“When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.”
W.B. Yeats was born this day in Sandymount, County Dublin, Ireland, in 1865. He would have been 147 years old.
Yeats is one of Ireland’s greatest writers. A Symbolist poet, he used imagery to enhance the meaning of his verse. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. And when Ireland achieved statehood Yeats was appointed as Senator.
He died in Menton, France on January 28, 1939. The epitaph on his headstone is from one of his poems:
Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!
John Singer Sargent’s 1908 pencil sketch of W. B. Yeats.
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ritaLOVEStoWRITE 
June 18th, 2012 at 3:00 am
That sketch kinda makes him out to be a babe. Any man who can write “Come away oh human child…” has to be a romantic. *Sigh*
June 18th, 2012 at 3:27 am
Thank you for commenting on my blog. I agree, that is a fine portrait of him. He was a good looking Irish man.