Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition

Meditations in Time of Civil War (Author: William Butler Yeats)

part 1

Meditations in Time of Civil War

Ancestral Houses

p.16

1. SURELY among a rich man s flowering lawns,
   Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
   Life overflows without ambitious pains;
   And rains down life until the basin spills,
   And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
   As though to choose whatever shape it wills
   And never stoop to a mechanical
   Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.

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   p.17

   Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not Sung
   Had he not found it certain beyond dreams
   That out of life's own self-delight had sprung
   The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems
   As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung
   Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,
   And not a fountain, were the symbol which
   Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.
   Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
   Called architect and artist in, that they,
   Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
   The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
   The gentleness none there had ever known;
   But when the master's buried mice can play.
   And maybe the great-grandson of that house,
   For all its bronze and marble, 's but a mouse.
   O what if gardens where the peacock strays
   With delicate feet upon old terraces,
   Or else all Juno from an urn displays
   Before the indifferent garden deities;
   O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways
   Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease
   And Childhood a delight for every sense,
   But take our greatness with our violence?

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   p.18

   What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,
   And buildings that a haughtier age designed,
   The pacing to and fro on polished floors
   Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined
   With famous portraits of our ancestors;
   What if those things the greatest of mankind
   Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
   But take our greatness with our bitterness?