To a Child Dancing in the Wind W.B. Yeats

I

DANCE there upon the shore;  

What need have you to care  

For wind or water’s roar?  

And tumble out your hair  

That the salt drops have wet;         

Being young you have not known  

The fool’s triumph, nor yet  

Love lost as soon as won,  

Nor the best labourer dead  

And all the sheaves to bind.  

What need have you to dread  

The monstrous crying of wind?  

  

II

Has no one said those daring  

Kind eyes should be more learn’d?  

Or warned you how despairing  

The moths are when they are burned,  

I could have warned you, but you are young,  

So we speak a different tongue.  

  

O you will take whatever’s offered  

And dream that all the world’s a friend,  

Suffer as your mother suffered,  

Be as broken in the end.  

But I am old and you are young,  

And I speak a barbarous tongue.

A Drinking Song

WINE comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

That's all we shall know for truth

Before we grow old and die.

I lift the glass to my mouth,

I look at you, and I sigh. 

William Butler Yeats

Forty Years Later

(After the fall)

It is my prayer,

 it is my longing,

 that we may pass

 from this life together--

a longing which shall never perish from the earth, 

but shall have place in the heart of every wife that loves, 

until the end of time; and it shall be called by my name.

But if one of us must go first,

 it is my prayer that it shall be I;

 for he is strong, I am weak,

 I am not so necessary to him

 as he is to me --

life without him would not be life; 

how could I endure it? 

This prayer is also immortal, 

and will not cease from being offered up 

while my race continues. 

I am the first wife; 

and in the last wife 

I shall be repeated.

Mark Twain