"White Birds" by Alex Teddy Cardenas

"The White Birds" is a 1892 poem that William Buttler Yeats wrote for Maude Goone, his beloved. In it, the poet describes his desire to become a bird, a seagull, so he can escape along with his lover to a distant shore, and live unaware of the social circumstances that keep them apart.

"I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,

Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;

Soon far from the rose and the lily, and fret of the flames would we be,

Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!"