ALTHOUGH I can see him still. <br />The freckled man who goes <br />To a grey place on a hill <br />In grey Connemara clothes <br />At dawn to cast his flies, <br />It's long since I began <br />To call up to the eyes <br />This wise and simple man. <br />All day I'd looked in the face <br />What I had hoped 'twould be <br />To write for my own race <br />And the reality; <br />The living men that I hate, <br />The dead man that I loved, <br />The craven man in his seat, <br />The insolent unreproved, <br />And no knave brought to book <br />Who has won a drunken cheer, <br />The witty man and his joke <br />Aimed at the commonest ear, <br />The clever man who cries <br />The catch-cries of the clown, <br />The beating down of the wise <br />And great Art beaten down. <br />Maybe a twelvemonth since <br />Suddenly I began, <br />In scorn of this audience, <br />Imagining a man, <br />And his sun-freckled face, <br />And grey Connemara cloth, <br />Climbing up to a place <br />Where stone is dark under froth, <br />And the down-turn of his wrist <br />When the flies drop in the stream; <br />A man who does not exist, <br />A man who is but a dream; <br />And cried, 'Before I am old <br />I shall have written him one <br />poem maybe as cold <br />And passionate as the dawn.'<br /><br />William Butler Yeats<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-fisherman/
