A Terrible Beauty .....

It is Passover & I'm on Vacation.  But, I did promise Poetry!!!  And my blog has been 'weighty' lately, and I have a major blog on Israel in preparation for posting in the next period ... So, Poetry & Music to lighten the theme for Passover over the next holiday days.  Enjoy!

This is an Extract from 'Easter, 1916' by Irish Poet Laureate William Butler Yeats.  This poem is perhaps best known for it's recurring line ..... 

"All is changed, changed utterly .... a terrible beauty is born" .....

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?

~ William Butler Yeats,    1865 ~ 1939  ~