To A Child Dancing In The Wind

by William Butler Yeats

I

    Dance there upon the shore;
    What need have you to care
    For wind or water’s roar?
    And tumble out your hair
    That the salt drops have wet;
    Being young you have not known
    The fool’s triumph, nor yet
    Love lost as soon as won,
    Nor the best labourer dead
    And all the sheaves to bind.
    What need have you to dread
    The monstrous crying of wind?

II

    Has no one said those daring
    Kind eyes should be more learn’d?
    Or warned you how despairing
    The moths are when they are burned,
    I could have warned you, but you are young,
    So we speak a different tongue.

    O you will take what ever’s offered
    And dream that all the world’s a friend,
    Suffer as your mother suffered,
    Be as broken in the end.
    But I am old and you are young,
    And I speak a barbarous tongue.