"The witty man and his joke..."

I love language and phrases
that stay in the mind,
and magically come back.
Yeats is great;
I read his Lake
Isle of Innisfree frequently.
And I remembered that little phrase
above today,
and sough out the poem,
a masterpiece
that made
me whole.

The Fisherman

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Although I can see him still—

The freckled man who goes

To a gray place on a hill

In gray Connemara clothes

At dawn to cast his flies—

It's long since I began

To call up to the eyes

This wise and simple man.   

All day I'd looked in the face   

What I had hoped it would be   

To write for my own race   

And the reality:   

The living men that I hate,   

The dead man that I loved,   

The craven man in his seat,   

The insolent unreproved—

And no knave brought to book   

Who has won a drunken cheer—

The witty man and his joke   

Aimed at the commonest ear,   

The clever man who cries   

The catch cries of the clown,   

The beating down of the wise   

And great Art beaten down.

Maybe a twelve-month since

Suddenly I began,

In scorn of this audience,

Imagining a man,

And his sun-freckled face

And gray Connemara cloth,

Climbing up to a place

Where stone is dark with froth,

And the down turn of his wrist

When the flies drop in the stream—

A man who does not exist,   

A man who is but a dream;   

And cried, “Before I am old   

I shall have written him one   

Poem maybe as cold   

And passionate as the dawn.”

Source: Poetry (February 1916).