There is a line from one of his poems that goes "again, and again and again...", but I have no idea which one it was . Thanks

You might check here:

[www.poemhunter.com]


Les

I didn't see it there. Kalliope has a nice collection of Yeats online, but I did not find the exact word usage there either. Here are the Search results, if Gail wants to work through the 59 links:

[tinyurl.com]

Hi. Maybe I had it wrong and it was more along the lines of "Though I try and try and try again..." Thanks for your help. Gail

It might be this one:

The Second Coming
--William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Les

[www.cs.rice.edu]?

Emule doesn't format indented lines well, but see the last line below:


Solomon and the Witch

And thus declared the Arab lady:
"Last night where under the wild moon
On grassy mattress I had lain me,
Within my arms great Solomon,
I suddenly cried out in a strange tongue
Not his, not mine."
And he that knew
All sounds by bird or angel sung
Answered: "A crested cockerel crew
Upon a blossoming apple bough
Three hundred years before the Fall,
And never crew again till now,
And would not now but that he thought,
Chance being at one with Choice at last,
All that the brigand apple brought
And this foul world were dead at last.
He that crowed out eternity
Thought to have crowed it in again.
A lover with a spider's eye
Will found out some appropriate pain,
Aye, though all passion's in the glance,
For every nerve: lover tests lover
With cruelties of Choice and Chance;
And when at last the murder's over
Maybe the bride-bed brings despair,
For each an imagined image brings
And finds a real image there;
Yet the world ends when these two things,
Though several, are a single light,
When oil and wick are burned in one;
Therefore a blessed moon last night
Gave Sheba to her Solomon."
"Yet the world stays":
"If that be so,
Your cockerel found us in the wrong
Although it thought it worth a crow.
Maybe an image is too strong
Or maybe is not strong enough"

"The night has fallen; not a sound
In the forbidden sacred grove,
Unless a petal hit the ground,
Nor any human sight within it
But the crushed grass where we have lain;
And the moon is wilder every minute.
Oh, Solomon! Let us try again."

-- William Butler Yeats