Poetry infestation!

[mdlbear]

The meme goes, "When you see this, post a poem in your LJ." From lysana
Two of my favorites by Yeats:

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

  Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
  Enwrought with golden and silver light,
  The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
  Of night and light and the half-light,

  I would spread the cloths under your feet:
  But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
  I have spread my dreams under your feet;
  Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
                -- William Butler Yeats, 1899

Sailing to Byzantium
                   I
  That is no country for old men. The young
  In one another's arms, birds in the trees
  --Those dying generations--at their song,
  The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
  Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
  Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
  Caught in that sensual music all neglect
  Monuments of unaging intellect.

                   II
  An aged man is but a paltry thing,  
  A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
  Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
  For every tatter in its mortal dress,
  Nor is there singing school but studying
  Monuments of its own magnificence;
  And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
  To the holy city of Byzantium.

                    III
  O sages standing in God's holy fire 
  As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
  Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
  And be the singing-masters of my soul.
  Consume my heart away; sick with desire
  And fastened to a dying animal
  It knows not what it is; and gather me
  Into the artifice of eternity.

                    IV
  Once out of nature I shall never take
  My bodily form from any natural thing,
  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
  Of hammered gold and gold enameling
  To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
  Or set upon a golden bough to sing
  To lords and ladies of Byzantium
  Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

                -- William Butler Yeats, 1928