Irish poets, learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads [5] Base-born products of base beds. Sing the peasantry, and then Hard-riding country gentlemen, The holiness of monks, and after Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay That were beaten into the clay Through seven heroic centuries; Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry. VI
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid. An ancestor was rector there Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross. No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!
September 4, 1938 GLOSSARYGLOSSARY
[Title] Ben Bulben: rock formation that is part of the Dartry mountains in County Sligo
[6] base: lowest of the low
[10] randy: sexual [16] indomitable: impossible to subdue or defeat [18] Drumcliff churchyard: a churchyard in County Sligo [19] An ancestor: Yeats’ grandfather, John Yeats [19] rector: the person with responsibility for the parish
