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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The Ghosts Of Christmas Shopping
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As the decades slip past, Christmas shopping can be strangely poignant:
Ghosts of Christmas Past, that we think lie safely buried, merely rest.
They are always ready to be conjured up.
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“My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.”
From Vacillation IV, by William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)
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