he stood up with a moan,
And went down to the long sands alone,
For four days warred he with the bitter tide,
And the waves flowed above him and he died.

Druid. Look on my thin grey hair and hollow cheeks
And on these hands that may not lift the sword,
This body trembling like a wind-blown reed.
No woman's loved me, no man sought my help.

Fergus. A king is but a foolish labourer
Who wastes his blood to be another's dream.

For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
from a world more full of weeping than he
can understand.

I will pray no more with the smooth stones:
when life in my body has ceased –
For lonely to move ‘mong the soft eyes of best ones a sad thing were –
I will go to the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast,
To Fin, Caolte, and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair.