Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Excerpts from Poem by William Butler Yeats

“The other night, while he was playing it,
A beautiful young man and girl came up
In a white breaking wave; they had the look
Of those that are alive for ever and ever.

My mother told me that there is not one
Of the Ever-living half so dangerous
as that wild Aengus. Long before her day
He carried Edain off from a king’s house
And hid her among fruits of jewel-stone
And in a tower of glass, and from that day
Has hated every man that’s not in love,
And has been dangerous to him.

A melancholy that a cup of win,
A lucky battle, or a woman’s kiss
Could not amend.

The cozening fortune-teller that comes whispering,
‘You will have all you have wished for when you have earned
Land for your children or money in a pot’
How are we better off than Seaghan the fool,
That never did a hand’s turn?
_

That crazy herdsman will tell his fellows
That he has been all night upon the hills,
Riding to hurley, or in the battle-host
With the Ever-living.

What if he speak the truth,
And for a dozen hours have been a part
Of that more powerful life?

His wife knows better.
Has she not seen him lying like a log,
Or fumbling in a dream about the house?
And if she hear him mutter of wild riders?
She knows that it was but the cart-horse coughing
That set him to fancy.

All would be well
Could we but give us wholly to the dreams
Not in its image on the mirror!

While in the body that’s impossible.

And yet I cannot think they’re leading me
To death; for they that promised to me love
Aengus and Edain ran up out of the wave –
You’d never doubt that life it was they promised
Had you looked on them face to face as I did,
With so red lips, and running on such feet,
And having such wide-open, shining eyes.

Aibric: It’s certain they are leading you to death.

Foragel: One of the Ever-living I shall find
one of the laughing People – and she and I
shall light upon a place in the world’s core
Where passion grows to be a changeless thing,
like charmed apples made of chrysoprase,
Or chrysoberyl, or beryl, or chrysolite;
And there, in juggleries of signt and sense,
Become one movement, energy, delight,
Until the overburthened moon is dead.

Meets his queen, Dectora, an Ever-living, who asks, “Why do you cast a shadow? Let go my hands! They would not send me one that casts a shadow.”

F: (says he cannot let her go, and can’t put her on the ship to sail away):
But if I were to put you on that ship,
With sailors that were sworn to do your will,
And you had spread a sail for home, a wind
Would rise of a sudden, or a wave so huge,
It had washing among the stars and put them out,
And beat the bulwark of your ship on mine,
Until you stood before me on the deck –
As now.

Dectora: I am not afraid,
While there’s a rope to run into a noose
Or wave to drown…

F: Do what you will,
For neither I nor you can break a mesh
Of the great golden net that is about us.

D: I shall have gone
Before a hand can touch me!

F: My hands are still;
The Ever-living hold us. Do what you will,
You cannot leap out of the golden net.

(after pages of protestations and exaggerations, falls for Forgael):

D: “Bend lower, that I may cover with with my hair,
For we will gaze upon this world no longer.”

F: (gathering Dectora’s hair about him) Beloved, having
dragged the net about us,
And knitted mesh to mesh, we grow immortal.”