The Fisherman

Although I can see him still— / The freckled man who goes / To a gray place on a hill / In gray Connemara clothes / At dawn to cast his flies— / It’s long since I began / To call up to the eyes / This wise and simple man. / All day I’d looked in the face / What I had hoped it would be / To write for my own race / And the reality: / The living men that I hate, / The dead man that I loved, / The craven man in his seat, / The insolent unreproved— / And no knave brought to book / Who has won a drunken cheer— / The witty man and his joke / Aimed at the commonest ear, / The clever man who cries / The catch cries of the clown, / The beating down of the wise / And great Art beaten down. Maybe a twelve-month since / Suddenly I began, / In scorn of this audience, / Imagining a man, / And his sun-freckled face / And gray Connemara cloth, / Climbing up to a place / Where stone is dark with froth, / And the down turn of his wrist / When the flies drop in the stream— / A man who does not exist, / A man who is but a dream; / And cried, “Before I am old / I shall have written him one / Poem maybe as cold / And passionate as dawn.” William Butler Yeats Poetry Magazine, Vol.7, No. 5, February 1916 Poetry Foundation https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13324/the-fisherman This poem is in the public domain.