The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite,—a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thoughts supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.

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And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon
The golden apples of the sun.

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Come away, O human child! 
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand, 
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand.

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The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky And all that famous harmony of leaves
Had blotted out man's image and his cry.

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Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.
The Wild Swans at Coole 1919. The Cat and the Moon

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Down the mountain walls
From where Pan's cavern is
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.

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I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;�
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,�
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

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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.

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I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.

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It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislator to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them.

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