"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." WB Yeats
Falling in love with Yeats again.
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Loki, starlight (insomniac series)
“And a softness came from the starlight and filled me to the bone.” W.B. Yeats
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Cloths of Heaven
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.
William Butler Yeats
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In English Wb yeats says;
"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 In urdu Haffeez Hoshiarpuri says;
"mohabbat karne vaale kam na hoñge
tirī mahfil meñ lekin ham na hoñge
agar tū ittifāqan mil bhī jaa.e
tirī furqat ke sadme kam na hoñge "
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Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.
- W.B. Yeats
This is the quote from W.B. Yeats as a painted sign on the wall as you enter the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company in Paris.
Strangers always found a welcome at Shakespeare and Company, where they could browse untroubled for hours, especially if they were aspiring writers themselves; and a few – well, a very few – of them may indeed have turned out to be angels, or at least angelic.
The original Shakespeare and Company shop was started in 1921 in the Rue de l’Odéon by Sylvia Beach, the daughter of a US Presbyterian minister. The first writer to patronise the shop was Gertrude Stein, but she fell out with Beach when she took up with James Joyce, whom Stein hated.
Beach published Joyce’s Ulysses when no established publisher would touch it, performing the arduous labour of love of proofreading it. Ernest Hemingway discovered the shop soon after his arrival in Paris, and wrote about it lovingly decades later in A Moveable Feast. When the Germans occupied Paris, Beach refused to sell a signed copy of Finnegans Wake to an invading officer. He said he would return for it the next day. So she moved all the books out and closed the shop. It was “liberated” by Hemingway himself in 1944. However, Beach didn’t have the heart to start again.
In 1948, after a wandering youth and war service, George Whitman came to Paris on the GI Bill, and in 1951 opened an English-language bookshop which he called Le Mistral. A few years later, he moved to the Rue de la Bûcherie, but didn’t rename the shop until after Beach’s death in 1961. He had been too shy to ask her if he could use the name, although they were friends and she used to come to readings at Le Mistral.
Whitman ran his shop as a species of anarchic democracy, even though in some respects he was a benevolent dictator. Anyone who called himself a writer could find a bed there, if there was one free, and stay as long as he liked or until Whitman got tired of him. The only rule for residents was that they must read a book a day and serve in the shop for an hour. One poet, or self-styled poet, who broke the second rule and lay in bed all day reading detective novels was ejected; but his chief offence was his choice of literature rather than his idleness.
The bookshop has its regulars, residents in Paris, not all of them English-speakers by any means, who use it as a sort of club and drop in for conversation and coffee.
Stock control has always been on the casual side. It’s not unknown for someone to lift a book from the shelves, slip it into his pocket, read it and return to sell it for the secondhand shelves the following day.
Inevitably, Shakespeare and Company has long been on the tourist trail, recommended in all the guides. This is just as well, because without their custom it’s hard to see how the shop could have survived. Many are in search of a copy of A Moveable Feast. This is not always on offer because, for some reason which I can’t remember, Whitman took a scunner to Hemingway.
The tourists also toss coins into the well in the shop, and it’s not unusual to see an indigent young person lying on the floor and fishing for euros.
On occasion I drop in because the lure of its history is too much even if there are other good independent book stores nearby. Visitors to Paris always want me to take them there and I oblige them even if I feel its lost some of its past glory. Still, I always buy a few books because it’s the best way to support independent book stores in this age of Amazon, as every independent book store needs all the help it can get.
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Inktober Day 3 - Path
"Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand
For the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand"
-"The Stolen Child" W.B. Yeats
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Ok so over the past day or so I’ve been seeing a lot of talk about the meaning behind Swan Upon Leda and I love it — I live that this deeply important song exists, I love that people are unpicking the lyrics and learning so much. I just wanted to point out — because I’m honestly not sure how many people know this — that besides being about abortion and oppression of women and colonialism, the song is also a direct reference to the 1924 poem by W.B. Yeats, “Leda and the Swan”. Hozier has referenced Yeats’ poetry multiple times in previous songs and Yeats himself was a strong supporter of Irish nationalism. For me it just drives home how much Ireland is ultimately at the heart of all Hozier’s music and I think that’s beautiful.
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the centre cannot hold because God is alive and he is coming to GET you
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Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
—William Butler Yeats, The Stolen Child
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'I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.'
(excerpt from The Wild Swans of Coole)
William Butler Yeats
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And a softness came
from the starlight
and filled me to the bone.
W. B. Yeats
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🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂
"the trees are in their autumn beauty,
the woodland paths are dry,
under the october twilight, the water
mirrors a still sky"
🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂
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The Song of Wandering Aengus
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
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Although our love is waning, let us stand by the lone border of the lake once more, together in that hour of gentleness. When the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep.
WB Yeats
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