A Man Young And Old:- His Memories

by William Butler Yeats

　　

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We should be hidden from their eyes, Being but holy shows And bodies broken like a thorn Whereon the bleak north blows, To think of buried Hector And that none living knows. The women take so little stock In what I do or say They’d sooner leave their cosseting To hear a jackass bray; My arms are like the twisted thorn And yet there beauty lay; The first of all the tribe lay there And did such pleasure take, She who had brought great Hector down And put all Troy to wreck, That she cried into this ear, ‘Strike me if I shriek.’

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