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Not surprisingly, I will start off my twilight collection with the one poet who was absolutely bewitched by the twilight:  William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).  Yeats was very much aware that there is more to our world than what we see and hear in our ordinary physical reality, and he was a master at surrendering his self-conscious ego to something outside himself.  His talent for finding spiritual revelation in the physical world which surrounds us is possibly a direct result of the lessons he learned in his rural Irish twilights.

Not surprisingly, as a young man he wrote an entire book about twilight: The Celtic Twilight (1893), which is still very much worth reading.  I must confess I find the folklore sections of this book to be tedious, but on the whole the book is redeemed by many passages of great beauty.  In particular, Yeats gives us what is probably the greatest definition of twilight ever penned:

that great Celtic twilight, in which heaven and earth so mingle that each seems to have taken upon itself some shadow of the other's beauty.

Well, there you have it all in a nutshell:  twilights can give us wonder, spirituality, revelation, and a mystic threshold into the unseen world every day of our lives.  Yeats ends The Celtic Twilight with one of his greatest poems:  Into the Twilight.  Of all the twilight poems ever written, this is the great one, the one to be memorized, the one whose words you need to treasure in your soul for the rest of your life...


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Into The Twilight

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.



But Yeats is not the only poet who found magic in the twilight... next


Twilights  •  William Butler Yeats   •  AE   •  John Cowper Powys   •  Anna de Noailles   •  Chinese Twilights   •  Japanese Twilights