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Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Song of the Happy Shepherd

Poem by William Butler Yeats

second stanza:

Then nowise worship dusty deeds,

Nor seek, for this is also sooth,

To hunger fiercely after truths,

Lest all thy toiling only breeds

New dreams, new dreams: there

is no truth

Saving in thine own heart.  Seek, then,

No learning from the starry men,

Who follow with the optic glass

The whirring ways of stars that pass -

Seek, then, for this is also sooth,

No word of theirs - the cold star-bane

has cloven and rent their hearts in twain

And dead is all their human truth.

quoted in part in The Theory of Everything  (2014) feature film

by the character Jane at the "Cambridge May Ball" at an outdoors

fireworks celebratory scene . . .

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