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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  William Butler Yeats

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

To a Child Dancing in the Wind

William Butler Yeats

HAS no one said those daring

Kind eyes should be more learned?

I have found out how despairing

The moths are when they are burned.

But I am old and you are young,

So we speak a different tongue.

Oh 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.

I could have warned you—but you are young,

And I speak a barbarous tongue.