The Nuts of Knowledge: Lyrical Poems Old and New

It was the fairy of the place,
Moving within a little light,
Who touched with dim and shadowy grace
The conflict at its fever height.

It seemed to whisper 'Quietness,'
Then quietly itself was gone:
Yet echoes of its mute caress
Were with me as the years went on.

It was the warrior within
Who called 'Awake, prepare for fight:
Yet lose not memory in the din:
Make of thy gentleness thy might:

'Make of thy silence words to shake
The long-enthroned kings of earth:
Make of thy will the force to break
Their towers of wantonness and mirth.'

It was the wise all-seeing soul
Who counselled neither war nor peace:
'Only be thou thyself that goal
In which the wars of time shall cease.'

DESIRE

With thee a moment! Then what dreams have play!
Traditions of eternal toil arise,
Search for the high austere and lonely way
The Spirit moves in through eternities.
Ah, in the soul what memories arise!
And with what yearning inexpressible,
Rising from long forgetfulness I turn
To Thee, invisible, unrumoured, still:
White for Thy whiteness all desires burn.
Ah, with what longing once again I turn!

THE PLACE OF REST

'The soul is its own witness and its own refuge'

Unto the deep the deep heart goes,
It lays its sadness nigh the breast:
Only the Mighty Mother knows
The wounds that quiver unconfessed.

It seeks a deeper silence still;
It folds itself around with peace,
Where thoughts alike of good or ill
In quietness unfostered cease.

It feels in the unwounding vast
For comfort for its hopes and fears:
The Mighty Mother bows at last;
She listens to her children's tears.

Where the last anguish deepens—there
The fire of beauty smites through pain:
A glory moves amid despair,
The Mother takes her child again.

SACRIFICE

Those delicate wanderers,
The wind, the star, the cloud,
Ever before mine eyes,
As to an altar bowed,
Light and dew-laden airs
Offer in sacrifice.

The offerings arise:
Hazes of rainbow light,
Pure crystal, blue, and gold,
Through dreamland take their flight;
And 'mid the sacrifice
God moveth as of old.

In miracles of fire
He symbols forth his days;
In gleams of crystal light
Reveals what pure pathways
Lead to the soul's desire,
The silence of the height.

RECONCILIATION

I begin through the grass once again to be bound to the Lord;
I can see, through a face that has faded, the face full of rest
Of the Earth, of the Mother, my heart with her heart in accord:
As I lie mid the cool green tresses that mantle her breast
I begin with the grass once again to be bound to the Lord.

By the hand of a child I am led to the throne of the King,
For a touch that now fevers me not is forgotten and far,
And His infinite sceptred hands that sway us can bring
Me in dreams from the laugh of a child to the song of a star.
On the laugh of a child I am borne to the joy of the King.

Well, when all is said and done
Best within my narrow way,
May some angel of the sun
Muse memorial o'er my clay:

'Here was beauty all betrayed
From the freedom of her state;
From her human uses stayed
On an idle rhyme to wait.

Ah, what deep despair might move
If the beauty lit a smile,
Or the heart was warm with love
That was pondering the while.

He has built his monument
With the winds of time at strife,
Who could have before he went
Written in the book of life.

To the stars from which he came
Empty handed he goes home;
He who might have wrought in flame
Only traced upon the foam.'

THE NUTS OF KNOWLEDGE

'Sinend daughter of Lodan Lucharglan, son of Lir, out of the Land of Promise went to Connlas' Well which is under the sea, to behold it. That is a well at which are the hazels of wisdom and inspiration that is, the hazels of the science of poetry; and in the same hour their fruit and their blossom & their foliage break forth, and then fall upon the well in the same shower, which raises upon the water a royal surge of purple.'

HERE ENDS THE NUTS OF KNOWLEDGE, WRITTEN BY A.E., PRINTED, UPON PAPER MADE IN IRELAND, AND PUBLISHED BY ELIZABETH CORBET YEATS AT THE DUN EMER PRESS, IN THE HOUSE OF EVELYN GLEESON AT DUNDRUM IN THE COUNTY OF DUBLIN, IRELAND, FINISHED ON THE TENTH DAY OF OCTOBER, IN THE YEAR NINETEEN HUNDRED & THREE.