The Road at My Door / W.B. Yeats

from Meditations in Time of Civil War

V. The Road at My Door

An affable Irregular,
A heavily-built Falstaffian man,
Comes cracking jokes of civil war
As though to die by gunshot were
The finest play under the sun.

A brown Lieutenant and his men,
Half dressed in national uniform,
Stand at my door, and I complain
Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
A pear-tree broken by the storm.

I count those feathered balls of soot
The moor-hen guides upon the stream,
To silence the envy in my thought;
And turn towards my chamber, caught
In the cold snows of a dream.

--
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), 1923
from The Cat and the Moon, and certain poems, 1924

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the European Union]
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W.B. Yeats biography