William Butler Yeats

He Thinks Of His Past Greatness When A Part Of The Constellations Of Heaven

I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young And weep because I know all things now: I have been a hazel-tree, and they hung The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough Among my leaves in times out of mind: I became a rush that horses tread: I became a man, a hater of the wind, Knowing one, out of all things, alone, that his head May not lie on the breast nor his lips on the hair Of the woman that he loves, until he dies. O beast of the wilderness, bird of the air, Must I endure your amorous cries? In an earlier version of this poem (October 1898) the final two lines read:- Although the rushes and the fowl of the air Cry of his love with their pitiful cries.