Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition

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

part 5

The Road at My Door

1. An affable Irregular,
   A heavily-built Falstaffian man,
   Comes cracking jokes of civil war
   As though to die by gunshot were
   The finest play under the sun.
   A brown Lieutenant and his men,
   Half dressed in national uniform,
   Stand at my door, and I complain
   Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
   A pear-tree broken by the storm.
   I count those feathered balls of soot
   The moor-hen guides upon the stream.
   To silence the envy in my thought;

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   p.23

   And turn towards my chamber, caught
   In the cold snows of a dream.