From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

Everything exists, everything is true and the earth is just a bit of dust beneath our feet.

Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.

Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

All the wild-witches, those most notable ladies For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.

I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.