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The Seven Sages

The First. My great-grandfather spoke to Edmund Burke
In Grattan's house.
The Second. My great-grandfather shared
A pot-house bench with Oliver Goldsmith once.
The Third. My great-grandfather's father talked of music,
Drank tar-water with the Bishop of Cloyne.
The Fourth. But mine saw Stella once.
The Fifth. Whence came our thought?
The Sixth. From four great minds that hated Whiggery.
The Fifth. Burke was a Whig.
The Sixth. Whether they knew or not,
Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne
All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery?
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard's eye.
The Seventh. All's Whiggery now,
But we old men are massed against the world.
The First. American colonies, Ireland, France and India
Harried, and Burke's great melody against it.
The Second. Oliver Goldsmith sang what he had seen,
Roads full of beggars, cattle in the fields,
But never saw the trefoil stained with blood,
The avenging leaf those fields raised up against it.
The Fourth. The tomb of Swift wears it away.
The Third. A voice
Soft as the rustle of a reed from Cloyne
That gathers volume; now a thunder-clap.
The Sixtb. What schooling had these four?
The Seventh. They walked the roads
Mimicking what they heard, as children mimic;
They understood that wisdom comes of beggary.

William Butler Yeats is an Irish poet, essayist, critic and playwright, one of the most prominent figures in European literature in the twentieth century. He is the main driving force of the Irish Literary Revival, and alongside Lady Ogsta Gregory, Edward Martin, and others. - founder and first director of the Abbey Theater, later known as the Irish National Theater. In 1923, he became the first Nobel Prize-winning Irish writer for his inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation, in the words of the Nobel Committee. Yates is one of the few writers who write their most significant works after being awarded the Nobel Prize. These are The Tower, The Winding Stair and Other Poems. A very good friend is with the American poet emigrant Ezra Pound. He is the author of the preface to the English translation of the poetry book "Gitanjali" by Rabindranat Tagor, who in 1923 became the first non-European Nobel Prize winner of literature. From Dublin, he studied in London there. As a young student, he studies poetry, and a child has a strong interest in Irish legends and occultism. These themes are present in the first period of his work, which lasts for the rest of the nineteenth century. He published his first poetry book in 1889. The smooth lyrical rhythm of the poems in it is a sign of the influence of Edmund Spencer, Percy Bischon Shelley and the poetry of pre-raffle. After 1900 Yates' poetry acquired a more material and realistic form. He largely denies his youthful transcendentalism, but he continues to address the question of the material and spiritual masks of the person, as well as the theories of the cyclicality of life.