A collection of poems

The Rose

189323 poems

The lyrics first appeared in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1892; Roberts Bros., Boston, 1892/1893). Yeats named the group "The Rose" in Poems (1895); Collected Poems dates it 1893. There was never a book called The Rose.

1To the Rose upon the Rood of TimeRed Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!The poet calls on a symbolic Rose to inspire his songs of ancient Ireland.
2Fergus and the DruidThe whole day have I followed in the rocks,A king who gave up his crown asks a Druid for dreaming wisdom.
3Cuchulain's Fight with the SeaA man came slowly from the setting sun,Cuchulain kills his own son unknowingly, then turns his rage on the sea.
4The Rose of the WorldWho dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?A woman's beauty outlasts Troy and was planned before creation.
5The Rose of PeaceIf Michael, leader of God's hostA woman's beauty could make the warrior archangel lay down his arms.
6The Rose of BattleRose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!The lonely and insatiable gather to sail and fight in God's battles.
7A Faery SongWe who are old, old and gay,Ancient fairies sing a blessing over two young runaway lovers.
8The Lake Isle of InnisfreeI will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,A city-dweller dreams of a simple, peaceful life on a lake island.
9A Cradle SongThe angels are stoopingA parent sings over a sleeping child, already sad to see it grow.
10The Pity of LoveA pity beyond all tellingTo love someone is to fear everything that might harm them.
11The Sorrow of LoveThe brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,A tragic girl's arrival fills a peaceful night with human grief.
12When You are OldWhen you are old and grey and full of sleep,A young lover asks a woman to picture her old age and remember him.
13The White BirdsI would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!A lover wishes he and his beloved were white seabirds, free of sorrow.
14A Dream of DeathI dreamed that one had died in a strange placeThe poet dreams of his beloved buried alone in a foreign land.
15The Countess Cathleen in ParadiseAll the heavy days are over;A soul freed from earthly sorrow dances among the angels.
16Who goes with Fergus?Who will go drive with Fergus now,An invitation to forget love's sorrows and ride with Fergus.
17The Man who dreamed of FaerylandHe stood among a crowd at Drumahair;Glimpses of faeryland spoil every earthly comfort for one man, even death.
18The Dedication to a Book of Stories selected from the Irish NovelistsThere was a green branch hung with many a bellA book of Irish stories offered to exiles as a healing bell branch.
19The Lamentation of the Old PensionerAlthough I shelter from the rainAn old man, once admired, spits in the face of Time.
20The Ballad of Father GilliganThe old priest Peter GilliganA weary priest falls asleep, and God sends an angel instead.
21The Two TreesBeloved, gaze in thine own heart,A lover urges his beloved to look within, not in the demons' mirror.
22To Some I have Talked with by the FireWhile I wrought out these fitful Danaan rhymes,Remembering fireside talk of spirits, faeries and angels.
23To Ireland in the Coming TimesKnow, that I would accounted beYeats claims his mystical poems serve Ireland as truly as patriotic ballads.

Yeats's own note

Ballads and Lyrics, “The Rose,” “The Wanderings of Oisin.”⁠—When I first wrote I went here and there for my subjects as my reading led me, and preferred to all other countries Arcadia and the India of romance, but presently I convinced myself, for such reasons as those in “Ireland and the Arts,” that I should never go for the scenery of a poem to any country but my own, and I think that I shall hold to that conviction to the end. I was very young; and, perhaps because I belonged to a Young Ireland Society in Dublin, I wished to be as easily understood as the Young Ireland writers, to write always out of the common thought of the people.

I have put the poems written while I was influenced by this desire, though with an always lessening force, into those sections which I have called “Early Poems.” I read certain of them now with no little discontent, for I find, especially in the ballads, some triviality and sentimentality. Mangan and Davis, at their best, are not sentimental and trivial, but I became so from an imitation that was not natural to me. When I was writing the poems in the second of the three, the section called “The Rose,” I found that I was becoming unintelligible to the young men who had been in my thought. We have still the same tradition, but I have been like a traveller who, having when newly arrived in the city noticed nothing but the news of the marketplace, the songs of the workmen, the great public buildings, has come after certain months to let his thoughts run upon some little carving in its niche, some Ogham on a stone, or the conversation of a countryman who knows more of the “Boar without Bristles” than of the daily paper.

When writing I went for nearly all my subjects to Irish folklore and legends, much as a Young Ireland poet would have done, writing “Down by the Salley Garden” by adding a few lines to a couple of lines I heard sung at Ballisodare; “The Meditation of the Old Fisherman” from the words of a not very old fisherman at Rosses Point; “The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner” from words spoken by a man on the Two Rock Mountain to a friend of mine; “The Ballad of the Old Foxhunter” from an incident in one of Kickham’s novels; and “The Ballad of Moll Magee” from a sermon preached in a chapel at Howth; and “The Wanderings of Oisin” from a Gaelic poem of the Eighteenth Century and certain Middle Irish poems in dialogue. It is no longer necessary to say who Oisin and Cuchulain and Fergus and the other bardic persons are, for Lady Gregory, in her Gods and Fighting Men and Cuchulain of Muirthemne has retold all that is greatest in the ancient literature of Ireland in a style that has to my ears an immortal beauty.

The Pronunciation of the Irish Names.⁠—I wrote the greater number of these poems I had hardly considered the question seriously. I copied at limes somebody’s perhaps fanciful phonetic spelling, and at times the ancient spelling as I found it in some literal translation, pronouncing the words always as they were spelt. I can only affirm that I did not even in my youth treat Irish names as badly as the medieval writers of the stories of King Arthur treated their Welsh names.