Explore "The Black and the White Arrows" by W.B. Yeats on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Instinct creates the recurring and the beautiful, all the winding of the / serpent; but reason, the most ugly man, as Blake called it, is a drawer / of the straight line, the maker of the arbitrary and the impermanent, / for no recurring spring will ever bring again yesterday's clock. / Sanctity has its straight line also, darting from the centre, and with / these arrows the many-coloured serpent, theme of all our poetry, is / maimed and hunted. He that finds the white arrow shall have wisdom older / than the Serpent, but what of the black arrow. How much knowledge, how / heavy a quiver of the crow-feathered ebony rods can the soul endure?