All Things Can Tempt Me (by William Butler Yeats)

Yeats [by George Charles Beresford, 1911]
All Things Can Tempt Me
by William Butler Yeats
from The Green Helmet and Other Poems [Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1910]
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
One time it was a woman's face, or worse —
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;
Now nothing but comes readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil. When I was young,
I had not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet sing it with such airs
That one believed he had a sword upstairs;
Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,
Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.
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