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Home  »  Responsibilities and Other Poems  »  9. When Helen lived

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939). Responsibilities and Other Poems. 1916.

9. When Helen lived

WE have cried in our despair

That men desert,

For some trivial affair

Or noisy, insolent, sport,

Beauty that we have won

From bitterest hours;

Yet we, had we walked within

Those topless towers

Where Helen walked with her boy,

Had given but as the rest

Of the men and women of Troy,

A word and a jest.