Hope that you may understand!
What can books of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land,
Paintings of the dolphin-drawn
Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons
Do, but awake a hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons?

A simple enough poem about the Meaning of Life and the Purpose of Art (yes, Yeats was never one to shy away from Big Things :-)).

This is about as close to free verse as Yeats ever got - which is not saying much. Indeed, even when he eschews the use of a formal ‘metre’, there’s still a definite rhythm to his words (read lines two through four out loud to see what I mean), and a rhyme scheme (abacdbcd) ( not much of a scheme, I must admit :-)).

Apart from that… well, I suppose the main reason I’ve chosen to run it is as an exercise in how a relatively small number of words (dragon-guarded, dolphin-drawn, sea-nymphs) can be used to create an atmospheric effect without the aid of any other devices. It’s not earth-shatteringly good, but it is worth a second look.

— Thomas

You can read more about Yeats at poem #21
There are several other Yeats poems in the Minstrels archive (I happen to like his work :-)); you can read them (and all our other offerings) at The Wondering Minstrels