I knew it would come to this. I knew I would get around to Yeats sometime, and that would mean having to choose a poem, one poem, from scores of great poems. Of course, I confront this problem almost every week. But Yeats is different. My Collected Works of W. B. Yeats - Volume I - The Poems, contains some 550 pages of poetry. And oh so many "favorites."

I decided I would address this problem by breaking my own rules, as I did once before, and run two poems instead of one. As for the selection, I decided not to worry over it; to just pick two that I like, and have liked for years. God willing, I'll return to Yeats many times before I finish this project, and can choose one or two more each of these times. "And indeed there will be time . . . Time yet for a hundred indecisions." (Oops! That's Eliot, not Yeats. But what the heck.)

My fondness for "When You Are Old," isn't hard to understand. I'm no spring chicken, you know. And I'm a sucker for love poems. As for "The Second Coming," everyone loves this poem. As a matter of fact, I almost didn't choose it because I try to stay away from the "old standards," the ones that appear in every anthology of poems that has a title like "The Greatest English Poems Ever Written," or something like that. On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned, Yeats isn't Yeats without "The Second Coming." So here it is.

Like Eliot, Yeats is one of the greatest poets of the 20^th century, a literary giant, so to speak. He published his first book of poems in 1886. He continued to write poetry and drama for the rest of his life, winning a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. Besides being a poet, he was a folklorist, playwright, political pamphleteer, and editor. He was also an Irish nationalist and a student of the occult, pursuits that figured prominently in both his poetry and his drama.

He fell in love with the beautiful and famous Irish revolutionary, actress, painter, linguist and philanthropist Maud Gonne in 1888, when he was 23, and remained in love with her for much of the rest of his life. He is said to have once declared that "all of the trouble of my life began" when he met Maud Gonne. Numerous of his poems and dramas were written with her in mind, including, you guessed it, "When You Are Old."

She married the Irish nationalist John MacBride in 1903. It was an unhappy affair, but they had one son, Sean, who eventually helped found Amnesty International and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974. His father was executed by the British after the Easter Rebellion in 1916. Yeats did not take part in this uprising, but one of his most famous poems was written about this event. It is appropriately titled "Easter 1916," and contains the well-known line "A terrible beauty is born." "The Second Coming" was written during this same troubled period.