A Passage Of Years

Two Years Later

by 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.

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“… I only see the years. They come and go

In alternation with the weeds, the field,

The wood.”

“What kind of years?”

“Why, latter years

Different from early years.”

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

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