A Month with Yeats: Day Fourteen

Today’s quote if from ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’. I think the following lines have inspired a sonnet. I find this a hard form to write, but this one came without trying.

‘That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.’ —W.B. Yeats

 

She justifies her chosen path

 

I have never done as much to lift the gloom,

As the robin singing in the hedge,

Nor shouted against the thin-lipped crowd,

From this place away from wave-beaten edge,

Louder than the dog that bays the moon.

I have watched them go, the children,

To fight their wars, nor held their hands,

And begged them think of the mothers,

Crying in all those distant lands.

When I leave, with empty hands and heart,

Show them, who look to lay the blame,

This rose, this unturned field, this place apart,

And tell them I followed the deer’s quick grace,

And the dreams that have filled this quiet place.

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