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Home  »  Responsibilities and Other Poems  »  50. At Galway Races

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

50. At Galway Races

THERE where the course is,

Delight makes all of the one mind,

The riders upon the galloping horses,

The crowd that closes in behind:

We, too, had good attendance once,

Hearers and hearteners of the work;

Aye, horsemen for companions,

Before the merchant and the clerk

Breathed on the world with timid breath.

Sing on: sometime, and at some new moon,

We’ll learn that sleeping is not death,

Hearing the whole earth change its tune,

Its flesh being wild, and it again

Crying aloud as the race course is,

And we find hearteners among men

That ride upon horses.