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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  William Butler Yeats

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

The Dawn

William Butler Yeats

I WOULD be as ignorant as the dawn,

That has looked down

On that old queen measuring a town

With the pin of a brooch,

Or on the withered men that saw

From their pedantic Babylon

The careless planets in their courses,

The stars fade out where the moon comes,

And took their tablets and made sums—

Yet did but look, rocking the glittering coach

Above the cloudy shoulders of the horses.

I would be—for no knowledge is worth a straw—

Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.