Whatever's Offered

To a Child Dancing in the Wind

I

Dance there upon the shore;   
What need have you to care   
For wind or water’s roar?   
And tumble out your hair   
That the salt drops have wet;            
Being young you have not known   
The fool’s triumph, nor yet   
Love lost as soon as won,   
Nor the best labourer dead   
And all the sheaves to bind.     
What need have you to dread   
The monstrous crying of wind?   
  

II

Has no one said those daring   
Kind eyes should be more learn’d?   
Or warned you how despairing     
The moths are when they are burned,   
I could have warned you, but you are young,   
So we speak a different tongue.   
 
O you will take whatever’s offered   
And dream that all the world’s a friend,     
Suffer as your mother suffered,   
Be as broken in the end.   
But I am old and you are young,   
And I speak a barbarous tongue.

 
                                 ~ by W.B. Yeats

The Old Sun

Meditation

Be tranquil, O my Sorrow, and be wise.
The Evening comes, is here, for which you sought:
The Dusk, wrapping the city in disguise,
Care unto some, to others peace has brought.

Now while the sordid multitude with shame
Obeying Pleasure's whip and merciless sway,
Go gathering remorse in servile game,
Give me your hand, my Sorrow, come this way,

Far from them. See the years in ancient dress
Along the balconies of heaven press,
Smiling Regret from deepest waters rise;

Beneath an arch the old Sun goes to bed,
And like a winding-sheet across the skies,
Hear, my Beloved, hear the sweet Night tread.


                                     ~ by Charles Baudelaire
                                                 translated by Barbara Gibbs