Uploaded on September 5, 2011
You waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play,
Though you glow and you glance, though you purr and you dart;
In the Junes that were warmer than these are, the waves were more gay,
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.
The herring are not in the tides as they were of old;
My sorrow! for many a creak gave the creel in the cart
That carried the take to Sligo town to be sold,
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.
And ah, you proud maiden, you are not so fair when his oar
Is heard on the water, as they were, the proud apart,
Who paced in the eve by the nets on the pebbly shore,
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.
— William Butler Yeats
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
09.05.2023: I remember the day this image was taken. We tried a new beach, which wasn’t as stereotypically beachy as the one we normally we visited, but it was almost empty, and that was lovely.