Under Ben Bulben IV

By William Butler Yeats

IV

Poet and sculptor do the work   

Nor let the modish painter shirk   

What his great forefathers did,   

Bring the soul of man to God,   

Make him fill the cradles right.

Measurement began our might:   

Forms a stark Egyptian thought,   

Forms that gentler Phidias wrought.

Michael Angelo left a proof   

On the Sistine Chapel roof,   

Where but half-awakened Adam   

Can disturb globe-trotting Madam   

Till her bowels are in heat,   

Proof that there's a purpose set   

Before the secret working mind:   

Profane perfection of mankind.

Quattrocento put in paint,

On backgrounds for a God or Saint,   

Gardens where a soul's at ease;   

Where everything that meets the eye

Flowers and grass and cloudless sky   

Resemble forms that are, or seem   

When sleepers wake and yet still dream,   

And when it's vanished still declare,   

With only bed and bedstead there,   

That Heavens had opened.

                                        Gyres run on;

When that greater dream had gone   

Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude   

Prepared a rest for the people of God,   

Palmer's phrase, but after that

Confusion fell upon our thought.