Ego Dominus Tuus, Latin for "I am your lord," sometimes translated as "I am your master" is a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...

. It was published in the 1918 book Per Amica Silentia Lunae, where it introduced some of Yeats's essays, and collected with other poems in The Wild Swans at Coole

The Wild Swans at Coole

The Wild Swans at Coole is a collection of poems by William Butler Yeats, first published in 1917. It is also the name of a poem in that collection...

(1919). The title is taken from Dante

DANTE

Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...

's La Vita Nuova

La Vita Nuova

La Vita Nuova is a medieval text written by Dante Alighieri in 1295. It is an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love in a prosimetrum style, a combination of both prose and verse...

: the words "ego dominus tuus" are spoken to Dante in a dream by the personification of Love. The two characters of the poem, Hic and Ille, are Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 words meaning this man and that man, respectively. Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

 identified Ille with 'Willie', or Yeats: the poem covers many characteristic themes of Yeats, in particular the image of the mask and the concept of the double or "anti-self". The dialogue of Hic and Ille treats the poetry of Dante, John Keats

John Keats

John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...

, and Yeats himself, contrasting the words of each poet with the experience of their lives.