some to read
'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' is an example of Yeats's earlier poetry, and I believe is still one of his most popular and anthologised poems. It's a melodic melancholic poem about yearning for the peace and tranquillity of nature while living in the city (west Ireland very powerfully symbolic in this regard, see also Joyce's "The Dead").
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43281/the-lake-isle-of-innisfree
'The Second Coming' is probably his most famous and (consciously or not) quoted poems. Even if you don't understand it (I can't say I do entirely), once read it can never be forgotten — which is probably the ultimate compliment a poet can receive.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
'Sailing to Byzantium' is another very famous Yeats poem. "This is no country for old men..." A metaphorical journey from youth to age, and from the impermanence of life to the permanence of poetry. (I actually prefer "Byzantium" to this but this is more famous and more easily grasped.)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43291/sailing-to-byzantium
'Leda and the Swan' is a sonnet which (like 'The Second Coming') articulates Yeats's vision of eternal historical recurrence. It links the myth of Zeus (in the form of a swan) impregnating Leda with the Trojan war, the fall of Troy and - subliminally - the virgin birth of Christ. For my money one of his absolute best.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43292/leda-and-the-swan
'The Magi' (which Pound singles out for praise) does the same sort of thing with the story of the nativity. The miraculous beginning, the horrific, violent end. Shows what I loved as I got into Yeats — the mysterious, gnomic quality of it. You read it quickly and wonder what that was all about — but you want to know, because it seems like it must be tremendously significant.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12892/the-magi
'Easter 1916' is a poem about the Easter Rising, an armed republican rebellion against British rule which was brutally put down, with the leaders executed for treason. One of these doomed leaders was Major John Macbride, ex-husband of the (unrequited) love of Yeats's life, the aristocratic revolutionary Maud Gonne — Yeats hated Macbride for the way he had treated his wife and daughter, but found himself compelled to acknowledge the heroism of MacBride's death in this poem, in which Yeats confronts and acknowledges his former inability to perceive the heroism of "common" people before the rebellion had thrown his supposedly lofty dismissal of violent action into stark relief. As said upthread, a turning-point poem for Yeats.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43289/easter-1916
'Paudeen', one of my favourite poems by Yeats, traces a similar mental trajectory from snobbish dismissal ('Paudeen' being a dismissive word for catholics - 'little Patrick'). Having closely examined this poem, I have come to believe that the fragmented, awkward diction of the opening 5 lines reflects the disordered mindset of the offended speaker as he stumbles through the countryside, which - upon hearing the curlews speaking - melts away into the most sublimely "poetic" diction, reflective of the transcendence that Yeats believed poetry should make manifest. The last line is one of the more obviously beautiful lines Yeats ever wrote, but would seem maybe a little indulgent and
overpoetic without the rough-and-tumble of what leads up to it. And the sentiment is beautiful, too — and points to the transcendent dimension in Yeats, where material events are often masking some deeper, unified reality.
Paudeen
INDIGNANT at the fumbling wits, the obscure spite
Of our old paudeen in his shop, I stumbled blind
Among the stones and thorn-trees, under morning light;
Until a curlew cried and in the luminous wind
A curlew answered; and suddenly thereupon I thought
That on the lonely height where all are in God's eye,
There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot,
A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry.