What are Yeats’s poems about?

Yeats (1865-1939) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. His major poetry collections include "The Wind in the Reeds", "Responsibility", "The Tower", etc.

Innisfree Island, the island in the middle of the lake

I am going to get up and go to Innisfree Island,

Build a small hut there. Weave the branches into the wall and cover it with mud;

I want to raise a box of bees and plant nine rows of beans,

I want to live alone in the forest meadow where the bees are buzzing.

There peace will come to me, peace trickling down slowly,

From the morning veil to the place where the crickets rest;

There the midnight flashes There is a glimmer of light, and at noon it is dyed with purple light,

And at dusk it is woven with the wings of the cardinal.

I am about to get up and leave, because from morning to night and from night to morning

I can hear the lake water lapping the shore gently;

No matter Whether I stand on the road or on the gray sidewalk,

I always hear it calling deep in my heart.

(Translated by Fei Bai)

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When you are old

When you are old, gray-haired and sleepy,

Taking a nap in front of the stove, please take down this book of psalms,

Recite slowly, dreaming of your eyes back then

The soft light and green halo;

How many people have loved your beauty, both true and false? ,

Loved your joyful and charming youth,

Only one loves you with the heart of a pilgrim,

Loves the sadness on your fading face ;

When you are hunched over by the hot grate,

You will speak softly, with a hint of sadness:

The lost love, now It has climbed up the mountain,

His face is buried among the dense stars.

(Translated by Fei Bai)

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Swans at Cole Manor

The trees are covered with beautiful autumn clothes,

The paths in the forest are dry,

In October In the dusk, the flowing water

reflected the quiet sky,

the water rippled among the stones,

59 swans swam.

Since I first counted them,

Nineteen degrees of autumn have passed,

Before I even had time to count them, I saw

p>

They all flew up at once.

Flapping their wings loudly,

Soaring in large, ragged circles.

As I stared at these dazzling swans,

I felt a surge of sadness in my heart.

Everything has changed since the first time by the river,

It was also dusk,

I heard the swans flapping above my head ,

Then the steps become more agile.

Not yet tired, couples,

in the cold and friendly river

walk forward or spread their wings and fly into the air,

Their hearts are still young,

No matter where they wander, they

always have passion and want to win love.

Now they are floating on the quiet water,

Mysterious and beautiful,

But one day I woke up and they had flown away.

Oh, which reed bush will they live in,

Which poolside, which lakeside,

make people happy?

(Translated by Qiu Xiaolong)

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Christ returns

Whirling and spinning on the outwardly expanding spiral,

The falcon can no longer hear the call of its master.

Everything is scattered, and the center can no longer be kept.

Chaos is everywhere in the world.

The bloody and confused tide is rushing forward.

Innocent etiquette is everywhere submerged;

The good people have lost all confidence,

The bad people are full of blazing fanaticism.

There is no doubt that God’s revelation will appear,

There is no doubt that Christ will return.

Christ returns! These words have not yet been spoken,

The dazzling thing is the giant beast from the Great Memory:

In the desert, a figure with the head of a human and the body of a lion,

Looking at each other as indifferently and ruthlessly as the sun,

Slowly moving its legs, it circled around,

The shadows of angry birds flying on the desert.

The darkness fell again, now I understand

Twenty centuries of slumber,

Having annoying nightmares in the turning cradle,

What kind of wild beast finally waited for the right time,

laidly fell to the holy land to be reincarnated?

(Translated by Yuan Kejia)

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Leda and the Swan

Sudden attack: on the staggering girl,

A pair of giant wings are still flapping, a pair of black webs

Caressing her thighs, holding her neck in his beak,

His chest pressed against hers, which she had no way of getting out of.

My fingers were stunned, how could they still have the ability to push away the glory of the white feather from between the loosened legs?

My body fell over in the snow-white rushes,

The only thing I felt was the strange heartbeat in it!

There was a tremor in the waist and thighs. Out of it came

the ruined walls, the smoke and flames on the towers

and the death of Agamemnon.

When she was possessed

The place was so subdued by the savage blood of the sky

Until the indifferent beak let her go,

Did she gain access to his power, his knowledge?

(Translated by Fei Bai)

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At the foot of Mount Benbul

1

By the light waves surrounding Mariotic

all those saints said, Swear,

The witch of Atreus really knew it,

told it, and made the cocks crow.

By those knights and women - their figure and color

proved that they were really superhuman, swore,

The pale, lanky companion,

Forever, always full of vitality,

Won the completeness of their passion;

At this moment, they are speeding through the winter dawn,

Benbulben Mountain is the view behind them.

These are the gist of what they want to say.

2

Many times, one person dies and the other lives

In their two afterlife,

The nation The afterlife, the afterlife of the soul,

Old Ireland was familiar with all this.

Whether a person dies in his bed,

or it is a gunshot that kills him,

A temporary separation from the people he loves

The worst thing anyone fears.

Although the gravediggers work long hours,

Their shovels are sharp and their muscles are strong,

They are just the ones who bury them

Re-advanced in human thought.

3

Have you heard Mitchell’s prayer:

“Lord, bring war to our time!”

You know, when all the words have been said,

And a person is fighting furiously,

What falls from the eyes that have been blind for a long time, < /p>

He completed his incomplete thoughts.

So I stood still for a while,

Laughing loudly, feeling peaceful in my heart.

Even the smartest people fail to realize their mission,

get to know each other at work, and choose partners

all because of some kind of violent behavior.

< p>I always feel so anxious.

4

Poets and sculptors, do your work,

Don’t let that fashionable painter blindly hide from him

What our great ancestors once did,

bring the human soul to God,

make him fill the cradle correctly.

Measuring begins our strength,

A typical Egyptian thought of shapes,

Shapes made by the gentle Phidias.

On the roof of the Sistine Chapel,

Michelangelo left proof;

There is just a half-awake Adam

It can make women who walk around the earth panic,

In the end, her heart is filled with passion,

Proving that there is a predetermined purpose,

Before that secret work of thought,

Human perfection was actually ordinary.

The Italian masters of the fifteenth century,

when designing backgrounds of gods and saints,

always painted gardens, where the soul is at peace,

Everything people see,

Flowers, leather. There is also a cloudless sky,

It is more like a sleeping person who wakes up and is in a dream,

sees shapes that look like this

This kind of The shape disappeared, leaving only the bed

and the bed frame, still claiming that the door to heaven was open.

Oh Spin

A bigger dream has faded,

Calvert and Wilson, Black and Crowder,

A kind of rest is prepared for those who believe in God,

It is Palmer’s words, but after that,

Our thoughts are full of confusion and sorrow.

5

Irish poets, learn your trade well,

Sing of all that is well done,

Scorn what is right From head to toe

the mystery of appearance has been lost,

Their heads and hearts lack memory -

A lowly product on a lowly bed .

Singing peasants, then

Country gentlemen galloping on horseback,

Holy monks, imitate

Drink the bitter The beer men laugh wildly;

Sing those joyful lords and ladies,

That is the most fundamental essence formed in seven heroic centuries

;

Let your mind think about other days,

This way. We can still

be the unconquerable Irish in the future.

6

Under the bare hilltop of Ben Bulben,

Yeats lies in the middle of Trumcliff Cemetery.

An ancestor was the rector there.

Many years ago, a church was nearby.

Beside the road, there was an ancient cross. ,

There is no marble tablet, and there is no formula;

On the limestone quarried nearby,

It is the words carved according to his instructions:

Give a cold look to life and death

Knight, step forward!

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Resurrection in 1916 Festival

I met them at sunset,

With their lively air

From the gray houses of the eighteenth century

Step away from the counter or desk.

I nodded when I walked past them

Or made meaningless greetings,

Or stayed among them for a while,

< p>Another polite but meaningless conversation,

I had already thought of a satirical story or joke before I finished the conversation,

To sit by the fire in the club By the way,

Talking to make a friend happy,

Because I believe that we are just

making a living in a place where we play clowns:

< p>But everything has changed, completely changed:

A terrible beauty has been born.

That woman’s days are spent in

innocent kindness,

Her nights are spent in arguments,

until It made her hoarse and blush.

She was young and repaired, how could there be a voice

better than hers,

when she was chasing rabbits on the hunt?

This man ran a school,

and also rode our Pegasus;

This other, his assistant and friend,

Also joined him;

His ideas are bold and excellent,

He has a sensitive nature, maybe

He will finally get prestige.

This other man is a crude

A vain drunkard, I thought.

He has done some of the most boring things to people close to my heart.

But I want to mention him in this song:

p>

He also resigned from the role he played in absurd comedy

;

He was the same as everyone else,

changed, Completely changed:

A terrible beauty has been born.

Many hearts have only one purpose

After summer and winter,

As if they were possessed by a demon and turned into rocks,

To save life The flowing spring is disturbed.

Horses coming from the road,

horsemen, and birds flying from the clouds

to the churning clouds,

Changing minute by minute;

The shadows of floating clouds falling on the stream

Changing minute by minute;

A horse's hoof in the water While slipping,

A horse lapped in the water;

The long-legged hen grouse swooped down,

clucking at the cock. ;

They live minute by minute:

The stone is in the middle of it all.

A sacrifice that lasts too long

can turn the heart into a rock.

Hey, when is enough?

That is God’s business, our business

It is mumbling a string of names,

Like a mother talking about her children

< p>When sleep finally envelopes

the limbs that have been running wild for a day.

Is that still the fall of night?

No, no, not night but death;

Is this death unnecessary?

Because Britain may keep its faith,

regardless of what has been said and done.

We know their dreams;

It is enough to know that they have dreamed and died

Why bother with too much love

< p>Confuse them before they die?

I wrote them in verse -

McDonagh and Connolly,

Pearce and McBride,

Now and in the future, no matter where we are

As long as there is green on the surface,

It has changed, completely changed:

A terrible beauty has already Birth.

Translated by Zha Liangzheng

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The Balloon of Thoughts

(The following two poems are translated by Mung Bean)

With both hands, follow the instructions given to you;

Leading the thoughts The balloon

inflated and drifted in the wind

reaching its cramped shack.

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The Saint and the Hunchback

p>

Stand up, raise your hands and start

Praying

For a man experiencing terrible pain

Remembering what he has lost in the process of fame.

A Roman Caesar also succumbed

Under this hump.

Saints

God tests everyone

in various ways.

I should not stop praising, because

I am beating myself with a whip

Maybe in that night and morning, I can drive away< /p>

Hidden in my body is Alexander the Greek,

and Augustus Caesar, and after them

The great scoundrel Alcibald.

Hunchback

To all those who stand up in your body

and pray, I would like to express my gratitude,

< p>The respect given to them was exactly according to their rank,

but most of it was reserved for Alcibald.

Notes:

Alcibiades: c.450-404 B.C., Athenian statesman and general.

Mung Bean Translation

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Sail to Byzantium

That is not the country of old people. The young

are embracing each other; the dying generation,

the birds in the trees are engaged in their singing;

the waterfall of fish, filled with mackerel The sea,

fish, beast or bird, praises all the summer

everything that is born and dies.

Indulging in the music of the senses, everyone ignores the eternal monuments of reason.

A decrepit old man is just a waste,

A tattered coat propped on a stick,

Unless the soul claps its hands and composes a song, for its sake

p>

Every crack in the skin sings louder;

But there are no schools to teach singing, but only

to study its splendor recorded on monuments, < /p>

So I crossed the ocean and came to

the sacred castle of Byzantium.

O wise men! Standing in the divine fire of God,

It is like a sculpture inlaid with gold on a mural,

Come out of the divine fire, spin in the sky,

Please do it for me The soul is the teacher of singing.

Burn my heart away, it is tied to a

dying body, corrupted by desire,

I no longer know what it was. ;Please collect me into the eternal artistic arrangement as soon as possible

Once separated from nature, I no longer took my shape from

any natural object,

but only from the gold glaze of the Greek goldsmith

And made of hammered gold,

to keep the sleepy emperor awake;

Or set on a golden branch to sing

All things past, present and future

To the nobles and ladies of Byzantium.

Translated by Zha Liangzheng

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Among the schoolchildren

1

I asked as I walked through the long classroom,

A kind old nun with a white headscarf answered the question,

Children learn arithmetic and practice singing

Learn various reading materials and history.

Cutting and sewing are required to be neat and tidy.

The style is the best and latest - the children from time to time

Out of curiosity, they inevitably raise their eyes to pay attention

A sixty-year-old smiling figure.

2

I meditate on a figure like Leda

Bent on the dying fire, she talked about her childhood

A harsh experience A reproach or a trivial matter

actually caused a tragic day in a child's mind——

This lecture was like a scene to our two young hearts

Out of sympathy, it blends into a single space,

Or, to change Plato's famous metaphor,

It turns into the yolk and egg white, becoming one.

3

Remembering the sadness or anger back then,

I looked at this and that child again,

Guess if she had such a demeanor back then——

Because the swan’s daughter will also bear

the genetic endowment of every wading bird——

She also has the same color hair and face.

When I think about it, my heart beats wildly.

She appears in front of me, transformed into a little girl.

4

Her current image floats into my heart,

Could it be the shaping of fifteenth-century hands,

Its cheeks are sunken, as if it is just drinking air.

Is it full if it only swallows enough shadows?

Although I have never been a descendant like Leda,

I have also had beautiful feathers - that's enough, okay,

It's best to use feathers when meeting people. Reciprocating a smile with a smile shows that

this old man is living a comfortable life.

5

The young mother holds a human figure on her lap

(That is the skin bag from which "reproductive honey" leaks to the human world,

Decision based on memories or "forgetting medicine"

Must sleep, shout, struggle to escape),

How will she look at her son, only the top of his head< /p>

The scenery that has been covered in white for more than sixty winters,

Does she think it is recompense for the pain of giving birth to her son,

the worries about his future in the world?

6

Plato believed that nature is nothing more than a bubble

Playing with the ghostly kaleidoscopic picture of things;

The solid Aristotle waving birch sticks,

will whip the king of kings on the ass;

Pythagoras, the golden femur, everyone knows,

fiddles with The bow or strings can be used to calculate the chords that the star sings and the lazy god of poetry hears:

Tie a piece of cloth to an old pole to scare the birds!

7

Nuns and mothers, both types of people worship idols,

But the face illuminated by candlelight cannot

inspire No matter what mother's wishful thinking,

it can only make the stone or bronze statue peaceful and peaceful.

But they are also heartbreaking—many forms,

The familiar Supreme of passion, piety, and love!

The glitz that symbolizes all the highest glory,

A mocker of human ambition!

8

Hard work itself is flowering and dancing,

As long as the body does not please the soul and mutilates itself,

Beauty will not be produced. In the regret of regret,

The dim wisdom does not come from the dim light of the night.

Chestnut tree, Oiran flower treasure with strong roots,

Are you a leaf, a flower, or a trunk?

The body swaying to the music, the bright eyes!

How can we differentiate between a dance and a dancer?

Translated by Bian Zhilin

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Rotate

Rotate! Spin! The ancient stone face looks forward;

If you think about things too much, you can no longer think about them;

Because beauty dies after beauty, and value dies after value.

Ancient features have perished at the hands of man.

Rivers of irrational blood stained the fields;

Empedocles threw everything on the ground;

Hector died , a light shines in Troy;

What we watch is just laughing in tragic joy.

If a numb nightmare rides on top of your head,

Blood and mud stain your sensitive body——

So what? Do not sigh, do not mourn,

A greater and more moving era has disappeared;

For painted bodies and boxes of cosmetics,

I Sigh in the ancient tomb, but never sigh again;

So what? A voice came from the cave,

All it knew was the word "Joy!"

The actions and work gradually became thicker, and so did the soul,

< p>So what? The ancient stone face looks upon all with kindness;

Whoever loves horses and women will be lifted from

the broken tomb of marble

or in darkness among polecats and owls

or dig up in any rich, dark void,

workers, nobles and saints, all these things

are there again Unfashionable spins keep the spin going.

(Translated by Qiu Xiaolong)

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Where my books go

All the words I have learned,

All the words I have written,

Necessarily Spread your wings and fly tirelessly,

Never pause in flight,

Fly to where your sad heart is,

Singing to you in the night,

In the distance, the river is flowing,

Dark clouds or bright stars.

(Translated by Qiu Xiaolong)

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