These are two excerpts from a poem penned by W. B. Yeats during the times of unrest in Ireland. The original poem is titled "Meditations In Time Of Civil War".
The fourth of these meditations is "My Descendants" and the sixth is "The Stare's Nest by My Window". The owl crying out the parched emptiness of a land in the time of war is replaced by honey bees. Yeats actually left a comment about the sixth meditation which I have included at the end. It is equally powerful in capturing the "tumultous" times.
IV. My Descendants
Having inherited a vigorous mind
From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams
And leave a woman and a man behind
As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems
Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
And there's but common greenness after that.
And what if my descendants lose the flower
Through natural declension of the soul,
Through too much business with the passing hour,
Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?
May this laborious stair and this stark tower
Become a roofless min that the owl
May build in the cracked masonry and cry
Her desolation to the desolate sky.
The primum Mobile that fashioned us
Has made the very owls in circles move;
And I, that count myself most prosperous,
Seeing that love and friendship are enough,
For an old neighbour's friendship chose the house
And decked and altered it for a girl's love,
And know whatever flourish and decline
These stones remain their monument and mine.
VI. The Stare's Nest by My Window
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
"I was in my Galway house during the first moths of the civil war, the
railway bridges blown up and the roads blocked with stones and trees.
For the first week there were no newspapers, no reliable news, we did
not know who had won nor who had lost, and even after newspapers came,
one never knew what was happening on the other side of the hill or of
the line of trees. Ford cars passed the house from time to time with
coffins standing upon end between the seats, and sometimes at night we
heard an explosion, and once by day saw the smoke made by the burning
of a great neighboring house. Men must have lived so through many
tumultuous centuries. One felt an overmastering desire not to grow
unhappy or embittered, not to loose all sense of the beauty of nature.
A stare (our West of Ireland name for a starling) had built in a hole
beside my window and I made these verses out of the feeling of the
moment.
[Yeats quotes first two stanzas]
"That is only the beginning but it runs on in the same mood.
Presently a strange thing happened. I began to smell honey in places
where honey could not be, at the end of a stone passage or at some
windy turn of the road, and it came always with certain thoughts.
When I got back to Dublin I was with angry people who argued over
everything or were eager to know the exact facts: in the midst of the
mood that makes realistic drama."
The Bounty of Sweden (1925), quoted in A. Norman Jeffares,
A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats