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A continuing selection of classic and contemporary poems.

Two Years Later

William Butler Yeats

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.
Online text © 1998-2008 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From Responsibilities | 1914
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