Later Poems

by William Butler Yeats

First published in 1922

This ebook edition was created and published by Global Grey in 2019, and updated on the 7th February 2023

The artwork for the cover is Portrait of William Butler Yeats

painted by John Butler Yeats.

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Contents

Preface

The Wind Among The Reeds (1899)

The Hosting Of The Sidhe

The Everlasting Voices

The Moods

The Lover Tells Of The Rose In His Heart

The Host Of The Air

The Fisherman

A Cradle Song

Into The Twilight

The Song Of Wandering Aengus

The Song Of The Old Mother

The Heart Of The Woman

The Lover Mourns For The Loss Of Love

He Mourns For The Change That Has Come Upon Him And His Beloved And Longs For The End Of The World

He Bids His Beloved Be At Peace

He Reproves The Curlew

He Remembers Forgotten Beauty

A Poet To His Beloved

He Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes

To His Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear

The Cap And Bells

The Valley Of The Black Pig

The Lover Asks Forgiveness Because Of His Many Moods

He Tells Of A Valley Full Of Lovers

He Tells Of The Perfect Beauty

He Hears The Cry Of The Sedge

He Thinks Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil Of His Beloved

The Blessed

The Secret Rose

Maid Quiet

The Travail Of Passion

The Lover Pleads With His Friend For Old Friends

A Lover Speaks To The Hearers Of His Songs In Coming Days

The Poet Pleads With The Elemental Powers

He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead

He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven

He Thinks Of His Past Greatness When A Part Of The Constellations Of Heaven

The Fiddler Of Dooney

The Old Age Of Queen Maeve (1903)

Baile And Aillinn (1903)

In The Seven Woods (1904)

In The Seven Woods

The Arrow

The Folly Of Being Comforted

Old Memory

Never Give All The Heart

The Withering Of The Boughs

Adam’s Curse

Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland

The Old Men Admiring Themselves In The Water

Under The Moon

The Ragged Wood

O Do Not Love Too Long

The Players Ask For A Blessing On The Psalteries And On Themselves

The Happy Townland

The Shadowy Waters (1906)

Dedication To Lady Gregory

The Harp Of Aengus

The Shadowy Waters

From The Green Helmet And Other Poems (1912)

His Dream

A Woman Homer Sung

The Consolation

No Second Troy

Reconciliation

King And No King

Peace

Against Unworthy Praise

The Fascination Of What’s Difficult

A Drinking Song

The Coming Of Wisdom With Time

On Hearing That The Students Of Our New University Have Joined The Agitation Against Immoral Literature

To A Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators Of His And Mine

The Mask

Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation

At The Abbey Theatre

These Are The Clouds

At Galway Races

A Friend’s Illness

All Things Can Tempt Me

The Young Man’s Song

Responsibilities (1914)

Responsibilities

The Grey Rock

The Two Kings

To A Wealthy Man Who Promised A Second Subscription To The Dublin Municipal Gallery If It Were Proved The People Wanted Pictures

September 1913

To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing

Paudeen

To A Shade

When Helen Lived

On Those That Hated “The Playboy Of The Western World,” 1907

The Three Beggars

The Three Hermits

Beggar To Beggar Cried

Running To Paradise

The Hour Before Dawn

A Song From The Player Queen

The Realists

I. The Witch

II. The Peacock

The Mountain Tomb

I. To A Child Dancing In The Wind

II. Two Years Later

A Memory Of Youth

Fallen Majesty

Friends

The Cold Heaven

That The Night Come

An Appointment

I. The Magi

II. The Dolls

A Coat

CODA

The Wild Swans At Coole (1919)

The Wild Swans At Coole

In Memory Of Major Robert Gregory

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

Men Improve With The Years

The Collar-Bone Of A Hare

Under The Round Tower

Solomon To Sheba

The Living Beauty

A Song

To A Young Beauty

To A Young Girl

The Scholars

Tom O’roughley

The Sad Shepherd

Lines Written In Dejection

The Dawn

On Woman

The Fisherman

The Hawk

Memory

Her Praise

The People

His Phoenix

A Thought From Propertius

Broken Dreams

A Deep-Sworn Vow

Presences

The Balloon Of The Mind

To A Squirrel At Kyle-Na-Gno

On Being Asked For A War Poem

In Memory Of Alfred Pollexfen

Upon A Dying Lady

Ego Dominus Tuus

A Prayer On Going Into My House

The Phases Of The Moon

The Cat And The Moon

The Saint And The Hunchback

Two Songs Of A Fool

Another Song Of A Fool

The Double Vision Of Michael Robartes

Michael Robartes And The Dancer (1921)

Michael Robartes And The Dancer

Solomon And The Witch

An Image From A Past Life

Under Saturn

Easter, 1916

Sixteen Dead Men

The Rose Tree

On A Political Prisoner

The Leaders Of The Crowd

Towards Break Of Day

Demon And Beast

The Second Coming

A Prayer For My Daughter

A Meditation In Time Of War

To Be Carved On A Stone At Thoor Ballylee

Notes

Preface

THIS book contains all poetry not in dramatic form that I have written between my seven-and-twentieth year and the year 1921. I have included one long poem in dramatic form, of which a much shortened version, intended for stage representation, is in my book of plays. I have left out nearly all the long notes which seemed necessary before the work of various writers, but especially of my friend Lady Gregory, had made the circumstantial origins of my verse, in ancient legend or in the legends of the country side, familiar to readers of poetry.

THOOR BALLYLEE,

May 1922.

The Wind Among The Reeds (1899)

The Hosting Of The Sidhe

THE host is riding from Knocknarea

And over the grave of Clooth-na bare;

Caolte tossing his burning hair

And Niamh calling Away, come away:

Empty your heart of its mortal dream.

The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,

Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,

Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam,

Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;

And if any gaze on our rushing band,

We come between him and the deed of his hand,

We come between him and the hope of his heart.

The host is rushing ‘twixt night and day,

And where is there hope or deed as fair?

Caolte tossing his burning hair,

And Niamh calling Away, come away.

The Everlasting Voices

O SWEET everlasting Voices, be still;

Go to the guards of the heavenly fold

And bid them wander obeying your will

Flame under flame, till Time be no more;

Have you not heard that our hearts are old,

That you call in birds, in wind on the hill,

In shaken boughs, in tide on the shore?

O sweet everlasting Voices, be still.

The Moods

TIME drops in decay,

Like a candle burnt out,

And the mountains and woods

Have their day, have their day;

What one in the rout

Of the fire-born moods

Has fallen away?

The Lover Tells Of The Rose In His Heart

ALL things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,

The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,

The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,

Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;

I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,

With the earth and the sky and the water, remade, like a casket of gold

For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The Host Of The Air

O’DRISCOLL drove with a song

The wild duck and the drake

From the tall and the tufted reeds

Of the drear Hart Lake.

And he saw how the reeds grew dark

At the coming of night tide,

And dreamed of the long dim hair

Of Bridget his bride.

He heard while he sang and dreamed

A piper piping away,

And never was piping so sad,

And never was piping so gay.

And he saw young men and young girls

Who danced on a level place

And Bridget his bride among them,

With a sad and a gay face.

The dancers crowded about him,

And many a sweet thing said,

And a young man brought him red wine

And a young girl white bread.

But Bridget drew him by the sleeve,

Away from the merry bands,

To old men playing at cards

With a twinkling of ancient hands.

The bread and the wine had a doom,

For these were the host of the air;

He sat and played in a dream

Of her long dim hair.

He played with the merry old men

And thought not of evil chance,

Until one bore Bridget his bride

Away from the merry dance.

He bore her away in his arms,

The handsomest young man there,

And his neck and his breast and his arms

Were drowned in her long dim hair.

O’Driscoll scattered the cards

And out of his dream awoke:

Old men and young men and young girls

Were gone like a drifting smoke;

But he heard high up in the air

A piper piping away,

And never was piping so sad,

And never was piping so gay.

The Fisherman

ALTHOUGH you hide in the ebb and flow

Of the pale tide when the moon has set,

The people of coming days will know

About the casting out of my net,

And how you have leaped times out of mind

Over the little silver cords,

And think that you were hard and unkind,

And blame you with many bitter words.

A Cradle Song

THE Danaan children laugh, in cradles of wrought gold,

And clap their hands together, and half close their eyes,

For they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies,

With heavy whitening wings, and a heart fallen cold:

I kiss my wailing child and press it to my breast,

And hear the narrow graves calling my child and me.

Desolate winds that cry over the wandering sea;

Desolate winds that hover in the flaming West;

Desolate winds that beat the doors of Heaven, and beat

The doors of Hell and blow there many a whimpering ghost;

O heart the winds have shaken; the unappeasable host

Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary’s feet.

Into The Twilight

OUT-WORN heart, in a time out-worn,

Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;

Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,

Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,

Dew ever shining and twilight grey;

Though hope fall from you and love decay,

Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:

For there the mystical brotherhood

Of sun and moon and hollow and wood

And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,

And time and the world are ever in flight;

And love is less kind than the grey twilight,

And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.

The Song Of Wandering Aengus

I WENT out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

The Song Of The Old Mother

I RISE in the dawn, and I kneel and blow

Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow;

And then I must scrub and bake and sweep

Till stars are beginning to blink and peep;

And the young lie long and dream in their bed

Of the matching of ribbons for bosom and head,

And their day goes over in idleness,

And they sigh if the wind but lift a tress:

While I must work because I am old,

And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold.

The Heart Of The Woman

O WHAT to me the little room

That was brimmed up with prayer and rest;

He bade me out into the gloom,

And my breast lies upon his breast.

O what to me my mother’s care,

The house where I was safe and warm;

The shadowy blossom of my hair

Will hide us from the bitter storm.

O hiding hair and dewy eyes,

I am no more with life and death,

My heart upon his warm heart lies,

My breath is mixed into his breath.

The Lover Mourns For The Loss Of Love

PALE brows, still hands and dim hair,

I had a beautiful friend

And dreamed that the old despair

Would end in love in the end:

She looked in my heart one day

And saw your image was there;

She has gone weeping away.

He Mourns For The Change That Has Come Upon Him And His Beloved And Longs For The End Of The World

Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns!

I have been changed to a hound with one red ear;

I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns,

For somebody hid hatred and hope and desire and fear

Under my feet that they follow you night and day.

A man with a hazel wand came without sound;

He changed me suddenly; I was looking another way;

And now my calling is but the calling of a hound;

And Time and Birth and Change are hurrying by.

I would that the Boar without bristles had come from the West

And had rooted the sun and moon and stars out of the sky

And lay in the darkness, grunting, and turning to his rest.

He Bids His Beloved Be At Peace

I HEAR the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake,

Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white;

The North unfolds above them clinging, creeping night,

The East her hidden joy before the morning break,

The West weeps in pale dew and sighs passing away,

The South is pouring down roses of crimson fire:

O vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire,

The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay:

Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat

Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast,

Drowning love’s lonely hour in deep twilight of rest,

And hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous feet.

He Reproves The Curlew

O, CURLEW, cry no more in the air,

Or only to the water in the West;

Because your crying brings to my mind

Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair

That was shaken out over my breast:

There is enough evil in the crying of wind.

He Remembers Forgotten Beauty

WHEN my arms wrap you round I press

My heart upon the loveliness

That has long faded from the world;

The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled

In shadowy pools, when armies fled;

The love-tales wrought with silken thread

By dreaming ladies upon cloth

That has made fat the murderous moth;

The roses that of old time were

Woven by ladies in their hair,

The dew-cold lilies ladies bore

Through many a sacred corridor

Where such grey clouds of incense rose

That only the gods’ eyes did not close:

For that pale breast and lingering hand

Come from a more dream-heavy land,

A more dream-heavy hour than this;

And when you sigh from kiss to kiss

I hear white Beauty sighing, too,

For hours when all must fade like dew,

But flame on flame, and deep on deep,

Throne over throne where in half sleep,

Their swords upon their iron knees,

Brood her high lonely mysteries.

A Poet To His Beloved

I BRING you with reverent hands

The books of my numberless dreams;

White woman that passion has worn

As the tide wears the dove-grey sands,

And with heart more old than the horn

That is brimmed from the pale fire of time:

White woman with numberless dreams

I bring you my passionate rhyme.

He Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes

FASTEN your hair with a golden pin,

And bind up every wandering tress;

I bade my heart build these poor rhymes:

It worked at them, day out, day in,

Building a sorrowful loveliness

Out of the battles of old times.

You need but lift a pearl-pale hand,

And bind up your long hair and sigh;

And all men’s hearts must burn and beat;

And candle-like foam on the dim sand,

And stars climbing the dew-dropping sky,

Live but to light your passing feet.

To His Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear

BE you still, be you still, trembling heart;

Remember the wisdom out of the old days:

Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,

find the winds that blow through the starry ways,

Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood

Cover over and hide, for he has no part

With the lonely, majestical multitude.

The Cap And Bells

THE jester walked in the garden:

The garden had fallen still;

He bade his soul rise upward

And stand on her window-sill.

It rose in a straight blue garment,

When owls began to call:

It had grown wise-tongued by thinking

Of a quiet and light footfall;

But the young queen would not listen;

She rose in her pale night gown;

She drew in the heavy casement

And pushed the latches down.

He bade his heart go to her,

When the owls called out no more;

In a red and quivering garment

It sang to her through the door.

It had grown sweet-tongued by dreaming,

Of a flutter of flower-like hair;

But she took up her fan from the table

And waved it off on the air.

“I have cap and bells,” he pondered,

“I will send them to her and die”;

And when the morning whitened

He left them where she went by.

She laid them upon her bosom,

Under a cloud of her hair,

And her red lips sang them a love-song:

Till stars grew out of the air.

She opened her door and her window,

And the heart and the soul came through,

To her right hand came the red one,

To her left hand came the blue.

They set up a noise like crickets,

A chattering wise and sweet,

And her hair was a folded flower

And the quiet of love in her feet.

The Valley Of The Black Pig

THE dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears

Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes,

And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries

Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.

We who still labour by the cromlec on the shore,

The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew,

Being weary of the world’s empires, bow down to you,

Master of the still stars and of the flaming door.

The Lover Asks Forgiveness Because Of His Many Moods

IF this importunate heart trouble your peace

With words lighter than air,

Or hopes that in mere hoping flicker and cease;

Crumple the rose in your hair;

And cover your lips with odorous twilight and say,

“O Hearts of wind-blown flame!

O Winds, elder than changing of night and day,

That murmuring and longing came,

From marble cities loud with tabors of old

In dove-grey faery lands;

From battle banners, fold upon purple fold,

Queens wrought with glimmering hands;

That saw young Niamh hover with love-lorn face

Above the wandering tide;

And lingered in the hidden desolate place,

Where the last Phoenix died

And wrapped the flames above his holy head;

And still murmur and long:

O Piteous Hearts, changing till change be dead

In a tumultuous song”:

And cover the pale blossoms of your breast

With your dim heavy hair,

And trouble with a sigh for all things longing for rest

The odorous twilight there.

He Tells Of A Valley Full Of Lovers

I DREAMED that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs,

For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood;

And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood

With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes:

I cried in my dream, O women, bid the young men lay

Their heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with your hair,

Or remembering hers they will find no other face fair

Till all the valleys of the world have been withered away.

He Tells Of The Perfect Beauty

O CLOUD-PALE eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes,

The poets labouring all their days

To build a perfect beauty in rhyme

Are overthrown by a woman’s gaze

And by the unlabouring brood of the skies:

And therefore my heart will bow, when dew

Is dropping sleep, until God burn time,

Before the unlabouring stars and you.

He Hears The Cry Of The Sedge

I WANDER by the edge

Of this desolate lake

Where wind cries in the sedge:

Until the axle break

That keeps the stars in their round,

And hands hurl in the deep

The banners of East and West,

And the girdle of light is unbound,

Your breast will not lie by the breast

Of your beloved in sleep.

He Thinks Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil Of His Beloved

HALF close your eyelids, loosen your hair,

And dream about the great and their pride;

They have spoken against you everywhere,

But weigh this song with the great and their pride;

I made it out of a mouthful of air,

Their children’s children shall say they have lied.

The Blessed

CUMHAL called out, bending his head,

Till Dathi came and stood,

With a blink in his eyes at the cave mouth,

Between the wind and the wood.

And Cumhal said, bending his knees,

“I have come by the windy way

To gather the half of your blessedness

And learn to pray when you pray.

“I can bring you salmon out of the streams

And heron out of the skies.”

But Dathi folded his hands and smiled

With the secrets of God in his eyes.

And Cumhal saw like a drifting smoke

All manner of blessed souls,

Women and children, young men with books,

And old men with croziers and stoles.

“Praise God and God’s mother,” Dathi said,

“For God and God’s mother have sent

The blessedest souls that walk in the world

To fill your heart with content.”

“And which is the blessedest,” Cumhal said,

“Where all are comely and good?

Is it these that with golden thuribles

Are singing about the wood?”

“My eyes are blinking,” Dathi said,

“With the secrets of God half blind,

But I can see where the wind goes

And follow the way of the wind;

“And blessedness goes where the wind goes,

And when it is gone we are dead;

I see the blessedest soul in the world

And he nods a drunken head.

“O blessedness comes in the night and the day

And whither the wise heart knows;

And one has seen in the redness of wine

The Incorruptible Rose,

“That drowsily drops faint leaves on him

And the sweetness of desire,

While time and the world are ebbing away

In twilights of dew and of fire.”

The Secret Rose

FAR off, most secret, and inviolate Rose,

Enfold me in my hour of hours; where those

Who sought thee in the Holy Sepulchre,

Or in the wine vat, dwell beyond the stir

And tumult of defeated dreams; and deep

Among pale eyelids, heavy with the sleep

Men have named beauty. Thy great leaves enfold

The ancient beards, the helms of ruby and gold

Of the crowned Magi; and the king whose eyes

Saw the Pierced Hands and Rood of elder rise

In Druid vapour and make the torches dim;

Till vain frenzy awoke and he died; and him

Who met Fand walking among flaming dew

By a grey shore where the wind never blew,

And lost the world and Emer for a kiss;

And him who drove the gods out of their liss,

And till a hundred morns had flowered red,

Feasted and wept the barrows of his dead;

And the proud dreaming king who flung the crown

And sorrow away, and calling bard and clown

Dwelt among wine-stained wanderers in deep woods;

And him who sold tillage, and house, and goods,

And sought through lands and islands numberless years,

Until he found with laughter and with tears,

A woman, of so shining loveliness,

That men threshed corn at midnight by a tress,

A little stolen tress. I, too, await

The hour of thy great wind of love and hate.

When shall the stars be blown about the sky,

Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?

Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,

Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?

Maid Quiet

WHERE has Maid Quiet gone to,

Nodding her russet hood?

The winds that awakened the stars

Are blowing through my blood.

O how could I be so calm

When she rose up to depart?

Now words that called up the lightning

Are hurtling through my heart.

The Travail Of Passion

WHEN the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;

When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;

Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way

Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,

The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream;

We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,

That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,

Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.

The Lover Pleads With His Friend For Old Friends

THOUGH you are in your shining days,

Voices among the crowd

And new friends busy with your praise,

Be not unkind or proud,

But think about old friends the most:

Time’s bitter flood will rise,

Your beauty perish and be lost

For all eyes but these eyes.

A Lover Speaks To The Hearers Of His Songs In Coming Days

O, WOMEN, kneeling by your altar rails long hence,

When songs I wove for my beloved hide the prayer,

And smoke from this dead heart drifts through the violet air

And covers away the smoke of myrrh and frankincense;

Bend down and pray for all that sin I wove in song,

Till the Attorney for Lost Souls cry her sweet cry,

And call to my beloved and me: “No longer fly

Amid the hovering, piteous, penitential throng.”

The Poet Pleads With The Elemental Powers

THE Powers whose name and shape no living creature knows

Have pulled the Immortal Rose;

And though the Seven Lights bowed in their dance and wept,

The Polar Dragon slept,

His heavy rings uncoiled from glimmering deep to deep:

When will he wake from sleep?

Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire,

With your harmonious choir

Encircle her I love and sing her into peace,

That my old care may cease;

Unfold your flaming wings and cover out of sight

The nets of day and night.

Dim Powers of drowsy thought, let her no longer be

Like the pale cup of the sea,

When winds have gathered and sun and moon burned dim

Above its cloudy rim;

But let a gentle silence wrought with music flow

Whither her footsteps go.

He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead

WERE you but lying cold and dead,

And lights were paling out of the West,

You would come hither, and bend your head,

And I would lay my head on your breast;

And you would murmur tender words,

Forgiving me, because you were dead:

Nor would you rise and hasten away,

Though you have the will of the wild birds,

But know your hair was bound and wound

About the stars and moon and sun:

O would, beloved, that you lay

Under the dock-leaves in the ground,

While lights were paling one by one.

He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

He Thinks Of His Past Greatness When A Part Of The Constellations Of Heaven

I HAVE drunk ale from the Country of the Young

And weep because I know all things now:

I have been a hazel tree and they hung

The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough

Among my leaves in times out of mind:

I became a rush that horses tread:

I became a man, a hater of the wind,

Knowing one, out of all things, alone, that his head

Would not lie on the breast or his lips on the hair

Of the woman that he loves, until he dies.

O beast of the wilderness, bird of the air,

Must I endure your amorous cries?

The Fiddler Of Dooney

WHEN I play on my fiddle in Dooney,

Folk dance like a wave of the sea;

My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,

My brother in Mocharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:

They read in their books of prayer;

I read in my book of songs

I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time,

To Peter sitting in state,

He will smile on the three old spirits,

But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,

Save by an evil chance,

And the merry love the fiddle

And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,

They will all come up to me,

With “Here is the fiddler of Dooney!”

And dance like a wave of the sea.

The Old Age Of Queen Maeve (1903)

MAEVE the great queen was pacing to and fro,

Between the walls covered with beaten bronze,

In her high house at Cruachan; the long hearth,

Flickering with ash and hazel, but half showed

Where the tired horse-boys lay upon the rushes,

Or on the benches underneath the walls,

In comfortable sleep; all living slept

But that great queen, who more than half the night

Had paced from door to fire and fire to door.

Though now in her old age, in her young age

She had been beautiful in that old way

That’s all but gone; for the proud heart is gone,

And the fool heart of the counting-house fears all

But soft beauty and indolent desire.

She could have called over the rim of the world

Whatever woman’s lover had hit her fancy,

And yet had been great bodied and great limbed,

Fashioned to be the mother of strong children;

And she’d had lucky eyes and a high heart,

And wisdom that caught fire like the dried flax,

At need, and made her beautiful and fierce,

Sudden and laughing.

O unquiet heart,

Why do you praise another, praising her,

As if there were no tale but your own tale

Worth knitting to a measure of sweet sound?

Have I not bid you tell of that great queen

Who has been buried some two thousand years?

When night was at its deepest, a wild goose

Cried from the porter’s lodge, and with long clamour

Shook the ale horns and shields upon their hooks;

But the horse-boys slept on, as though some power

Had filled the house with Druid heaviness;

And wondering who of the many-changing Sidhe

Had come as in the old times to counsel her,

Maeve walked, yet with slow footfall, being old,

To that small chamber by the outer gate.

The porter slept, although he sat upright

With still and stony limbs and open eyes.

Maeve waited, and when that ear-piercing noise

Broke from his parted lips and broke again,

She laid a hand on either of his shoulders,

And shook him wide awake, and bid him say

Who of the wandering many-changing ones

Had troubled his sleep. But all he had to say

Was that, the air being heavy and the dogs

More still than they had been for a good month,

He had fallen asleep, and, though he had dreamed nothing,

He could remember when he had had fine dreams.

It was before the time of the great war

Over the White-Horned Bull, and the Brown Bull.

She turned away; he turned again to sleep

That no god troubled now, and, wondering

What matters were afoot among the Sidhe,

Maeve walked through that great hall, and with a sigh

Lifted the curtain of her sleeping-room,

Remembering that she too had seemed divine

To many thousand eyes, and to her own

One that the generations had long waited

That work too difficult for mortal hands

Might be accomplished. Bunching the curtain up

She saw her husband Ailell sleeping there,

And thought of days when he’d had a straight body,

And of that famous Fergus, Nessa’s husband,

Who had been the lover of her middle life.

Suddenly Ailell spoke out of his sleep,

And not with his own voice or a man’s voice,

But with the burning, live, unshaken voice,

Of those that it may be can never age.

He said, “High Queen of Cruachan and Magh Ai,

A king of the Great Plain would speak with you.”

And with glad voice Maeve answered him, “What king

Of the far wandering shadows has come to me?

As in the old days when they would come and go

About my threshold to counsel and to help.”

The parted lips replied, “I seek your help,

For I am Aengus, and I am crossed in love.”

“How may a mortal whose life gutters out

Help them that wander with hand clasping hand,

Their haughty images that cannot wither,

For all their beauty’s like a hollow dream,

Mirrored in streams that neither hail nor rain

Nor the cold North has troubled?”

He replied:

“I am from those rivers and I bid you call

The children of the Maines out of sleep,

And set them digging under Bual’s hill.

We shadows, while they uproot his earthy house,

Will overthrow his shadows and carry off

Caer, his blue-eyed daughter that I love.

I helped your fathers when they built these walls,

And I would have your help in my great need,

Queen of high Cruachan.”

“I obey your will

With speedy feet and a most thankful heart:

For you have been, O Aengus of the birds,

Our giver of good counsel and good luck.”

And with a groan, as if the mortal breath

Could but awaken sadly upon lips

That happier breath had moved, her husband turned

Face downward, tossing in a troubled sleep;

But Maeve, and not with a slow feeble foot,

Came to the threshold of the painted house,

Where her grandchildren slept, and cried aloud,

Until the pillared dark began to stir

With shouting and the clang of unhooked arms.

She told them of the many-changing ones;

And all that night, and all through the next day

To middle night, they dug into the hill.

At middle night great cats with silver claws,

Bodies of shadow and blind eyes like pearls,

Came up out of the hole, and red-eared hounds

With long white bodies came out of the air

Suddenly, and ran at them and harried them.

The Maines’ children dropped their spades, and stood

With quaking joints and terror-strucken faces,

Till Maeve called out: “These are but common men.

The Maines’ children have not dropped their spades,

Because Earth, crazy for its broken power,

Casts up a show and the winds answer it

With holy shadows.” Her high heart was glad,

And when the uproar ran along the grass

She followed with light footfall in the midst,

Till it died out where an old thorn tree stood.

Friend of these many years, you too had stood

With equal courage in that whirling rout;

For you, although you’ve not her wandering heart,

Have all that greatness, and not hers alone,

For there is no high story about queens

In any ancient book but tells of you;

And when I’ve heard how they grew old and died,

Or fell into unhappiness, I’ve said:

“She will grow old and die, and she has wept!”

And when I’d write it out anew, the words,

Half crazy with the thought, She too has wept!

Outrun the measure.

I’d tell of that great queen

Who stood amid a silence by the thorn

Until two lovers came out of the air

With bodies made out of soft fire. The one,

About whose face birds wagged their fiery wings,

Said: “Aengus and his sweetheart give their thanks

To Maeve and to Maeve’s household, owing all

In owing them the bride-bed that gives peace.”

Then Maeve: “O Aengus, Master of all lovers,

A thousand years ago you held high talk

With the first kings of many-pillared Cruachan.

O when will you grow weary?”

They had vanished;

But out of the dark air over her head there came

A murmur of soft words and meeting lips.

Baile And Aillinn (1903)

Argument. Baile and Aillinn were lovers, but Aengus, the Master of Love, wishing them to be happy in his own land among the dead, told to each a story of the other’s death, so that their hearts were broken and they died.

I HARDLY hear the curlew cry,

Nor the grey rush when the wind is high,

Before my thoughts begin to run

On the heir of Ulad, Buan’s son,

Baile, who had the honey mouth;

And that mild woman of the south,

Aillinn, who was King Lugaid’s heir.

Their love was never drowned in care

Of this or that thing, nor grew cold

Because their bodies had grown old.

Being forbid to marry on earth,

They blossomed to immortal mirth.

About the time when Christ was born,

When the long wars for the White Horn

And the Brown Bull had not yet come,

Young Baile Honey-Mouth, whom some

Called rather Baile Little-Land,

Rode out of Emain with a band

Of harpers and young men; and they

Imagined, as they struck the way

To many-pastured Muirthemne,

That all things fell out happily,

And there, for all that fools had said,

Baile and Aillinn would be wed.

They found an old man running there:

He had ragged long grass-coloured hair;

He had knees that stuck out of his hose;

He had puddle water in his shoes;

He had half a cloak to keep him dry,

Although he had a squirrel’s eye.

O wandering birds and rushy beds,

You put such folly in our heads

With all this crying in the wind;

No common love is to our mind,

And our poor Kate or Nan is less

Than any whose unhappiness

Awoke the harp-strings long ago.

Yet they that know all things but know

That all life had to give us is

A child’s laughter, a woman’s kiss.

Who was it put so great a scorn

In the grey reeds that night and morn

Are trodden and broken by the herds,

And in the light bodies of birds

That north wind tumbles to and fro

And pinches among hail and snow?

That runner said: “I am from the south;

I run to Baile Honey-Mouth,

To tell him how the girl Aillinn

Rode from the country of her kin,

And old and young men rode with her:

For all that country had been astir

If anybody half as fair

Had chosen a husband anywhere

But where it could see her every day.

When they had ridden a little way

An old man caught the horse’s head

With: ‘You must home again, and wed

With somebody in your own land.’

A young man cried and kissed her hand,

‘O lady, wed with one of us’;

And when no face grew piteous

For any gentle thing she spake,

She fell and died of the heart-break.”

Because a lover’s heart’s worn out,

Being tumbled and blown about

By its own blind imagining,

And will believe that anything

That is bad enough to be true, is true,

Baile’s heart was broken in two;

And he being laid upon green boughs,

Was carried to the goodly house

Where the Hound of Ulad sat before

The brazen pillars of his door,

His face bowed low to weep the end

Of the harper’s daughter and her friend.

For although years had passed away

He always wept them on that day,

For on that day they had been betrayed;

And now that Honey-Mouth is laid

Under a cairn of sleepy stone

Before his eyes, he has tears for none,

Although he is carrying stone, but two

For whom the cairn’s but heaped anew.

We hold because our memory is

So full of that thing and of this

That out of sight is out of mind.

But the grey rush under the wind

And the grey bird with crooked bill

Have such long memories, that they still

Remember Deirdre and her man;

And when we walk with Kate or Nan

About the windy water side,

Our heart can hear the voices chide.

How could we be so soon content,

Who know the way that Naoise went

And they have news of Deirdre’s eyes,

Who being lovely was so wise--

Ah! wise, my heart knows well how wise.

Now had that old gaunt crafty one,

Gathering his cloak about him, run

Where Aillinn rode with waiting maids,

Who amid leafy lights and shades

Dreamed of the hands that would unlace

Their bodices in some dim place

When they had come to the marriage bed;

And harpers, pacing with high head

As though their music were enough

To make the savage heart of love

Grow gentle without sorrowing,

Imagining and pondering

Heaven knows what calamity;

“Another’s hurried off,” cried he,

From heat and cold and wind and wave;

They have heaped the stones above his grave

In Muirthemne, and over it

In changeless Ogham letters writ--

Baile, that was of Rury’s seed.

But the gods long ago decreed

No waiting maid should ever spread

Baile and Aillinn’s marriage bed,

For they should clip and clip again

Where wild bees hive on the Great Plain.

Therefore it is but little news

That put this hurry in my shoes.”

Then seeing that he scarce had spoke

Before her love-worn heart had broke,

He ran and laughed until he came

To that high hill the herdsmen name

The Hill Seat of Leighin, because

Some god or king had made the laws

That held the land together there,

In old times among the clouds of the air.

That old man climbed; the day grew dim;

Two swans came flying up to him,

Linked by a gold chain each to each,

And with low murmuring laughing speech

Alighted on the windy grass.

They knew him: his changed body was

Tall, proud and ruddy, and light wings

Were hovering over the harp-strings

That Etain, Midhir’s wife, had wove

In the hid place, being crazed by love.

What shall I call them? fish that swim,

Scale rubbing scale where light is dim

By a broad water-lily leaf;

Or mice in the one wheaten sheaf

Forgotten at the threshing place;

Or birds lost in the one clear space

Of morning light in a dim sky;

Or, it may be, the eyelids of one eye,

Or the door pillars of one house,

Or two sweet blossoming apple-boughs

That have one shadow on the ground;

Or the two strings that made one sound

Where that wise harper’s finger ran.

For this young girl and this young man

Have happiness without an end,

Because they have made so good a friend.

They know all wonders, for they pass

The towery gates of Gorias,

And Findrias and Falias,

And long-forgotten Murias,

Among the giant kings whose hoard,

Cauldron and spear and stone and sword,

Was robbed before earth gave the wheat;

Wandering from broken street to street

They come where some huge watcher is,

And tremble with their love and kiss.

They know undying things, for they

Wander where earth withers away,

Though nothing troubles the great streams

But light from the pale stars, and gleams

From the holy orchards, where there is none

But fruit that is of precious stone,

Or apples of the sun and moon.

What were our praise to them? They eat

Quiet’s wild heart, like daily meat;

Who when night thickens are afloat

On dappled skins in a glass boat,

Far out under a windless sky;

While over them birds of Aengus fly,

And over the tiller and the prow,

And waving white wings to and fro

Awaken wanderings of light air

To stir their coverlet and their hair.

And poets found, old writers say,

A yew tree where his body lay;

But a wild apple hid the grass

With its sweet blossom where hers was;

And being in good heart, because

A better time had come again

After the deaths of many men,

And that long fighting at the ford,

They wrote on tablets of thin board,

Made of the apple and the yew,

All the love stories that they knew.

Let rush and bird cry out their fill

Of the harper’s daughter if they will,

Beloved, I am not afraid of her.

She is not wiser nor lovelier,

And you are more high of heart than she,

For all her wanderings over-sea;

But I’d have bird and rush forget

Those other two; for never yet

Has lover lived, but longed to wive

Like them that are no more alive.

In The Seven Woods (1904)

In The Seven Woods

I HAVE heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods

Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees

Hum in the lime tree flowers; and put away

The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness

That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile

Tara uprooted, and new commonness

Upon the throne and crying about the streets

And hanging its paper flowers from post to post,

Because it is alone of all things happy.

I am contented for I know that Quiet

Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart

Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer,

Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs

A cloudy quiver over Parc-na-Lee.

August 1902.

The Arrow

I THOUGHT of your beauty, and this arrow,

Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.

There’s no man may look upon her, no man;

As when newly grown to be a woman,

Tall and noble but with face and bosom

Delicate in colour as apple blossom.

This beauty’s kinder, yet for a reason

I could weep that the old is out of season.

The Folly Of Being Comforted

ONE that is ever kind said yesterday:

“Your well-beloved’s hair has threads of grey,

And little shadows come about her eyes;

Time can but make it easier to be wise

Though now it seem impossible, and so

Patience is all that you have need of.”

No,

I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain,

Time can but make her beauty over again:

Because of that great nobleness of hers

The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs

Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways,

When all the wild summer was in her gaze.

O heart! O heart! if she’d but turn her head,

You’d know the folly of being comforted.

Old Memory

O THOUGHT, fly to her when the end of day

Awakens an old memory, and say,

“Your strength, that is so lofty and fierce and kind,

It might call up a new age, calling to mind

The queens that were imagined long ago,

Is but half yours: he kneaded in the dough

Through the long years of youth, and who would have thought

It all, and more than it all, would come to naught,

And that dear words meant nothing?” But enough,

For when we have blamed the wind we can blame love;

Or, if there needs be more, be nothing said

That would be harsh for children that have strayed.

Never Give All The Heart

NEVER give all the heart, for love

Will hardly seem worth thinking of

To passionate women if it seem

Certain, and they never dream

That it fades out from kiss to kiss;

For everything that’s lovely is

But a brief dreamy kind delight.

O never give the heart outright,

For they, for all smooth lips can say,

Have given their hearts up to the play.

And who could play it well enough

If deaf and dumb and blind with love?

He that made this knows all the cost,

For he gave all his heart and lost.

The Withering Of The Boughs

I CRIED when the moon was murmuring to the birds:

“Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will,

I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words,

For the roads are unending, and there is no place to my mind.”

The honey-pale moon lay low on the sleepy hill,

And I fell asleep upon lonely Echtge of streams.

No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;

The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.

I know of the leafy paths that the witches take,

Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool,

And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake;

I know where a dim moon drifts, where the Danaan kind

Wind and unwind their dances when the light grows cool

On the island lawns, their feet where the pale foam gleams.

No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;

The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.

I know of the sleepy country, where swans fly round

Coupled with golden chains, and sing as they fly.

A king and a queen are wandering there, and the sound

Has made them so happy and hopeless, so deaf and so blind

With wisdom, they wander till all the years have gone by;

I know, and the curlew and peewit on Echtge of streams.

No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;

The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.

Adam’s Curse

WE sat together at one summer’s end,

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,

And you and I, and talked of poetry.

I said: “A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.”

And thereupon

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake

There’s many a one shall find out all heartache

On finding that her voice is sweet and low

Replied: “To be born woman is to know,

Although they do not talk of it at school--

That we must labour to be beautiful.”

I said: “It’s certain there is no fine thing

Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.

There have been lovers who thought love should be

So much compounded of high courtesy

That they would sigh and quote with learned looks

Precedents out of beautiful old books;

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.”

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;

We saw the last embers of daylight die,

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell

Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears;

That you were beautiful, and that I strove

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown

As weary hearted as that hollow moon.

Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland

THE old brown thorn trees break in two high over Cummen Strand,

Under a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand;

Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies,

But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes

Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

The wind has bundled up the clouds high over Knocknarea,

And thrown the thunder on the stones for all that Maeve can say.

Angers that are like noisy clouds have set our hearts abeat;

But we have all bent low and low and kissed the quiet feet

Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

The yellow pool has overflowed high up on Clooth-na-Bare,

For the wet winds are blowing out of the clinging air;

Like heavy flooded waters our bodies and our blood;

But purer than a tall candle before the Holy Rood

Is Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

The Old Men Admiring Themselves In The Water

I HEARD the old, old men say,

“Everything alters,

And one by one we drop away.”

They had hands like claws, and their knees

Were twisted like the old thorn trees

By the waters.

I heard the old, old men say,

“All that’s beautiful drifts away

Like the waters.”

Under The Moon

I HAVE no happiness in dreaming of Brycelinde,

Nor Avalon the grass-green hollow, nor Joyous Isle,

Where one found Lancelot crazed and hid him for a while;

Nor Ulad, when Naoise had thrown a sail upon the wind;

Nor lands that seem too dim to be burdens on the heart:

Land-under-Wave, where out of the moon’s light and the sun’s

Seven old sisters wind the threads of the long-lived ones,

Land-of-the-Tower, where Aengus has thrown the gates apart,

And Wood-of-Wonders, where one kills an ox at dawn,

To find it when night falls laid on a golden bier.

Therein are many queens like Branwen and Guinivere;

And Niamh and Laban and Fand, who could change to an otter or fawn,

And the wood-woman, whose lover was changed to a blue-eyed hawk;

And whether I go in my dreams by woodland, or dun, or shore,

Or on the unpeopled waves with kings to pull at the oar,

I hear the harp-string praise them, or hear their mournful talk.

Because of something told under the famished horn

Of the hunter’s moon, that hung between the night and the day,

To dream of women whose beauty was folded in dismay,

Even in an old story, is a burden not to be borne.

The Ragged Wood

O HURRY where by water among the trees,

The delicate stepping stag and his lady sigh

When they have but looked upon their images,

Would none had ever loved but you and I!

Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed,

Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky,

When the sun looked out of his golden hood:

O that none ever loved but you and I!

O hurry to the ragged wood, for there

I will drive all those lovers out and cry--

O my share of the world, O yellow hair,

No one has ever loved but you and I!

O Do Not Love Too Long

SWEETHEART, do not love too long:

I loved long and long,

And grew to be out of fashion

Like an old song.

All through the years of our youth

Neither could have known

Their own thought from the other’s,

We were so much at one.

But, O in a minute she changed--

O do not love too long,

Or you will grow out of fashion

Like an old song.

The Players Ask For A Blessing On The Psalteries And On Themselves

Three voices together:

HURRY to bless the hands that play,

The mouths that speak, the notes and strings,

O masters of the glittering town!

O ! lay the shrilly trumpet down,

Though drunken with the flags that sway

Over the ramparts and the towers,

And with the waving of your wings.

First voice:

Maybe they linger by the way.

One gathers up his purple gown;

One leans and mutters by the wall--

He dreads the weight of mortal hours.

Second voice:

O no, O no! they hurry down

Like plovers that have heard the call.

Third voice:

O kinsmen of the Three in One,

O kinsmen bless the hands that play.

The notes they waken shall live on

When all this heavy history’s done;

Our hands, our hands must ebb away.

Three voices together:

The proud and careless notes live on

But bless our hands that ebb away.

The Happy Townland

THERE’S many a strong farmer

Whose heart would break in two,

If he could see the townland

That we are riding to;

Boughs have their fruit and blossom

At all times of the year;

Rivers are running over

With red beer and brown beer.

An old man plays the bagpipes

In a golden and silver wood;

Queens, their eyes blue like the ice,

Are dancing in a crowd.

The little fox he murmured,

“O what of the world’s bane?”

The sun was laughing sweetly,

The moon plucked at my rein;

But the little red fox murmured,

“O do not pluck at his rein,

He is riding to the townland

That is the world’s bane.”

When their hearts are so high

That they would come to blows,

They unhook their heavy swords

From golden and silver boughs;

But all that are killed in battle

Awaken to life again.

It is lucky that their story

Is not known among men,

For O, the strong farmers

That would let the spade lie,

Their hearts would be like a cup

That somebody had drunk dry.

The little fox he murmured,

“O what of the world’s bane?”

The sun was laughing sweetly,

The moon plucked at my rein;

But the little red fox murmured,

“O do not pluck at his rein,

He is riding to the townland

That is the world’s bane.”

Michael will unhook his trumpet

From a bough overhead,

And blow a little noise

When the supper has been spread.

Gabriel will come from the water

With a fish tail, and talk

Of wonders that have happened

On wet roads where men walk,

And lift up an old horn

Of hammered silver, and drink

Till he has fallen asleep

Upon the starry brink.

The little fox he murmured,

“O what of the world’s bane?”

The sun was laughing sweetly,

The moon plucked at my rein;

But the little red fox murmured,

“O do not pluck at his rein,

He is riding to the townland

That is the world’s bane.”

The Shadowy Waters (1906)

Dedication To Lady Gregory

I WALKED among the seven woods of Coole,

Shan-walla, where a willow-bordered pond

Gathers the wild duck from the winter dawn;

Shady Kyle-dortha; sunnier Kyle-na-gno,

Where many hundred squirrels are as happy

As though they had been hidden by green boughs,

Where old age cannot find them; Pairc-na-lea,

Where hazel and ash and privet blind the paths;

Dim Pairc-na-carraig, where the wild bees fling

Their sudden fragrances on the green air;

Dim Pairc-na-tarav, where enchanted eyes

Have seen immortal, mild, proud shadows walk;

Dim Inchy wood, that hides badger and fox

And marten-cat, and borders that old wood

Wise Biddy Early called the wicked wood:

Seven odours, seven murmurs, seven woods.

I had not eyes like those enchanted eyes,

Yet dreamed that beings happier than men

Moved round me in the shadows, and at night

My dreams were cloven by voices and by fires;

And the images I have woven in this story

Of Forgael and Dectora and the empty waters

Moved round me in the voices and the fires,

And more I may not write of, for they that cleave

The waters of sleep can make a chattering tongue

Heavy like stone, their wisdom being half silence.

How shall I name you, immortal, mild, proud shadows?

I only know that all we know comes from you,

And that you come from Eden on flying feet.

Is Eden far away, or do you hide

From human thought, as hares and mice and coneys

That run before the reaping-hook and lie

In the last ridge of the barley? Do our woods

And winds and ponds cover more quiet woods,

More shining winds, more star glimmering ponds?

Is Eden out of time and out of space?

And do you gather about us when pale light

Shining on water and fallen among leaves,

And winds blowing from flowers, and whirr of feathers

And the green quiet, have uplifted the heart?

I have made this poem for you, that men may read it

Before they read of Forgael and Dectora,

As men in the old times, before the harps began,

Poured out wine for the high invisible ones.

September 1900.

The Harp Of Aengus

EDAIN came out of Midher’s hill, and lay

Beside young Aengus in his tower of glass,

Where time is drowned in odour-laden winds

And druid moons, and murmuring of boughs,

And sleepy boughs, and boughs where apples made

Of opal and ruby and pale chrysolite

Awake unsleeping fires; and wove seven strings,

Sweet with all music, out of his long hair,

Because her hands had been made wild by love.

When Midher’s wife had changed her to a fly,

He made a harp with druid apple wood

That she among her winds might know he wept;

And from that hour he has watched over none

But faithful lovers.

The Shadowy Waters

PERSONS IN THE PLAY

FORGAEL

AIBRIC

JAILORS

DECTORA

THE SHADOWY WATERS

The deck of an ancient ship. At the right of the stage is the mast, with a large square sail hiding a great deal of the sky and sea on that side. The tiller is at the left of the stage; it is a long oar coming through an opening in the bulwark. The deck rises in a series of steps behind the tiller, and the stern of the ship curves overhead. When the play opens there are four persons upon the deck. AIBRIC stands by the tiller. FORGAEL sleeps upon the raised portion of the deck towards the front of the stage. Two SAILORS are standing near to the mast, on which a harp is hanging.

FIRST SAILOR

Has he not led us into these waste seas

For long enough?

SECOND SAILOR

Aye, long and long enough.

FIRST SAILOR

We have not come upon a shore or ship

These dozen weeks.

SECOND SAILOR

And I had thought to make

A good round sum upon this cruise, and turn--

For I am getting on in life--to something

That has less ups and downs than robbery.

FIRST SAILOR

I am so tired of being bachelor

I could give all my heart to that Red Moll

That had but the one eye.

SECOND SAILOR

Can no bewitchment

Transform these rascal billows into women

That I may drown myself?

FIRST SAILOR

Better steer home,

Whether he will or no; and better still

To take him while he sleeps and carry him

And drop him from the gunnel.

SECOND SAILOR

I dare not do it.

Were’t not that there is magic in his harp,

I would be of your mind; but when he plays it

Strange creatures flutter up before one’s eyes,

Or cry about one’s ears.

FIRST SAILOR

Nothing to fear.

SECOND SAILOR

Do you remember when we sank that galley

At the full moon?

FIRST SAILOR

He played all through the night.

SECOND SAILOR

Until the moon had set; and when I looked

Where the dead drifted, I could see a bird

Like a grey gull upon the breast of each.

While I was looking they rose hurriedly,

And after circling with strange cries awhile

Flew westward; and many a time since then

I’ve heard a rustling overhead in the wind.

FIRST SAILOR

I saw them on that night as well as you.

But when I had eaten and drunk myself asleep

My courage came again.

SECOND SAILOR

But that’s not all.

The other night, while he was playing it,

A beautiful young man and girl came up

In a white, breaking wave; they had the look

Of those that are alive for ever and ever.

FIRST SAILOR

I saw them, too, one night. Forgael was playing,

And they were listening there beyond the sail.

He could not see them, but I held out my hands

To grasp the woman.

SECOND SAILOR

You have dared to touch her?

FIRST SAILOR

O, she was but a shadow, and slipped from me.

SECOND SAILOR

But were you not afraid?

FIRST SAILOR

Why should I fear?

SECOND SAILOR

‘Twas Aengus and Edain, the wandering lovers,

To whom all lovers pray.

FIRST SAILOR

But what of that?

A shadow does not carry sword or spear.

SECOND SAILOR

My mother told me that there is not one

Of the Ever-living half so dangerous

As that wild Aengus. Long before her day

He carried Edain off from a king’s house,

And hid her among fruits of jewel-stone

And in a tower of glass, and from that day

Has hated every man that’s not in love,

And has been dangerous to him.

FIRST SAILOR

I have heard

He does not hate seafarers as he hates

Peaceable men that shut the wind away,

And keep to the one weary marriage-bed.

SECOND SAILOR

I think that he has Forgael in his net,

And drags him through the sea.

FIRST SAILOR

Well, net or none,

I’d drown him while we have the chance to do it.

SECOND SAILOR

It’s certain I’d sleep easier o’ nights

If he were dead; but who will be our captain,

Judge of the stars, and find a course for us?

FIRST SAILOR

I’ve thought of that. We must have Aibric with us,

For he can judge the stars as well as Forgael.

[Going towards AIBRIC.

Become our captain, Aibric. I am resolved

To make an end of Forgael while he sleeps.

There’s not a man but will be glad of it

When it is over, nor one to grumble at us.

AIBRIC

You have taken pay and made your bargain for it.

FIRST SAILOR

What good is there in this hard way of living,

Unless we drain more flagons in a year

And kiss more lips than lasting peaceable men

In their long lives? Will you be of our troop

And take the captain’s share of everything

And bring us into populous seas again?

AIBRIC

Be of your troop! Aibric be one of you

And Forgael in the other scale! kill Forgael,

And he my master from my childhood up!

If you will draw that sword out of its scabbard

I’ll give my answer.

FIRST SAILOR

You have awaked him.

[To SECOND SAILOR.

We’d better go, for we have lost this chance.

[They go out.

FORGAEL

Have the birds passed us? I could hear your voice.

But there were others.

AIBRIC

I have seen nothing pass.

FORGAEL

You’re certain of it? I never wake from sleep

But that I am afraid they may have passed,

For they’re my only pilots. If I lost them

Straying too far into the north or south,

I’d never come upon the happiness

That has been promised me. I have not seen them

These many days; and yet there must be many

Dying at every moment in the world,

And flying towards their peace.

AIBRIC

Put by these thoughts,

And listen to me for awhile. The sailors

Are plotting for your death.

FORGAEL

Have I not given

More riches than they ever hoped to find?

And now they will not follow, while I seek

The only riches that have hit my fancy.

AIBRIC

What riches can you find in this waste sea

Where no ship sails, where nothing that’s alive

Has ever come but those man-headed birds,

Knowing it for the world’s end?

FORGAEL

Where the world ends

The mind is made unchanging, for it finds

Miracle, ecstasy, the impossible hope,

The flagstone under all, the fire of fires,

The roots of the world.

AIBRIC

Who knows that shadows

May not have driven you mad for their own sport?

FORGAEL

Do you, too, doubt me? Have you joined their plot?

AIBRIC

No, no, do not say that. You know right well

That I will never lift a hand against you.

FORGAEL

Why should you be more faithful than the rest,

Being as doubtful?

AIBRIC

I have called you master

Too many years to lift a hand against you.

FORGAEL

Maybe it is but natural to doubt me.

You’ve never known, I’d lay a wager on it,

A melancholy that a cup of wine,

A lucky battle, or a woman’s kiss

Could not amend.

AIBRIC

I have good spirits enough.

FORGAEL

If you will give me all your mind awhile--

All, all, the very bottom of the bowl--

I’ll show you that I am made differently,

That nothing can amend it but these waters,

Where I am rid of life--the events of the world--

What do you call it?--that old promise-breaker,

The cozening fortune-teller that comes whispering,

“You will have all you have wished for when you have earned

Land for your children or money in a pot.”

And when we have it we are no happier,

Because of that old draught under the door,

Or creaky shoes. And at the end of all

How are we better off than Seaghan the fool,

That never did a hand’s turn? Aibric! Aibric!

We have fallen in the dreams the Ever-living

Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world,

And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh,

And find their laughter sweeter to the taste

For that brief sighing.

AIBRIC

If you had loved some woman--

FORGAEL

You say that also? You have heard the voices,

For that is what they say--all, all the shadows--

Aengus and Edain, those passionate wanderers,

And all the others; but it must be love

As they have known it. Now the secret’s out;

For it is love that I am seeking for,

But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind

That is not in the world.

AIBRIC

And yet the world

Has beautiful women to please every man.

FORGAEL

But he that gets their love after the fashion

Loves in brief longing and deceiving hope

And bodily tenderness, and finds that even

The bed of love, that in the imagination

Had seemed to be the giver of all peace,

Is no more than a wine-cup in the tasting,

And as soon finished.

AIBRIC

All that ever loved

Have loved that way--there is no other way.

FORGAEL

Yet never have two lovers kissed but they

Believed there was some other near at hand,

And almost wept because they could not find it.

AIBRIC

When they have twenty years; in middle life

They take a kiss for what a kiss is worth,

And let the dream go by.

FORGAEL

It’s not a dream,

But the reality that makes our passion

As a lamp shadow--no--no lamp, the sun.

What the world’s million lips are thirsting for,

Must be substantial somewhere.

AIBRIC

I have heard the Druids

Mutter such things as they awake from trance.

It may be that the Ever-living know it--

No mortal can.

FORGAEL

Yes; if they give us help.

AIBRIC

They are besotting you as they besot

The crazy herdsman that will tell his fellows

That he has been all night upon the hills,

Riding to hurley, or in the battle-host

With the Ever-living.

FORGAEL

What if he speak the truth,

And for a dozen hours have been a part

Of that more powerful life?

AIBRIC

His wife knows better.

Has she not seen him lying like a log,

Or fumbling in a dream about the house?

And if she hear him mutter of wild riders,

She knows that it was but the cart-horse coughing

That set him to the fancy.

FORGAEL

All would be well

Could we but give us wholly to the dreams,

And get into their world that to the sense

Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly

Among substantial things; for it is dreams

That lift us to the flowing, changing world

That the heart longs for. What is love itself,

Even though it be the lightest of light love,

But dreams that hurry from beyond the world

To make low laughter more than meat and drink,

Though it but set us sighing? Fellow-wanderer,

Could we but mix ourselves into a dream,

Not in its image on the mirror!

AIBRIC

While

We’re in the body that’s impossible,

FORGAEL

And yet I cannot think they’re leading me

To death; for they that promised to me love

As those that can outlive the moon have known it,

Had the world’s total life gathered up, it seemed,

Into their shining limbs--I’ve had great teachers.

Aengus and Edain ran up out of the wave--

You’d never doubt that it was life they promised

Had you looked on them face to face as I did,

With so red lips, and running on such feet,

And having such wide-open, shining eyes.

AIBRIC

It’s certain they are leading you to death.

None but the dead, or those that never lived,

Can know that ecstasy. Forgael! Forgael!

They have made you follow the man-headed birds,

And you have told me that their journey lies

Towards the country of the dead.

FORGAEL

What matter

If I am going to my death, for there,

Or somewhere, I shall find the love they

have promised.

That much is certain. I shall find a woman,

One of the Ever-living, as I think--

One of the Laughing People--and she and I

Shall light upon a place in the world’s core,

Where passion grows to be a changeless thing,

Like charmed apples made of chrysoprase,

Or chrysoberyl, or beryl, or chrysolite;

And there, in juggleries of sight and sense,

Become one movement, energy, delight,

Until the overburthened moon is dead.

[A number of SAILORS enter hurriedly.]

FIRST SAILOR

Look there! there in the mist! a ship of spice

And we are almost on her!

SECOND SAILOR

We had not known

But for the ambergris and sandalwood.

FIRST SAILOR

No; but opoponax and cinnamon.

FORGAEL

[Taking the tiller from AIBRIC]

The Ever-living have kept my bargain for me,

And paid you on the nail.

AIBRIC

Take up that rope

To make her fast while we are plundering her.

FIRST SAILOR

There is a king and queen upon her deck,

And where there is one woman there’ll be others.

AIBRIC

Speak lower, or they’ll hear.

FIRST SAILOR

They cannot hear;

They are too busy with each other. Look!

He has stooped down and kissed her on the lips.

SECOND SAILOR

When she finds out we have better men aboard

She may not be too sorry in the end.

FIRST SAILOR

She will be like a wild cat; for these queens

Care more about the kegs of silver and gold

And the high fame that come to them in marriage,

Than a strong body and a ready hand.

SECOND SAILOR

There’s nobody is natural but a robber,

And that is why the world totters about

Upon its bandy legs.

AIBRIC

Run at them now,

And overpower the crew while yet asleep!

[The SAILORS go out.

[Voices and the clashing of swords are heard from the other ship, which cannot be seen because of the sail.

A VOICE

Armed men have come upon us! O, I am slain!

ANOTHER VOICE

Wake all below!

ANOTHER VOICE

Why have you broken our sleep?

FIRST VOICE

Armed men have come upon us! O, I am slain!

FORGAEL

[Who has remained at the tiller]

There! there they come! Gull, gannet, or diver,

But with a man’s head, or a fair woman’s,

They hover over the masthead awhile

To wait their friends; but when their friends have come

They’ll fly upon that secret way of theirs.

One--and one--a couple--five together;

And I will hear them talking in a minute.

Yes, voices! but I do not catch the words.

Now I can hear. There’s one of them that says:

“How light we are, now we are changed to birds!”

Another answers: “Maybe we shall find

Our heart’s desire now that we are so light.”

And then one asks another how he died,

And says: “A sword-blade pierced me in my sleep.”

And now they all wheel suddenly and fly

To the other side, and higher in the air.

And now a laggard with a woman’s head

Comes crying, “I have run upon the sword.

I have fled to my beloved in the air,

In the waste of the high air, that we may wander

Among the windy meadows of the dawn.”

But why are they still waiting? why are they

Circling and circling over the masthead?

What power that is more mighty than desire

To hurry to their hidden happiness

Withholds them now? Have the Ever-living Ones

A meaning in that circling overhead?

But what’s the meaning? [He cries out.]

Why do you linger there?

Why do you not run to your desire,

Now that you have happy winged bodies?

[His voice sinks again.

Being too busy in the air and the high air,

They cannot hear my voice; but what’s the

meaning?

[The SAILORS have returned. DECTORA is with them.

FORGAEL

[Turning and seeing her]

Why are you standing with your eyes upon me?

You are not the world’s core. O no, no, no!

That cannot be the meaning of the birds.

You are not its core. My teeth are in the world,

But have not bitten yet.

DECTORA

I am a queen,

And ask for satisfaction upon these

Who have slain my husband and laid hands upon me.

[Breaking loose from the SAILORS who are holding her.

Let go my hands!

FORGAEL

Why do you cast a shadow?

Where do you come from? Who brought you to this place?

They would not send me one that casts a shadow.

DECTORA

Would that the storm that overthrew my ships,

And drowned the treasures of nine conquered nations,

And blew me hither to my lasting sorrow,

Had drowned me also. But, being yet alive,

I ask a fitting punishment for all

That raised their hands against him.

FORGAEL

There are some

That weigh and measure all in these waste seas--

They that have all the wisdom that’s in life,

And all that prophesying images

Made of dim gold rave out in secret tombs;

They have it that the plans of kings and queens

Are dust on the moth’s wing; that nothing matters

But laughter and tears--laughter, laughter, and tears;

That every man should carry his own soul

Upon his shoulders.

DECTORA

You’ve nothing but wild words,

And I would know if you will give me vengeance.

FORGAEL

When she finds out I will not let her go--

When she knows that.

DECTORA

What is it that you are muttering--

That you’ll not let me go? I am a queen.

FORGAEL

Although you are more beautiful than any,

I almost long that it were possible;

But if I were to put you on that ship,

With sailors that were sworn to do your will,

And you had spread a sail for home, a wind

Would rise of a sudden, or a wave so huge,

It had washed among the stars and put them out,

And beat the bulwark of your ship on mine,

Until you stood before me on the deck--

As now.

DECTORA

Does wandering in these desolate seas

And listening to the cry of wind and wave

Bring madness?

FORGAEL

Queen, I am not mad.

DECTORA

And yet you say the water and the wind

Would rise against me.

FORGAEL

No, I am not mad--

If it be not that hearing messages

From lasting watchers, that outlive the moon,

At the most quiet midnight is to be stricken.

DECTORA

And did those watchers bid you take me captive?

FORGAEL

Both you and I are taken in the net.

It was their hands that plucked the winds awake

And blew you hither; and their mouths have promised

I shall have love in their immortal fashion;

And for this end they gave me my old harp

That is more mighty than the sun and moon,

Or than the shivering casting-net of the stars,

That none might take you from me.

DECTORA

[First trembling back from the mast where the harp is, and then laughing]

For a moment

Your raving of a message and a harp

More mighty than the stars half troubled me,

But all that’s raving. Who is there can compel

The daughter and the granddaughter of kings

To be his bedfellow?

FORGAEL

Until your lips

Have called me their beloved, I’ll not kiss them.

DECTORA

My husband and my king died at my feet,

And yet you talk of love.

FORGAEL

The movement of time

Is shaken in these seas, and what one does

One moment has no might upon the moment

That follows after.

DECTORA

I understand you now.

You have a Druid craft of wicked sound

Wrung from the cold women of the sea--

A magic that can call a demon up,

Until my body give you kiss for kiss.

FORGAEL

Your soul shall give the kiss.

DECTORA

I am not afraid,

While there’s a rope to run into a noose

Or wave to drown. But I have done with words,

And I would have you look into my face

And know that it is fearless.

FORGAEL

Do what you will,

For neither I nor you can break a mesh

Of the great golden net that is about us.

DECTORA

There’s nothing in the world that’s worth a fear.

[She passes FORGAEL and stands for a moment looking into his face.

I have good reason for that thought.

[She runs suddenly on to the raised part of the poop.

And now

I can put fear away as a queen should.

[She mounts on to the bulwark and turns towards FORGAEL.

Fool, fool Although you have looked into my face

You do not see my purpose. I shall have gone

Before a hand can touch me.

FORGAEL

[Folding his arms]

My hands are still;

The Ever-living hold us. Do what you will,

You cannot leap out of the golden net.

FIRST SAILOR

No need to drown, for, if you will pardon us

And measure out a course and bring us home,

We’ll put this man to death.

DECTORA

I promise it.

FIRST SAILOR

There is none to take his side.

AIBRIC

I am on his side.

I’ll strike a blow for him to give him time

To cast his dreams away.

[AIBRIC goes in front of FORGAEL with drawn sword. FORGAEL takes the harp.

FIRST SAILOR

No other’ll do it.

[The SAILORS throw AIBRIC on one side. He falls and lies upon the deck. They lift their swords to strike FORGAEL, who is about to play the harp. The stage begins to darken. The SAILORS hesitate in fear.

SECOND SAILOR

He has put a sudden darkness over the moon.

DECTORA

Nine swords with handles of rhinoceros horn

To him that strikes him first!

FIRST SAILOR

I will strike him first.

[He goes close up to FORGAEL with his sword lifted.

[Shrinking back.] He has caught the crescent moon out of the sky,

And carries it between us.

SECOND SAILOR

Holy fire

To burn us to the marrow if we strike.

DECTORA

I’ll give a golden galley full of fruit,

That has the heady flavour of new wine,

To him that wounds him to the death.

FIRST SAILOR

I’ll do it.

For all his spells will vanish when he dies,

Having their life in him.

SECOND SAILOR

Though it be the moon

That he is holding up between us there,

I will strike at him.

THE OTHERS

And I! And I! And I!

[FORGAEL plays the harp.

FIRST SAILOR

[Falling into a dream suddenly]

But you were saying there is somebody

Upon that other ship we are to wake.

You did not know what brought him to his end,

But it was sudden.

SECOND SAILOR

You are in the right;

I had forgotten that we must go wake him.

DECTORA

He has flung a Druid spell upon the air,

And set you dreaming.

SECOND SAILOR

How can we have a wake

When we have neither brown nor yellow ale?

FIRST SAILOR

I saw a flagon of brown ale aboard her.

THIRD SAILOR

How can we raise the keen that do not know

What name to call him by?

FIRST SAILOR

Come to his ship.

His name will come into our thoughts in a minute.

I know that he died a thousand years ago,

And has not yet been waked.

SECOND SAILOR

[Beginning to keen]

Ohone! O! O! O!

The yew bough has been broken into two,

And all the birds are scattered.

ALL THE SAILORS

O! O! O! O!

[They go out keening.

DECTORA

Protect me now, gods, that my people swear by.

[AIBRIC has risen from the deck where he had fallen. He has begun looking for his sword as if in a dream.

AIBRIC

Where is my sword that fell out of my hand

When I first heard the news? Ah, there it is!

[He goes dreamily towards the sword, but DECTORA runs at it and takes it up before he can reach it.

AIBRIC [sleepily]

Queen, give it me.

DECTORA

No, I have need of it.

AIBRIC

Why do you need a sword? But you may keep it,

Now that he’s dead I have no need of it,

For everything is gone.

A SAILOR

[Calling from the other ship]

Come hither, Aibric,

And tell me who it is that we are waking.

AIBRIC

[Half to DECTORA, half to himself]

What name had that dead king? Arthur of Britain?

No, no--not Arthur. I remember now.

It was golden-armed Iollan, and he died

Broken-hearted, having lost his queen

Through wicked spells. That is not all the tale,

For he was killed. O! O! O! O! O! O!

For golden-armed Iollan has been killed.

[He goes out.

[While he has been speaking, and through part of what follows, one hears the wailing of the SAILORS from the other ship. DECTORA stands with the sword lifted in front of FORGAEL.

DECTORA

I will end all your magic on the instant.

[Her voice becomes dreamy, and she lowers the sword slowly, and finally lets it fall. She spreads out her hair. She takes off her crown and lays it upon the deck.

This sword is to lie beside him in the grave.

It was in all his battles. I will spread my hair,

And wring my hands, and wail him bitterly,

For I have heard that he was proud and laughing,

Blue-eyed, and a quick runner on bare feet,

And that he died a thousand years ago.

O! O! O!

[FORGAEL changes the tune.

But no, that is not it.

I knew him well, and while I heard him laughing

They killed him at my feet. O! O! O! O!

For golden-armed Iollan that I loved.

But what is it that made me say I loved him?

It was that harper put it in my thoughts,

But it is true. Why did they run upon him,

And beat the golden helmet with their swords?

FORGAEL

Do you not know me, lady? I am he

That you are weeping for.

DECTORA

No, for he is dead.

O! O! O! for golden-armed Iollan.

FORGAEL

It was so given out, but I will prove

That the grave-diggers in a dreamy frenzy

Have buried nothing but my golden arms.

Listen to that low-laughing string of the moon

And you will recollect my face and voice,

For you have listened to me playing it

These thousand years.

[He starts up, listening to the birds. The harp slips from his hands, and remains leaning against the bulwarks behind him.

What are the birds at there?

Why are they all a-flutter of a sudden?

What are you calling out above the mast?

If railing and reproach and mockery

Because I have awakened her to love

My magic strings, I’ll make this answer to it:

Being driven on by voices and by dreams

That were clear messages from the Ever-living,

I have done right. What could I but obey?

And yet you make a clamour of reproach.

DECTORA [laughing]

Why, it’s a wonder out of reckoning

That I should keen him from the full of the moon

To the horn, and he be hale and hearty.

FORGAEL

How have I wronged her now that she is merry?

But no, no, no! your cry is not against me.

You know the councils of the Ever-living,

And all that tossing of your wings is joy,

And all that murmuring’s but a marriage song;

But if it be reproach, I answer this:

There is not one among you that made love

By any other means. You call it passion,

Consideration, generosity;

But it was all deceit, and flattery

To win a woman in her own despite,

For love is war, and there is hatred in it;

And if you say that she came willingly--

DECTORA

Why do you turn away and hide your face,

That I would look upon for ever?

FORGAEL

My grief.

DECTORA

Have I not loved you for a thousand years?

FORGAEL

I never have been golden-armed Iollan,

DECTORA

I do not understand. I know your face

Better than my own hands.

FORGAEL

I have deceived you

Out of all reckoning.

DECTORA

Is it not true

That you were born a thousand years ago,

In islands where the children of Aengus wind

In happy dances under a windy moon,

And that you’ll bring me there?

FORGAEL

I have deceived you;

I have deceived you utterly.

DECTORA

How can that be?

Is it that though your eyes are full of love

Some other woman has a claim on you,

And I’ve but half?

FORGAEL

Oh, no!

DECTORA

And if there is,

If there be half a hundred more, what matter?

I’ll never give another thought to it;

No, no, nor half a thought; but do not speak.

Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted,

Their heads being turned with praise and flattery;

And that is why their lovers are afraid

To tell them a plain story.

FORGAEL

That’s not the story;

But I have done so great a wrong against you,

There is no measure that it would not burst.

I will confess it all.

DECTORA

What do I care,

Now that my body has begun to dream,

And you have grown to be a burning sod

In the imagination and intellect?

If something that’s most fabulous were true--

If you had taken me by magic spells,

And killed a lover or husband at my feet--

I would not let you speak, for I would know

That it was yesterday and not to-day

I loved him; I would cover up my ears,

As I am doing now. [A pause.] Why do you weep?

FORGAEL

I weep because I’ve nothing for your eyes

But desolate waters and a battered ship.

DECTORA

O, why do you not lift your eyes to mine?

FORGAEL

I weep--I weep because bare night’s above,

And not a roof of ivory and gold.

DECTORA

I would grow jealous of the ivory roof,

And strike the golden pillars with my hands.

I would that there was nothing in the world

But my beloved--that night and day had perished,

And all that is and all that is to be,

All that is not the meeting of our lips.

FORGAEL

You turn away. Why do you turn away?

Am I to fear the waves, or is the moon

My enemy?

DECTORA

I looked upon the moon,

Longing to knead and pull it into shape

That I might lay it on your head as a crown.

But now it is your thoughts that wander away,

For you are looking at the sea. Do you not know

How great a wrong it is to let one’s thought

Wander a moment when one is in love?

[He has moved away. She follows him. He is looking out over the sea, shading his eyes.]

Why are you looking at the sea?

FORGAEL

Look there!

DECTORA

What is there but a troop of ash-grey birds

That fly into the west?

FORGAEL

But listen, listen!

DECTORA

What is there but the crying of the birds?

FORGAEL

If you’ll but listen closely to that crying

You’ll hear them calling out to one another

With human voices.

DECTORA

O, I can hear them now.

What are they? Unto what country do they fly?

FORGAEL

To unimaginable happiness.

They have been circling over our heads in the air,

But now that they have taken to the road

We have to follow, for they are our pilots;

And though they’re but the colour of grey ash,

They’re crying out, could you but hear their words,

“There is a country at the end of the world

Where no child’s born but to outlive the moon.”

[The SAILORS come in with AIBRIC. They are in great excitement.

FIRST SAILOR

The hold is full of treasure.

SECOND SAILOR

Full to the hatches.

FIRST SAILOR

Treasure on treasure.

THIRD SAILOR

Boxes of precious spice.

FIRST SAILOR

Ivory images with amethyst eyes.

THIRD SAILOR

Dragons with eyes of ruby.

FIRST SAILOR

The whole ship

Flashes as if it were a net of herrings.

THIRD SAILOR

Let’s home; I’d give some rubies to a woman.

SECOND SAILOR

There’s somebody I’d give the amethyst eyes to.

AIBRIC

[Silencing them with a gesture]

We would return to our own country, Forgael,

For we have found a treasure that’s so great

Imagination cannot reckon it.

And having lit upon this woman there,

What more have you to look for on the seas?

FORGAEL

I cannot--I am going on to the end.

As for this woman, I think she is coming with me.

AIBRIC

The Ever-living have made you mad; but no,

It was this woman in her woman’s vengeance

That drove you to it, and I fool enough

To fancy that she’d bring you home again.

‘Twas you that egged him to it, for you know

That he is being driven to his death.

DECTORA

That is not true, for he has promised me

An unimaginable happiness.

AIBRIC

And if that happiness be more than dreams,

More than the froth, the feather, the dust-whirl,

The crazy nothing that I think it is,

It shall be in the country of the dead,

If there be such a country.

DECTORA

No, not there,

But in some island where the life of the world

Leaps upward, as if all the streams o’ the world

Had run into one fountain.

AIBRIC

Speak to him.

He knows that he is taking you to death;

Speak--he will not deny it.

DECTORA

Is that true?

FORGAEL

I do not know for certain, but I know

That I have the best of pilots.

AIBRIC

Shadows, illusions,

That the Shape-changers, the Ever-laughing Ones,

The Immortal Mockers have cast into his mind,

Or called before his eyes.

DECTORA

O carry me

To some sure country, some familiar place.

Have we not everything that life can give

In having one another?

FORGAEL

How could I rest

If I refused the messengers and pilots

With all those sights and all that crying out?

DECTORA

But I will cover up your eyes and ears,

That you may never hear the cry of the birds,

Or look upon them.

FORGAEL

Were they but lowlier

I’d do your will, but they are too high--too high.

DECTORA

Being too high, their heady prophecies

But harry us with hopes that come to nothing,

Because we are not proud, imperishable,

Alone and winged.

FORGAEL

Our love shall be like theirs

When we have put their changeless image on.

DECTORA

I am a woman, I die at every breath.

AIBRIC

Let the birds scatter for the tree is broken,

And there’s no help in words. [To the SAILORS.]

To the other ship,

And I will follow you and cut the rope

When I have said farewell to this man here,

For neither I nor any living man

Will look upon his face again.

[The SAILORS go out.

FORGAEL [to DECTORA]

Go with him,

For he will shelter you and bring you home.

AIBRIC

[Taking FORGAEL’S hand]

I’ll do it for his sake.

DECTORA

No. Take this sword

And cut the rope, for I go on with Forgael.

AIBRIC

[Half falling into the keen]

The yew bough has been broken into two,

And all the birds are scattered--O! O! O!

Farewell! farewell! [He goes out.

DECTORA

The sword is in the rope--

The rope’s in two--it falls into the sea,

It whirls into the foam. O ancient worm,

Dragon that loved the world and held us to it,

You are broken, you are broken. The world drifts away,

And I am left alone with my beloved,

Who cannot put me from his sight for ever.

We are alone for ever, and I laugh,

Forgael, because you cannot put me from you.

The mist has covered the heavens, and you and I

Shall be alone for ever. We two--this crown--

I half remember. It has been in my dreams.

Bend lower, O king, that I may crown you with it.

O flower of the branch, O bird among the leaves,

O silver fish that my two hands have taken

Out of the running stream, O morning star,

Trembling in the blue heavens like a white fawn

Upon the misty border of the wood,

Bend lower, that I may cover you with my hair,

For we will gaze upon this world no longer.

FORGAEL

[Gathering DECTORA’S hair about him]

Beloved, having dragged the net about us,

And knitted mesh to mesh, we grow immortal;

And that old harp awakens of itself

To cry aloud to the grey birds, and dreams,

That have had dreams for father, live in us.

From The Green Helmet And Other Poems (1912)

His Dream

I SWAYED upon the gaudy stern

The butt end of a steering oar,

And saw wherever I could turn

A crowd upon a shore.

And though I would have hushed the crowd,

There was no mother’s son but said,

“What is the figure in a shroud

Upon a gaudy bed?”

And after running at the brim

Cried out upon that thing beneath,

--It had such dignity of limb--

By the sweet name of Death.

Though I’d my finger on my lip,

What could I but take up the song?

And running crowd and gaudy ship

Cried out the whole night long,

Crying amid the glittering sea,

Naming it with ecstatic breath,

Because it had such dignity

By the sweet name of Death.

A Woman Homer Sung

IF any man drew near

When I was young,

I thought, “He holds her dear,”

And shook with hate and fear.

But oh, ‘twas bitter wrong

If he could pass her by

With an indifferent eye.

Whereon I wrote and wrought,

And now, being grey,

I dream that I have brought

To such a pitch my thought

That coming time can say,

“He shadowed in a glass

What thing her body was.”

For she had fiery blood

When I was young,

And trod so sweetly proud

As ‘twere upon a cloud,

A woman Homer sung,

That life and letters seem

But an heroic dream.

The Consolation

I HAD this thought awhile ago,

“My darling cannot understand

What I have done, or what would do

In this blind bitter land.”

And I grew weary of the sun

Until my thoughts cleared up again,

Remembering that the best I have done

Was done to make it plain;

That every year I have cried, “At length

My darling understands it all,

Because I have come into my strength,

And words obey my call”;

That had she done so who can say

What would have shaken from the sieve?

I might have thrown poor words away

And been content to live.

No Second Troy

WHY should I blame her that she filled my days

With misery, or that she would of late

Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,

Or hurled the little streets upon the great,

Had they but courage equal to desire?

What could have made her peaceful with a mind

That nobleness made simple as a fire,

With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind

That is not natural in an age like this,

Being high and solitary and most stern?

Why, what could she have done being what she is?

Was there another Troy for her to burn?

Reconciliation

SOME may have blamed you that you took away

The verses that could move them on the day

When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind

With lightning you went from me, and I could find

Nothing to make a song about but kings,

Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things

That were like memories of you--but now

We’ll out, for the world lives as long ago;

And while we’re in our laughing, weeping fit,

Hurl helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit.

But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone,

My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.

King And No King

“WOULD it were anything but merely voice!”

The No King cried who after that was King,

Because he had not heard of anything

That balanced with a word is more than noise;

Yet Old Romance being kind, let him prevail

Somewhere or somehow that I have forgot,

Though he’d but cannon--Whereas we that had thought

To have lit upon as clean and sweet a tale

Have been defeated by that pledge you gave

In momentary anger long ago;

And I that have not your faith, how shall I know

That in the blinding light beyond the grave

We’ll find so good a thing as that we have lost?

The hourly kindness, the day’s common speech,

The habitual content of each with each

When neither soul nor body has been crossed.

Peace

AH, that Time could touch a form

That could show what Homer’s age

Bred to be a hero’s wage.

“Were not all her life but storm,

Would not painters paint a form

Of such noble lines,” I said,

“Such a delicate high head,

All that sternness amid charm,

All that sweetness amid strength?”

Ah, but peace that comes at length,

Came when Time had touched her form.

Against Unworthy Praise

O HEART, be at peace, because

Nor knave nor dolt can break

What’s not for their applause,

Being for a woman’s sake.

Enough if the work has seemed,

So did she your strength renew,

A dream that a lion had dreamed

Till the wilderness cried aloud,

A secret between you two,

Between the proud and the proud.

What, still you would have their praise!

But here’s a haughtier text,

The labyrinth of her days

That her own strangeness perplexed;

And how what her dreaming gave

Earned slander, ingratitude,

From self-same dolt and knave;

Aye, and worse wrong than these.

Yet she, singing upon her road,

Half lion, half child, is at peace.

The Fascination Of What’s Difficult

THE fascination of what’s difficult

Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent

Spontaneous joy and natural content

Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt

That must, as if it had not holy blood,

Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,

Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt

As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays

That have to be set up in fifty ways,

On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,

Theatre business, management of men.

I swear before the dawn comes round again

I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

A Drinking Song

WINE comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

That’s all we shall know for truth

Before we grow old and die.

I lift the glass to my mouth,

I look at you, and I sigh.

The Coming Of Wisdom With Time

THOUGH leaves are many, the root is one;

Through all the lying days of my youth

I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;

Now I may wither into the truth.

On Hearing That The Students Of Our New University Have Joined The Agitation Against Immoral Literature

WHERE, where but here have Pride and Truth,

That long to give themselves for wage,

To shake their wicked sides at youth

Restraining reckless middle-age.

To A Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators Of His And Mine

You say, as I have often given tongue

In praise of what another’s said or sung,

‘Twere politic to do the like by these;

But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

The Mask

“PUT off that mask of burning gold

With emerald eyes.”

“O no, my dear, you make so bold

To find if hearts be wild and wise,

And yet not cold.”

“I would but find what’s there to find,

Love or deceit.”

“It was the mask engaged your mind,

And after set your heart to beat,

Not what’s behind.”

“But lest you are my enemy,

I must enquire.”

“O no, my dear, let all that be,

What matter, so there is but fire

In you, in me?”

Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation

How should the world be luckier if this house,

Where passion and precision have been one

Time out of mind, became too ruinous

To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun?

And the sweet laughing eagle thoughts that grow

Where wings have memory of wings, and all

That comes of the best knit to the best? Although

Mean roof-trees were the sturdier for its fall,

How should their luck run high enough to reach

The gifts that govern men, and after these

To gradual Time’s last gift, a written speech

Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease?

At The Abbey Theatre

(Imitated from Ronsard)

DEAR Craoibhin Aoibhin, look into our case.

When we are high and airy hundreds say

That if we hold that flight they’ll leave the place,

While those same hundreds mock another day

Because we have made our art of common things,

So bitterly, you’d dream they longed to look

All their lives through into some drift of wings.

You’ve dandled them and fed them from the book

And know them to the bone; impart to us

We’ll keep the secret--a new trick to please.

Is there a bridle for this Proteus

That turns and changes like his draughty seas?

Or is there none, most popular of men,

But when they mock us that we mock again?

These Are The Clouds

THESE are the clouds about the fallen sun,

The majesty that shuts his burning eye:

The weak lay hand on what the strong has done,

Till that be tumbled that was lifted high

And discord follow upon unison,

And all things at one common level lie.

And therefore, friend, if your great race were run

And these things came, so much the more thereby

Have you made greatness your companion,

Although it be for children that you sigh:

These are the clouds about the fallen sun,

The majesty that shuts his burning eye.

At Galway Races

THERE where the course is,

Delight makes all of the one mind,

The riders upon the galloping horses,

The crowd that closes in behind:

We, too, had good attendance once,

Hearers and hearteners of the work;

Aye, horsemen for companions,

Before the merchant and the clerk

Breathed on the world with timid breath.

Sing on: sometime, and at some new moon,

We’ll learn that sleeping is not death,

Hearing the whole earth change its tune,

Its flesh being wild, and it again

Crying aloud as the racecourse is,

And we find hearteners among men

That ride upon horses.

A Friend’s Illness

SICKNESS brought me this

Thought, in that scale of his:

Why should I be dismayed

Though flame had burned the whole

World, as it were a coal,

Now I have seen it weighed

Against a soul?

All Things Can Tempt Me

ALL things can tempt me from this craft of verse:

One time it was a woman’s face, or worse--

The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;

Now nothing but comes readier to the hand

Than this accustomed toil. When I was young,

I had not given a penny for a song

Did not the poet sing it with such airs

That one believed he had a sword upstairs;

Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,

Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.

The Young Man’s Song

I WHISPERED, “I am too young.”

And then, “I am old enough”;

Wherefore I threw a penny

To find out if I might love.

“Go and love, go and love, young man,

If the lady be young and fair.”

Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,

I am looped in the loops of her hair.

Oh, love is the crooked thing,

There is nobody wise enough

To find out all that is in it,

For he would be thinking of love

Till the stars had run away,

And the shadows eaten the moon.

Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,

One cannot begin it too soon.

Responsibilities (1914)

Responsibilities

“In dreams begins responsibility.”

Old Play.

“How am I fallen from myself, for a long time now

I have not seen the Prince of Chang in my dreams.”

Khoung-fou-tseu.

PARDON, old fathers, if you still remain

Somewhere in ear-shot for the story’s end,

Old Dublin merchant “free of ten and four”

Or trading out of Galway into Spain;

And country scholar, Robert Emmet’s friend,

A hundred-year-old memory to the poor;

Traders or soldiers who have left me blood

That has not passed through any huxter’s loin,

Pardon, and you that did not weigh the cost,

Old Butlers when you took to horse and stood

Beside the brackish waters of the Boyne

Till your bad master blenched and all was lost;

You merchant skipper that leaped overboard

After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay,

You most of all, silent and fierce old man

Because you were the spectacle that stirred

My fancy, and set my boyish lips to say

“Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun “;

Pardon that for a barren passion’s sake,

Although I have come close on forty-nine

I have no child, I have nothing but a book,

Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.

January 1914.

The Grey Rock

POETS with whom I learned my trade,

Companions of the Cheshire Cheese,

Here’s an old story I’ve re-made,

Imagining ‘twould better please

Your ears than stories now in fashion,

Though you may think I waste my breath

Pretending that there can be passion

That has more life in it than death,

find though at bottling of your wine

Old wholesome Goban had no say;

The moral’s yours because it’s mine.

When cups went round at close of day--

Is not that how good stories run?--

The gods were sitting at the board

In their great house at Slievenamon,

And sang a drowsy song, or snored,

For all were full of wine and meat;

And smoky torches made a glare

On metal Goban ‘d hammered at,

On old deep silver rolling there

Or on some still unemptied cup

That he, when frenzy stirred his thewes,

Had hammered out on mountain top

To hold the sacred stuff he brews

That only gods may buy of him.

Now from that juice that made them wise

All those had lifted up the dim

Imaginations of their eyes,

For one that was like woman made

Before their sleepy eyelids ran

And trembling with her passion said,

“Come out and dig for a dead man,

Who’s burrowing somewhere in the ground,

And mock him to his face and then

Hollo him on with horse and hound,

For he is the worst of all dead men.”

We should be dazed and terror struck,

If we but saw in dreams that room,

Those wine-drenched eyes, and curse our luck

That emptied all our days to come.

I knew a woman none could please,

Because she dreamed when but a child

Of men and women made like these;

And after, when her blood ran wild,

Had ravelled her own story out,

And said, “In two or in three years

I need must marry some poor lout,”

And having said it burst in tears.

Since, tavern comrades, you have died,

Maybe your images have stood,

Mere bone and muscle thrown aside,

Before that roomful or as good.

You had to face your ends when young--

‘Twas wine or women, or some curse--

But never made a poorer song

That you might have a heavier purse,

Nor gave loud service to a cause

That you might have a troop of friends.

You kept the Muses’ sterner laws,

And unrepenting faced your ends,

And therefore earned the right--and yet

Dowson and Johnson most I praise--

To troop with those the world’s forgot,

And copy their proud steady gaze.

“The Danish troop was driven out

Between the dawn and dusk,” she said;

“Although the event was long in doubt,

Although the King of Ireland’s dead

And half the kings, before sundown

All was accomplished.”

”When this day

Murrough, the King of Ireland’s son,

Foot after foot was giving way,

He and his best troops back to back

Had perished there, but the Danes ran,

Stricken with panic from the attack,

The shouting of an unseen man;

And being thankful Murrough found,

Led by a footsole dipped in blood

That had made prints upon the ground,

Where by old thorn trees that man stood;

And though when he gazed here and there,

He had but gazed on thorn trees, spoke,

‘Who is the friend that seems but air

And yet could give so fine a stroke? ‘

Thereon a young man met his eye,

Who said, ‘Because she held me in

Her love, and would not have me die,

Rock-nurtured Aoife took a pin,

And pushing it into my shirt,

Promised that for a pin’s sake,

No man should see to do me hurt;

But there it’s gone; I will not take

The fortune that had been my shame

Seeing, King’s son, what wounds you have.’

‘Twas roundly spoke, but when night came

He had betrayed me to his grave,

For he and the King’s son were dead.

I’d promised him two hundred years,

And when for all I’d done or said--

And these immortal eyes shed tears--

He claimed his country’s need was most,

I’d saved his life, yet for the sake

Of a new friend he has turned a ghost.

What does he care if my heart break?

I call for spade and horse and hound

That we may harry him.” Thereon

She cast herself upon the ground

And rent her clothes and made her moan:

“Why are they faithless when their might

Is from the holy shades that rove

The grey rock and the windy light?

Why should the faithfullest heart most love

The bitter sweetness of false faces?

Why must the lasting love what passes,

Why are the gods by men betrayed!”

But thereon every god stood up

With a slow smile and without sound,

And stretching forth his arm and cup

To where she moaned upon the ground,

Suddenly drenched her to the skin;

And she with Goban’s wine adrip,

No more remembering what had been,

Stared at the gods with laughing lip.

I have kept my faith, though faith was tried,

To that rock-born, rock-wandering foot,

And the world’s altered since you died,

And I am in no good repute

With the loud host before the sea,

That think sword strokes were better meant

Than lover’s music--let that be,

So that the wandering foot’s content.

The Two Kings

KING EOCHAID came at sundown to a wood

Westward of Tara. Hurrying to his queen

He had out-ridden his war-wasted men

That with empounded cattle trod the mire;

And where beech trees had mixed a pale green light

With the ground-ivy’s blue, he saw a stag

Whiter than curds, its eyes the tint of the sea.

Because it stood upon his path and seemed

More hands in height than any stag in the world

He sat with tightened rein and loosened mouth

Upon his trembling horse, then drove the spur;

But the stag stooped and ran at him, and passed,

Rending the horse’s flank. King Eochaid reeled

Then drew his sword to hold its levelled point

Against the stag. When horn and steel were met

The horn resounded as though it had been silver,

A sweet, miraculous, terrifying sound.

Horn locked in sword, they tugged and struggled there

As though a stag and unicorn were met

In Africa on Mountain of the Moon,

Until at last the double horns, drawn backward,

Butted below the single and so pierced

The entrails of the horse. Dropping his sword

King Eochaid seized the horns in his strong hands

And stared into the sea-green eye, and so

Hither and thither to and fro they trod

Till all the place was beaten into mire.

The strong thigh and the agile thigh were met,

The hands that gathered up the might of the world,

And hoof and horn that had sucked in their speed

Amid the elaborate wilderness of the air.

Through bush they plunged and over ivied root,

And where the stone struck fire, while in the leaves

A squirrel whinnied and a bird screamed out;

But when at last he forced those sinewy flanks

Against a beech bole, he threw down the beast

And knelt above it with drawn knife. On the instant

It vanished like a shadow, and a cry

So mournful that it seemed the cry of one

Who had lost some unimaginable treasure

Wandered between the blue and the green leaf

And climbed into the air, crumbling away,

Till all had seemed a shadow or a vision

But for the trodden mire, the pool of blood,

The disembowelled horse.

King Eochaid ran,

Toward peopled Tara, nor stood to draw his breath

Until he came before the painted wall,

The posts of polished yew, circled with bronze,

Of the great door; but though the hanging lamps

Showed their faint light through the unshuttered windows,

Nor door, nor mouth, nor slipper made a noise,

Nor on the ancient beaten paths, that wound

From well-side or from plough-land, was there noise;

Nor had there been the noise of living thing

Before him or behind, but that far-off

On the horizon edge bellowed the herds.

Knowing that silence brings no good to kings,

And mocks returning victory, he passed

Between the pillars with a beating heart

And saw where in the midst of the great hall

Pale-faced, alone upon a bench, Edain

Sat upright with a sword before her feet.

Her hands on either side had gripped the bench,

Her eyes were cold and steady, her lips tight.

Some passion had made her stone. Hearing a foot

She started and then knew whose foot it was;

But when he thought to take her in his arms

She motioned him afar, and rose and spoke:

“I have sent among the fields or to the woods

The fighting men and servants of this house,

For I would have your judgment upon one

Who is self-accused. If she be innocent

She would not look in any known man’s face

Till judgment has been given, and if guilty,

Will never look again on known man’s face.”

And at these words he paled, as she had paled,

Knowing that he should find upon her lips

The meaning of that monstrous day.

Then she:

“You brought me where your brother Ardan sat

Always in his one seat, and bid me care him

Through that strange illness that had fixed him there,

And should he die to heap his burial mound

And carve his name in Ogham.” Eochaid said,

“He lives?” “He lives and is a healthy man.”

“While I have him and you it matters little

What man you have lost, what evil you have found.”

“I bid them make his bed under this roof

And carried him his food with my own hands,

And so the weeks passed by. But when I said

‘What is this trouble?’ he would answer nothing,

Though always at my words his trouble grew;

And I but asked the more, till he cried out,

Weary of many questions: ‘There are things

That make the heart akin to the dumb stone.’

Then I replied: ‘Although you hide a secret,

Hopeless and dear, or terrible to think on,

Speak it, that I may send through the wide world

For medicine.’ Thereon he cried aloud:

‘Day after day you question me, and I,

Because there is such a storm amid my thoughts

I shall be carried in the gust, command,

Forbid, beseech and waste my breath.’ Then I,

‘Although the thing that you have hid were evil,

The speaking of it could be no great wrong,

And evil must it be, if done ‘twere worse

Than mound and stone that keep all virtue in,

And loosen on us dreams that waste our life,

Shadows and shows that can but turn the brain.’

But finding him still silent I stooped down

And whispering that none but he should hear,

Said: ‘If a woman has put this on you,

My men, whether it please her or displease,

And though they have to cross the Loughlan waters

And take her in the middle of armed men,

Shall make her look upon her handiwork,

That she may quench the rick she has fired; and though

She may have worn silk clothes, or worn a crown,

She’ll not be proud, knowing within her heart

That our sufficient portion of the world

Is that we give, although it be brief giving,

Happiness to children and to men.’

Then he, driven by his thought beyond his thought,

And speaking what he would not though he would,

Sighed: ‘You, even you yourself, could work the cure!’

And at those words I rose and I went out

And for nine days he had food from other hands,

And for nine days my mind went whirling round

The one disastrous zodiac, muttering

That the immedicable mound’s beyond

Our questioning, beyond our pity even.

But when nine days had gone I stood again

Before his chair and bending down my head

Told him, that when Orion rose, and all

The women of his household were asleep,

To go--for hope would give his limbs the power--

To an old empty woodman’s house that’s hidden

Close to a clump of beech trees in the wood

Westward of Tara, there to await a friend

That could, as he had told her, work his cure

And would be no harsh friend.

When night had deepened,

I groped my way through boughs, and over roots,

Till oak and hazel ceased and beech began,

And found the house, a sputtering torch within,

And stretched out sleeping on a pile of skins

Ardan, and though I called to him and tried

To shake him out of sleep, I could not rouse him.

I waited till the night was on the turn,

Then fearing that some labourer, on his way

To plough or pasture-land, might see me there,

Went out.

Among the ivy-covered rocks,

As on the blue light of a sword, a man

Who had unnatural majesty, and eyes

Like the eyes of some great kite scouring the woods,

Stood on my path. Trembling from head to foot

I gazed at him like grouse upon a kite;

But with a voice that had unnatural music,

‘A weary wooing and a long,’ he said,

‘Speaking of love through other lips and looking

Under the eyelids of another, for it was my craft

That put a passion in the sleeper there,

And when I had got my will and drawn you here,

Where I may speak to you alone, my craft

Sucked up the passion out of him again

And left mere sleep. He’ll wake when the sun wakes,

Push out his vigorous limbs and rub his eyes,

And wonder what has ailed him these twelve months.’

I cowered back upon the wall in terror,

But that sweet-sounding voice ran on: ‘Woman,

I was your husband when you rode the air,

Danced in the whirling foam and in the dust,

In days you have not kept in memory,

Being betrayed into a cradle, and I come

That I may claim you as my wife again.’

I was no longer terrified, his voice

Had half awakened some old memory,

Yet answered him: ‘I am King Eochaid’s wife

And with him have found every happiness

Women can find.’ With a most masterful voice,

That made the body seem as it were a string

Under a bow, he cried: ‘What happiness

Can lovers have that know their happiness

Must end at the dumb stone? But where we build

Our sudden palaces in the still air

Pleasure itself can bring no weariness,

Nor can time waste the cheek, nor is there foot

That has grown weary of the whirling dance,

Nor an unlaughing mouth, but mine that mourns,

Among those mouths that sing their sweethearts’ praise,

Your empty bed.’ ‘How should I love,’ I answered,

‘Were it not that when the dawn has lit my bed

And shown my husband sleeping there, I have sighed,

“Your strength and nobleness will pass away.”

Or how should love be worth its pains were it not

That when he has fallen asleep within my arms,

Being wearied out, I love in man the child?

What can they know of love that do not know

She builds her nest upon a narrow ledge

Above a windy precipice?’ Then he:

‘Seeing that when you come to the deathbed

You must return, whether you would or no,

This human life blotted from memory,

Why must I live some thirty, forty years,

Alone with all this useless happiness?’

Thereon he seized me in his arms, but I

Thrust him away with both my hands and cried,

‘Never will I believe there is any change

Can blot out of my memory this life

Sweetened by death, but if I could believe

That were a double hunger in my lips

For what is doubly brief.’

And now the shape,

My hands were pressed to, vanished suddenly.

I staggered, but a beech tree stayed my fall,

And clinging to it I could hear the cocks

Crow upon Tara.”

King Eochaid bowed his head

And thanked her for her kindness to his brother,

For that she promised, and for that refused.

Thereon the bellowing of the empounded herds

Rose round the walls, and through the bronze-ringed door

Jostled and shouted those war-wasted men,

And in the midst King Eochaid’s brother stood,

And bade all welcome, being ignorant.

To A Wealthy Man Who Promised A Second Subscription To The Dublin Municipal Gallery If It Were Proved The People Wanted Pictures

You gave but will not give again

Until enough of Paudeen’s pence

By Biddy’s halfpennies have lain

To be “some sort of evidence,”

Before you’ll put your guineas down,

That things it were a pride to give

Are what the blind and ignorant town

Imagines best to make it thrive.

What cared Duke Ercole, that bid

His mummers to the market place,

What th’ onion-sellers thought or did

So that his Plautus set the pace

For the Italian comedies?

And Guidobaldo, when he made

That grammar school of courtesies

Where wit and beauty learned their trade

Upon Urbino’s windy hill,

Had sent no runners to and fro

That he might learn the shepherds’ will.

And when they drove out Cosimo,

Indifferent how the rancour ran,

He gave the hours they had set free

To Michelozzo’s latest plan

For the San Marco Library,

Whence turbulent Italy should draw

Delight in Art whose end is peace,

In logic and in natural law

By sucking at the dugs of Greece.

Your open hand but shows our loss,

For he knew better how to live.

Let Paudeens play at pitch and toss,

Look up in the sun’s eye and give

What the exultant heart calls good

That some new day may breed the best

Because you gave, not what they would

But the right twigs for an eagle’s nest!

December 1912.

September 1913

WHAT need you, being come to sense,

But fumble in a greasy till

And add the halfpence to the pence

And prayer to shivering prayer, until

You have dried the marrow from the bone;

For men were born to pray and save:

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind

The names that stilled your childish play,

They have gone about the world like wind,

But little time had they to pray

For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,

And what, God help us, could they save:

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread

The grey wing upon every tide;

For this that all that blood was shed,

For this Edward Fitzgerald died,

And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,

All that delirium of the brave;

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,

And call those exiles as they were

In all their loneliness and pain,

You’d cry “Some woman’s yellow hair

Has maddened every mother’s son”:

They weighed so lightly what they gave,

But let them be, they’re dead and gone,

They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing

Now all the truth is out,

Be secret and take defeat

From any brazen throat,

For how can you compete,

Being honour bred, with one

Who, were it proved he lies,

Were neither shamed in his own

Nor in his neighbours’ eyes?

Bred to a harder thing

Than Triumph, turn away

And like a laughing string

Whereon mad fingers play

Amid a place of stone,

Be secret and exult,

Because of all things known

That is most difficult.

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.

To A Shade

IF you have revisited the town, thin Shade,

Whether to look upon your monument

(I wonder if the builder has been paid)

Or happier thoughted when the day is spent

To drink of that salt breath out of the sea

When grey gulls flit about instead of men,

And the gaunt houses put on majesty:

Let these content you and be gone again;

For they are at their old tricks yet.

A man

Of your own passionate serving kind who had brought

In his full hands what, had they only known,

Had given their children’s children loftier thought,

Sweeter emotion, working in their veins

Like gentle blood, has been driven from the place,

And insult heaped upon him for his pains

And for his open-handedness, disgrace;

Your enemy, an old foul mouth, had set

The pack upon him.

Go, unquiet wanderer,

And gather the Glasnevin coverlet

About your head till the dust stops your ear,

The time for you to taste of that salt breath

And listen at the corners has not come;

You had enough of sorrow before death--

Away, away! You are safer in the tomb.

September 29, 1913.

When Helen Lived

WE have cried in our despair

That men desert,

For some trivial affair

Or noisy, insolent, sport,

Beauty that we have won

From bitterest hours;

Yet we, had we walked within

Those topless towers

Where Helen walked with her boy,

Had given but as the rest

Of the men and women of Troy,

A word and a jest.

On Those That Hated “The Playboy Of The Western World,” 1907

ONCE, when midnight smote the air,

Eunuchs ran through Hell and met

On every crowded street to stare

Upon great Juan riding by:

Even like these to rail and sweat

Staring upon his sinewy thigh.

The Three Beggars

“THOUGH to my feathers in the wet,

I have stood here from break of day,

I have not found a thing to eat

For only rubbish comes my way.

Am I to live on lebeen-lone?”

Muttered the old crane of Gort.

“For all my pains on lebeen-lone.”

King Guari walked amid his court

The palace-yard and river-side

And there to three old beggars said:

“You that have wandered far and wide

Can ravel out what’s in my head.

Do men who least desire get most,

Or get the most who most desire?”

A beggar said: “They get the most

Whom man or devil cannot tire,

And what could make their muscles taut

Unless desire had made them so.”

But Guari laughed with secret thought,

“If that be true as it seems true,

One of you three is a rich man,

For he shall have a thousand pounds

Who is first asleep, if but he can

Sleep before the third noon sounds.”

And thereon merry as a bird,

With his old thoughts King Guari went

From river-side and palace-yard

And left them to their argument.

“And if I win,” one beggar said,

“Though I am old I shall persuade

A pretty girl to share my bed”;

The second: “I shall learn a trade”;

The third: “I’ll hurry to the course

Among the other gentlemen,

And lay it all upon a horse “;

The second: “I have thought again:

A farmer has more dignity.”

One to another sighed and cried:

The exorbitant dreams of beggary,

That idleness had borne to pride,

Sang through their teeth from noon to noon;

And when the second twilight brought

The frenzy of the beggars’ moon

None closed his blood-shot eyes but sought

To keep his fellows from their sleep;

All shouted till their anger grew

And they were whirling in a heap.

They mauled and bit the whole night through;

They mauled and bit till the day shone;

They mauled and bit through all that day

And till another night had gone,

Or if they made a moment’s stay

They sat upon their heels to rail,

And when old Guari came and stood

Before the three to end this tale,

They were commingling lice and blood.

“Time’s up,” he cried, and all the three

With blood-shot eyes upon him stared.

“Time’s up,” he cried, and all the three

Fell down upon the dust and snored.

“Maybe I shall be lucky yet,

Now they are silent,” said the crane.

“Though to my feathers in the wet

I’ve stood as I were made of stone

And seen the rubbish run about,

It’s certain there are trout somewhere

And maybe I shall take a trout

If but I do not seem to care.”

The Three Hermits

THREE old hermits took the air

By a cold and desolate sea,

First was muttering a prayer,

Second rummaged for a flea;

On a windy stone, the third,

Giddy with his hundredth year,

Sang unnoticed like a bird.

“Though the Door of Death is near

And what waits behind the door,

Three times in a single day

I, though upright on the shore,

Fall asleep when I should pray.”

So the first but now the second,

“We’re but given what we have earned

When all thoughts and deeds are reckoned,

So it’s plain to be discerned

That the shades of holy men,

Who have failed being weak of will,

Pass the Door of Birth again,

And are plagued by crowds, until

They’ve the passion to escape.”

Moaned the other, “They are thrown

Into some most fearful shape.”

But the second mocked his moan:

“They are not changed to anything,

Having loved God once, but maybe,

To a poet or a king

Or a witty lovely lady.”

While he’d rummaged rags and hair,

Caught and cracked his flea, the third,

Giddy with his hundredth year

Sang unnoticed like a bird.

Beggar To Beggar Cried

“TIME to put off the world and go somewhere

And find my health again in the sea air,”

Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,

“And make my soul before my pate is bare.”

“And get a comfortable wife and house

To rid me of the devil in my shoes,”

Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,

“And the worse devil that is between my thighs.”

“And though I’d marry with a comely lass,

She need not be too comely--let it pass,”

Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,

“But there’s a devil in a looking-glass.”

“Nor should she be too rich, because the rich

Are driven by wealth as beggars by the itch,”

Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,

“And cannot have a humorous happy speech.”

“And there I’ll grow respected at my ease,

And hear amid the garden’s nightly peace,”

Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,

“The wind-blown clamour of the barnacle-geese.”

Running To Paradise

As I came over Windy Gap

They threw a halfpenny into my cap,

For I am running to Paradise;

And all that I need do is to wish

And somebody puts his hand in the dish

To throw me a bit of salted fish:

And there the king is but as the beggar.

My brother Mourteen is worn out

With skelping his big brawling lout,

And I am running to Paradise;

A poor life do what he can,

And though he keep a dog and a gun,

A serving maid and a serving man:

And there the king is but as the beggar.

Poor men have grown to be rich men,

And rich men grown to be poor again,

And I am running to Paradise;

And many a darling wit’s grown dull

That tossed a bare heel when at school,

Now it has filled an old sock full:

And there the king is but as the beggar.

The wind is old and still at play

While I must hurry upon my way,

For I am running to Paradise;

Yet never have I lit on a friend

To take my fancy like the wind

That nobody can buy or bind:

And there the king is but as the beggar.

The Hour Before Dawn

A CURSING rogue with a merry face,

A bundle of rags upon a crutch,

Stumbled upon that windy place

Called Croghan, and it was as much

As the one sturdy leg could do

To keep him upright while he cursed.

He had counted, where long years ago

Queen Maeve’s nine Maines had been nursed,

A pair of lapwings, one old sheep

And not a house to the plain’s edge,

When close to his right hand a heap

Of grey stones and a rocky ledge

Reminded him that he could make,

If he but shifted a few stones,

A shelter till the daylight broke.

But while he fumbled with the stones

They toppled over; “Were it not

I have a lucky wooden shin

I had been hurt”; and toppling brought

Before his eyes, where stones had been,

A dark deep hollow in the rock.

He gave a gasp and thought to have fled,

Being certain it was no right rock

Because an ancient history said

Hell Mouth lay open near that place,

And yet stood still, because inside

A great lad with a beery face

Had tucked himself away beside

A ladle and a tub of beer,

And snored, no phantom by his look.

So with a laugh at his own fear

He crawled into that pleasant nook.

“Night grows uneasy near the dawn

Till even I sleep light; but who

Has tired of his own company?

What one of Maeve’s nine brawling sons

Sick of his grave has wakened me?

But let him keep his grave for once

That I may find the sleep I have lost.”

“What care I if you sleep or wake

But I’ll have no man call me ghost.”

“Say what you please, but from daybreak

I’ll sleep another century.”

“And I will talk before I sleep

And drink before I talk.”

And he

Had dipped the wooden ladle deep

Into the sleeper’s tub of beer

Had not the sleeper started up.

“Before you have dipped it in the beer

I dragged from Goban’s mountain-top

I’ll have assurance that you are able

To value beer; no half-legged fool

Shall dip his nose into my ladle

Merely for stumbling on this hole

In the bad hour before the dawn.”

“Why, beer is only beer.”

”But say

I’ll sleep until the winter’s gone,

Or maybe to Midsummer Day,’

And drink, and you will sleep that length.”

“I’d like to sleep till winter’s gone

Or till the sun is in his strength.

This blast has chilled me to the bone.”

“I had no better plan at first.

I thought to wait for that or this;

Maybe the weather was a-cursed

Or I had no woman there to kiss;

So slept for half a year or so;

But year by year I found that less

Gave me such pleasure I’d forgo

Even a half hour’s nothingness,

And when at one year’s end I found

I had not waked a single minute,

I chose this burrow under ground.

I’ll sleep away all Time within it:

My sleep were now nine centuries

But for those mornings when I find

The lapwing at their foolish cries

And the sheep bleating at the wind

As when I also played the fool.”

The beggar in a rage began

Upon his hunkers in the hole,

“It’s plain that you are no right man

To mock at everything I love

As if it were not worth the doing.

I’d have a merry life enough

If a good Easter wind were blowing,

And though the winter wind is bad

I should not be too down in the mouth

For anything you did or said

If but this wind were in the south.”

“You cry aloud, O would ‘twere spring

Or that the wind would shift a point,

And do not know that you would bring,

If time were suppler in the joint,

Neither the spring nor the south wind

But the hour when you shall pass away

And leave no smoking wick behind,

For all life longs for the Last Day

And there’s no man but cocks his ear

To know when Michael’s trumpet cries

That flesh and bone may disappear,

And souls as if they were but sighs,

And there be nothing but God left;

But I alone being blessed keep

Like some old rabbit to my cleft

And wait Him in a drunken sleep.”

He dipped his ladle in the tub

And drank and yawned and stretched him out.

The other shouted, “You would rob

My life of every pleasant thought

And every comfortable thing

And so take that and that.” Thereon

He gave him a great pummelling,

But might have pummelled at a stone

For all the sleeper knew or cared;

And after heaped up stone on stone,

And then, grown weary, prayed and cursed

And heaped upon stone on stone again,

And prayed and cursed and cursed and fled

From Maeve and all that juggling plain,

Nor gave God thanks till overhead

The clouds were brightening with the dawn.

A Song From The Player Queen

My mother dandled me and sang,

“How young it is, how young!”

And made a golden cradle

That on a willow swung.

“He went away,” my mother sang,

“When I was brought to bed,”

And all the while her needle pulled

The gold and silver thread.

She pulled the thread and bit the thread

And made a golden gown,

And wept because she had dreamt that I

Was born to wear a crown.

“When she was got,” my mother sang,

“I heard a sea-mew cry,

And saw a flake of the yellow foam

That dropped upon my thigh.”

How therefore could she help but braid

The gold into my hair,

And dream that I should carry

The golden top of care?

The Realists

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 waggons

Do, but awake a hope to live

That had gone

With the dragons?

I. The Witch

TOIL and grow rich,

What’s that but to lie

With a foul witch

And after, drained dry,

To be brought

To the chamber where

Lies one long sought

With despair.

II. The Peacock

WHAT’S riches to him

That has made a great peacock

With the pride of his eye?

The wind-beaten, stone-grey,

And desolate Three-rock

Would nourish his whim.

Live he or die

Amid wet rocks and heather,

His ghost will be gay

Adding feather to feather

For the pride of his eye.

The Mountain Tomb

POUR wine and dance if Manhood still have pride,

Bring roses if the rose be yet in bloom;

The cataract smokes upon the mountain side,

Our Father Rosicross is in his tomb.

Pull down the blinds, bring fiddle and clarionet

That there be no foot silent in the room

Nor mouth from kissing, nor from wine unwet;

Our Father Rosicross is in his tomb.

In vain, in vain; the cataract still cries

The everlasting taper lights the gloom;

All wisdom shut into his onyx eyes

Our Father Rosicross sleeps in his tomb.

I. To A Child Dancing In The Wind

DANCE there upon the shore;

What need have you to care

For wind or water’s roar?

And tumble out your hair

That the salt drops have wet;

Being young you have not known

The fool’s triumph, nor yet

Love lost as soon as won,

Nor the best labourer dead

And all the sheaves to bind.

What need have you to dread

The monstrous crying of wind?

II. Two Years Later

HAS no one said those daring

Kind eyes should be more learn’d?

Or warned you how despairing

The moths are when they are burned,

I could have warned you, but you are young,

So we speak a different tongue.

O you will take whatever’s offered

And dream that all the world’s a friend,

Suffer as your mother suffered,

Be as broken in the end.

But I am old and you are young,

And I speak a barbarous tongue.

A Memory Of Youth

THE moments passed as at a play,

I had the wisdom love brings forth;

I had my share of mother wit

And yet for all that I could say,

And though I had her praise for it,

A cloud blown from the cut-throat north

Suddenly hid love’s moon away.

Believing every word I said

I praised her body and her mind

Till pride had made her eyes grow bright,

And pleasure made her cheeks grow red,

And vanity her footfall light,

Yet we, for all that praise, could find

Nothing but darkness overhead.

We sat as silent as a stone,

We knew, though she’d not said a word,

That even the best of love must die,

And had been savagely undone

Were it not that love upon the cry

Of a most ridiculous little bird

Tore from the clouds his marvellous moon.

Fallen Majesty

ALTHOUGH crowds gathered once if she but showed her face,

And even old men’s eyes grew dim, this hand alone,

Like some last courtier at a gypsy camping place

Babbling of fallen majesty, records what’s gone.

The lineaments, a heart that laughter has made sweet,

These, these remain, but I record what’s gone. A crowd

Will gather, and not know it walks the very street

Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud.

Friends

Now must I these three praise--

Three women that have wrought

What joy is in my days;

One that no passing thought,

Nor those unpassing cares,

No, not in these fifteen

Many times troubled years,

Could ever come between

Heart and delighted heart;

And one because her hand

Had strength that could unbind

What none can understand,

What none can have and thrive,

Youth’s dreamy load, till she

So changed me that I live

Labouring in ecstasy.

And what of her that took

All till my youth was gone

With scarce a pitying look?

How should I praise that one?

When day begins to break

I count my good and bad,

Being wakeful for her sake,

Remembering what she had,

What eagle look still shows,

While up from my heart’s root

So great a sweetness flows

I shake from head to foot.

The Cold Heaven

SUDDENLY I saw the cold and rook-delighting Heaven

That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,

And thereupon imagination and heart were driven

So wild that every casual thought of that and this

Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season

With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;

And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,

Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,

Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,

Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent

Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken

By the injustice of the skies for punishment?

That The Night Come

SHE lived in storm and strife,

Her soul had such desire

For what proud death may bring

That it could not endure

The common good of life,

But lived as ‘twere a king

That packed his marriage day

With banneret and pennon,

Trumpet and kettledrum,

And the outrageous cannon,

To bundle time away

That the night come.

An Appointment

BEING out of heart with government

I took a broken root to fling

Where the proud, wayward squirrel went,

Taking delight that he could spring;

And he, with that low whinnying sound

That is like laughter, sprang again

And so to the other tree at a bound.

Nor the tame will, nor timid brain,

Nor heavy knitting of the brow

Bred that fierce tooth and cleanly limb

And threw him up to laugh on the bough;

No government appointed him.

I. The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,

In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones

Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky

With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,

And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,

And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,

Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

II. The Dolls

A DOLL in the doll-maker’s house

Looks at the cradle and bawls:

“That is an insult to us.”

But the oldest of all the dolls

Who had seen, being kept for show,

Generations of his sort,

Out-screams the whole shelf: “Although

There’s not a man can report

Evil of this place,

The man and the woman bring

Hither to our disgrace,

A noisy and filthy thing.”

Hearing him groan and stretch

The doll-maker’s wife is aware

Her husband has heard the wretch,

And crouched by the arm of his chair,

She murmurs into his ear,

Head upon shoulder leant:

“My dear, my dear, oh dear,

It was an accident.”

A Coat

I MADE my song a coat

Covered with embroideries

Out of old mythologies

From heel to throat;

But the fools caught it,

Wore it in the world’s eyes

As though they’d wrought it.

Song, let them take it

For there’s more enterprise

In walking naked.

CODA

WHILE I, from that reed-throated whisperer

Who comes at need, although not now as once

A clear articulation in the air

But inwardly, surmise companions

Beyond the fling of the dull ass’s hoof,

--Ben Jonson’s phrase--and find when June is come

At Kyle-na-no under that ancient roof

A sterner conscience and a friendlier home,

I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs,

Those undreamt accidents that have made me

--Seeing that Fame has perished this long while

Being but a part of ancient ceremony--

Notorious, till all my priceless things

Are but a post the passing dogs defile.

The Wild Swans At Coole (1919)

The Wild Swans At Coole

THE trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine and fifty swans.

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold,

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake’s edge or pool

Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?

In Memory Of Major Robert Gregory

1

Now that we’re almost settled in our house

I’ll name the friends that cannot sup with us

Beside a fire of turf in th’ ancient tower,

And having talked to some late hour

Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed:

Discoverers of forgotten truth

Or mere companions of my youth,

All, all are in my thoughts to-night being dead.

2

Always we’d have the new friend meet the old

And we are hurt if either friend seem cold,

And there is salt to lengthen out the smart

In the affections of our heart,

And quarrels are blown up upon that head;

But not a friend that I would bring

This night can set us quarrelling,

For all that come into my mind are dead.

3

Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind,

That loved his learning better than mankind,

Though courteous to the worst; much falling he

Brooded upon sanctity

Till all his Greek and Latin learning seemed

A long blast upon the horn that brought

A little nearer to his thought

A measureless consummation that he dreamed.

4

And that enquiring man John Synge comes next

That dying chose the living world for text

And never could have rested in the tomb

But that, long travelling, he had come

Towards nightfall upon certain set apart

In a most desolate stony place,

Towards nightfall upon a race

Passionate and simple like his heart.

5

And then I think of old George Pollexfen,

In muscular youth well known to Mayo men

For horsemanship at meets or at racecourses,

That could have shown how purebred horses

And solid men, for all their passion, live

But as the outrageous stars incline

By opposition, square and trine;

Having grown sluggish and contemplative.

6

They were my close companions many a year,

A portion of my mind and life, as it were,

And now their breathless faces seem to look

Out of some old picture-book;

I am accustomed to their lack of breath,

But not that my dear friend’s dear son,

Our Sidney and our perfect man,

Could share in that discourtesy of death.

7

For all things the delighted eye now sees

Were loved by him; the old storm-broken trees

That cast their shadows upon road and bridge;

The tower set on the stream’s edge;

The ford where drinking cattle make a stir

Nightly, and startled by that sound

The water-hen must change her ground;

He might have been your heartiest welcomer.

8

When with the Galway foxhounds he would ride

From Castle Taylor to the Roxborough side

Or Esserkelly plain, few kept his pace;

At Mooneen he had leaped a place

So perilous that half the astonished meet

Had shut their eyes, and where was it

He rode a race without a bit?

And yet his mind outran the horses’ feet.

9

We dreamed that a great painter had been born

To cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn,

To that stern colour and that delicate line

That are our secret discipline

Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might.

Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,

And yet he had the intensity

To have published all to be a world’s delight.

10

What other could so well have counselled us

In all lovely intricacies of a house

As he that practised or that understood

All work in metal or in wood,

In moulded plaster or in carven stone?

Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,

And all he did done perfectly

As though he had but that one trade alone.

11

Some burn damp fagots, others may consume

The entire combustible world in one small room

As though dried straw, and if we turn about

The bare chimney is gone black out

Because the work had finished in that flare.

Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,

As ‘twere all life’s epitome.

What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?

12

I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind

That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind

All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved

Or boyish intellect approved,

With some appropriate commentary on each;

Until imagination brought

A fitter welcome; but a thought

Of that late death took all my heart for speech.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I KNOW that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

Men Improve With The Years

I AM worn out with dreams;

A weather-worn, marble triton

Among the streams;

And all day long I look

Upon this lady’s beauty

As though I had found in book

A pictured beauty,

Pleased to have filled the eyes

Or the discerning ears,

Delighted to be but wise,

For men improve with the years;

And yet and yet

Is this my dream, or the truth?

O would that we had met

When I had my burning youth;

But I grow old among dreams,

A weather-worn, marble triton

Among the streams.

The Collar-Bone Of A Hare

WOULD I could cast a sail on the water

Where many a king has gone

And many a king’s daughter,

And alight at the comely trees and the lawn,

The playing upon pipes and the dancing,

And learn that the best thing is

To change my loves while dancing

And pay but a kiss for a kiss.

I would find by the edge of that water

The collar-bone of a hare

Worn thin by the lapping of water,

And pierce it through with a gimlet and stare

At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,

And laugh over the untroubled water

At all who marry in churches,

Through the white thin bone of a hare.

Under The Round Tower

“ALTHOUGH I’d lie lapped up in linen

A deal I’d sweat and little earn

If I should live as live the neighbours,”

Cried the beggar, Billy Byrne;

“Stretch bones till the daylight come

On great-grandfather’s battered tomb.”

Upon a grey old battered tombstone

In Glendalough beside the stream,

Where the O’Byrnes and Byrnes are buried,

He stretched his bones and fell in a dream

Of sun and moon that a good hour

Bellowed and pranced in the round tower;

Of golden king and silver lady,

Bellowing up and bellowing round,

Till toes mastered a sweet measure,

Mouth mastered a sweet sound,

Prancing round and prancing up

Until they pranced upon the top.

That golden king and that wild lady

Sang till stars began to fade,

Hands gripped in hands, toes close together,

Hair spread on the wind they made;

That lady and that golden king

Could like a brace of blackbirds sing.

“It’s certain that my luck is broken,”

That rambling jailbird Billy said;

“Before nightfall I’ll pick a pocket

And snug it in a feather-bed,

I cannot find the peace of home

On great-grandfather’s battered tomb.”

Solomon To Sheba

SANG Solomon to Sheba,

And kissed her dusky face,

“All day long from mid-day

We have talked in the one place,

All day long from shadowless noon

We have gone round and round

In the narrow theme of love

Like an old horse in a pound.”

To Solomon sang Sheba,

Planted on his knees,

“If you had broached a matter

That might the learned please,

You had before the sun had thrown

Our shadows on the ground

Discovered that my thoughts, not it,

Are but a narrow pound.”

Sang Solomon to Sheba,

And kissed her Arab eyes,

“There’s not a man or woman

Born under the skies

Dare match in learning with us two,

And all day long we have found

There’s not a thing but love can make

The world a narrow pound.”

The Living Beauty

I’LL say and maybe dream I have drawn content--

Seeing that time has frozen up the blood,

The wick of youth being burned and the oil spent--

From beauty that is cast out of a mould

In bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,

Appears, and when we have gone is gone again,

Being more indifferent to our solitude

Than ‘twere an apparition. O heart, we are old,

The living beauty is for younger men,

We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.

A Song

I THOUGHT no more was needed

Youth to prolong

Than dumb-bell and foil

To keep the body young.

Oh, who could have foretold

That the heart grows old?

Though I have many words,

What woman’s satisfied,

I am no longer faint

Because at her side?

Oh, who could have foretold

That the heart grows old?

I have not lost desire

But the heart that I had;

I thought ‘twould burn my body

Laid on the death-bed,

For who could have foretold

That the heart grows old?

To A Young Beauty

DEAR fellow-artist, why so free

With every sort of company,

With every Jack and Jill?

Choose your companions from the best;

Who draws a bucket with the rest

Soon topples down the hill.

You may, that mirror for a school,

Be passionate, not bountiful

As common beauties may,

Who were not born to keep in trim

With old Ezekiel’s cherubim

But those of Beaujolet.

I know what wages beauty gives,

How hard a life her servant lives,

Yet praise the winters gone:

There is not a fool can call me friend,

And I may dine at journey’s end

With Landor and with Donne.

To A Young Girl

MY dear, my dear, I know

More than another

What makes your heart beat so;

Not even your own mother

Can know it as I know,

Who broke my heart for her

When the wild thought,

That she denies

And has forgot,

Set all her blood astir

And glittered in her eyes.

The Scholars

BALD heads forgetful of their sins,

Old, learned, respectable bald heads

Edit and annotate the lines

That young men, tossing on their beds,

Rhymed out in love’s despair

To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;

Wear out the carpet with their shoes

Earning respect; have no strange friend;

If they have sinned nobody knows.

Lord, what would they say

Should their Catullus walk that way?

Tom O’roughley

“THOUGH logic choppers rule the town,

And every man and maid and boy

Has marked a distant object down,

An aimless joy is a pure joy,”

Or so did Tom O’Roughley say

That saw the surges running by,

“And wisdom is a butterfly

And not a gloomy bird of prey.

“If little planned is little sinned

But little need the grave distress.

What’s dying but a second wind?

How but in zig-zag wantonness

Could trumpeter Michael be so brave?”

Or something of that sort he said,

“And if my dearest friend were dead

I’d dance a measure on his grave.”

The Sad Shepherd

SHEPHERD

THAT cry’s from the first cuckoo of the year.

I wished before it ceased.

GOATHERD

Nor bird nor beast

Could make me wish for anything this day,

Being old, but that the old alone might die,

And that would be against God’s Providence.

Let the young wish. But what has brought you here?

Never until this moment have we met

Where my goats browse on the scarce grass or leap

From stone to stone.

SHEPHERD

I am looking for strayed sheep;

Something has troubled me and in my trouble

I let them stray. I thought of rhyme alone,

For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble

And make the daylight sweet once more; but when

I had driven every rhyme into its place

The sheep had gone from theirs.

GOATHERD

I know right well

What turned so good a shepherd from his charge.

SHEPHERD

He that was best in every country sport

And every country craft, and of us all

Most courteous to slow age and hasty youth,

Is dead.

GOATHERD

The boy that brings my griddle cake

Brought the bare news.

SHEPHERD

He had thrown the crook away

And died in the great war beyond the sea.

GOATHERD

He had often played his pipes among my hills,

And when he played it was their loneliness,

The exultation of their stone, that cried

Under his fingers.

SHEPHERD

I had it from his mother,

And his own flock was browsing at the door.

GOATHERD

How does she bear her grief? There is not a shepherd

But grows more gentle when he speaks her name,

Remembering kindness done, and how can I,

That found when I had neither goat nor grazing

New welcome and old wisdom at her fire

Till winter blasts were gone, but speak of her

Even before his children and his wife.

SHEPHERD

She goes about her house erect and calm

Between the pantry and the linen chest,

Or else at meadow or at grazing overlooks

Her labouring men, as though her darling lived,

But for her grandson now; there is no change

But such as I have seen upon her face

Watching our shepherd sports at harvest-time

When her son’s turn was over.

GOATHERD

Sing your song,

I too have rhymed my reveries, but youth

Is hot to show whatever it has found,

And till that’s done can neither work nor wait.

Old goatherds and old goats, if in all else

Youth can excel them in accomplishment,

Are learned in waiting.

SHEPHERD

You cannot but have seen

That he alone had gathered up no gear,

Set carpenters to work on no wide table,

On no long bench nor lofty milking shed

As others will, when first they take possession,

But left the house as in his father’s time

As though he knew himself, as it were, a cuckoo,

No settled man. And now that he is gone

There’s nothing of him left but half a score

Of sorrowful, austere, sweet, lofty pipe tunes.

GOATHERD

You have put the thought in rhyme.

SHEPHERD

I worked all day,

And when ‘twas done so little had I done

That maybe “I am sorry” in plain prose

Had sounded better to your mountain fancy.

[He sings.

“Like the speckled bird that steers

Thousands of leagues oversea,

And runs for a while or a while half-flies

Upon his yellow legs through our meadows,

He stayed for a while; and we

Had scarcely accustomed our ears

To his speech at the break of day,

Had scarcely accustomed our eyes

To his shape at the rinsing pool

Among the evening shadows,

When he vanished from ears and eyes.

I had wished a dear thing on that day

I heard him first, but man is a fool.”

GOATHERD

You sing as always of the natural life,

And I that made like music in my youth

Hearing it now have sighed for that young man

And certain lost companions of my own.

SHEPHERD

They say that on your barren mountain ridge

You have measured out the road that the soul treads

When it has vanished from our natural eyes;

That you have talked with apparitions.

GOATHERD

Indeed

My daily thoughts since the first stupor of youth

Have found the path my goats’ feet cannot find.

SHEPHERD

Sing, for it may be that your thoughts have plucked

Some medicable herb to make our grief

Less bitter.

GOATHERD

They have brought me from that ridge

Seed pods and flowers that are not all wild poppy.

[Sings.

“He grows younger every second

That were all his birthdays reckoned

Much too solemn seemed;

Because of what he had dreamed,

Or the ambitions that he served,

Much too solemn and reserved.

Jaunting, journeying

To his own dayspring,

He unpacks the loaded pern

Of all ‘twas pain or joy to learn,

Of all that he had made.

The outrageous war shall fade;

At some old winding whitethorn root

He’ll practise on the shepherd’s flute,

Or on the close-cropped grass

Court his shepherd lass,

Or run where lads reform our daytime

Till that is their long shouting playtime;

Knowledge he shall unwind

Through victories of the mind,

Till, clambering at the cradle side,

He dreams himself his mother’s pride,

All knowledge lost in trance

Of sweeter ignorance.”

SHEPHERD

When I have shut these ewes and this old ram

Into the fold, we’ll to the woods and there

Cut out our rhymes on strips of new-torn bark

But put no name and leave them at her door.

To know the mountain and the valley have grieved

May be a quiet thought to wife and mother,

And children when they spring up shoulder high.

Lines Written In Dejection

WHEN have I last looked on

The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies

Of the dark leopards of the moon?

All the wild witches those most noble ladies,

For all their broom-sticks and their tears,

Their angry tears, are gone.

The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished;

I have nothing but the embittered sun;

Banished heroic mother moon and vanished,

And now that I have come to fifty years

I must endure the timid sun.

The Dawn

I WOULD be ignorant as the dawn

That has looked down

On that old queen measuring a town

With the pin of a brooch,

Or on the withered men that saw

From their pedantic Babylon

The careless planets in their courses,

The stars fade out where the moon comes,

And took their tablets and did sums;

I would be ignorant as the dawn

That merely stood, rocking the glittering coach

Above the cloudy shoulders of the horses;

I would be--for no knowledge is worth a straw--

Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.

On Woman

MAY God be praised for woman

That gives up all her mind,

A man may find in no man

A friendship of her kind

That covers all he has brought

As with her flesh and bone,

Nor quarrels with a thought

Because it is not her own.

Though pedantry denies

It’s plain the Bible means

That Solomon grew wise

While talking with his queens

Yet never could, although

They say he counted grass,

Count all the praises due

When Sheba was his lass,

When she the iron wrought, or

When from the smithy fire

It shuddered in the water

Harshness of their desire

That made them stretch and yawn,

Pleasure that comes with sleep,

Shudder that made them one.

What else He give or keep

God grant me--no not here,

For I am not so bold

To hope a thing so dear

Now I am growing old,

But when if the tale’s true

The Pestle of the moon

That pounds up all anew

Brings me to birth again--

To find what once I had

And know what once I have known,

Until I am driven mad,

Sleep driven from my bed,

By tenderness and care,

Pity, an aching head,

Gnashing of teeth, despair;

And all because of some one

Perverse creature of chance,

And live like Solomon

That Sheba led a dance.

The Fisherman

ALTHOUGH I can see him still

The freckled man who goes

To a grey place on a hill

In grey Connemara clothes

At dawn to cast his flies,

It’s long since I began

To call up to the eyes

This wise and simple man.

All day I’d looked in the face

What I had hoped ‘twould be

To write for my own race

And the reality;

The living men that I hate,

The dead man that I loved,

The craven man in his seat,

The insolent unreproved

And no knave brought to book

Who has won a drunken cheer,

The witty man and his joke

Aimed at the commonest ear,

The clever man who cries

The catch-cries of the clown,

The beating down of the wise

And great Art beaten down.

Maybe a twelvemonth since

Suddenly I began,

In scorn of this audience

Imagining a man,

And his sun-freckled face,

And grey Connemara cloth,

Climbing up to a place

Where stone is dark under froth,

And the down turn of his wrist

When the flies drop in the stream;

A man who does not exist,

A man who is but a dream;

And cried, “Before I am old

I shall have written him one

Poem maybe as cold

And passionate as the dawn.”

The Hawk

“CALL down the hawk from the air;

Let him be hooded or caged

Till the yellow eye has grown mild,

For larder and spit are bare,

The old cook enraged,

The scullion gone wild.”

“I will not be clapped in a hood,

Nor a cage, nor alight upon wrist,

Now I have learnt to be proud

Hovering over the wood

In the broken mist

Or tumbling cloud.”

“What tumbling cloud did you cleave,

Yellow-eyed hawk of the mind,

Last evening? that I, who had sat

Dumfounded before a knave,

Should give to my friend

A pretence of wit.”

Memory

ONE had a lovely face,

And two or three had charm,

But charm and face were in vain

Because the mountain grass

Cannot but keep the form

Where the mountain hare has lain.

Her Praise

SHE is foremost of those that I would hear praised.

I have gone about the house, gone up and down

As a man does who has published a new book

Or a young girl dressed out in her new gown,

And though I have turned the talk by hook or crook

Until her praise should be the uppermost theme,

A woman spoke of some new tale she had read,

A man confusedly in a half dream

As though some other name ran in his head.

She is foremost of those that I would hear praised.

I will talk no more of books or the long war

But walk by the dry thorn until I have found

Some beggar sheltering from the wind, and there

Manage the talk until her name come round.

If there be rags enough he will know her name

And be well pleased remembering it, for in the old days,

Though she had young men’s praise and old men’s blame,

Among the poor both old and young gave her praise.

The People

“WHAT have I earned for all that work,” I said,

“For all that I have done at my own charge?

The daily spite of this unmannerly town,

Where who has served the most is most defamed,

The reputation of his lifetime lost

Between the night and morning. I might have lived,

And you know well how great the longing has been,

Where every day my footfall should have lit

In the green shadow of Ferrara wall;

Or climbed among the images of the past--

The unperturbed and courtly images--

Evening and morning, the steep street of Urbino

To where the duchess and her people talked

The stately midnight through until they stood

In their great window looking at the dawn;

I might have had no friend that could not mix

Courtesy and passion into one like those

That saw the wicks grow yellow in the dawn;

I might have used the one substantial right

My trade allows: chosen my company,

And chosen what scenery had pleased me best.”

Thereon my phoenix answered in reproof,

“The drunkards, pilferers of public funds,

All the dishonest crowd I had driven away,

When my luck changed and they dared meet my face,

Crawled from obscurity, and set upon me

Those I had served and some that I had fed;

Yet never have I, now nor any time,

Complained of the people.”

All I could reply

Was: “You, that have not lived in thought but deed,

Can have the purity of a natural force,

But I, whose virtues are the definitions

Of the analytic mind, can neither close

The eye of the mind nor keep my tongue from speech.”

And yet, because my heart leaped at her words,

I was abashed, and now they come to mind

After nine years, I sink my head abashed.

His Phoenix

THERE is a queen in China, or maybe it’s in Spain,

And birthdays and holidays such praises can be heard

Of her unblemished lineaments, a whiteness with no stain,

That she might be that sprightly girl who was trodden by a bird;

And there’s a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind,

Or who have found a painter to make them so for pay

And smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind:

I knew a phoenix in my youth so let them have their day.

The young men every night applaud their Gaby’s laughing eye,

And Ruth St. Denis had more charm although she had poor luck,

From nineteen hundred nine or ten, Pavlova’s had the cry,

And there’s a player in the States who gathers up her cloak

And flings herself out of the room when Juliet would be bride

With all a woman’s passion, a child’s imperious way,

And there are--but no matter if there are scores beside:

I knew a phoenix in my youth so let them have their day.

There’s Margaret and Marjorie and Dorothy and Nan,

A Daphne and a Mary who live in privacy;

One’s had her fill of lovers, another’s had but one,

Another boasts, “I pick and choose and have but two or three.”

If head and limb have beauty and the instep’s high and light

They can spread out what sail they please for all I have to say,

Be but the breakers of men’s hearts or engines of delight:

I knew a phoenix in my youth so let them have their day.

There’ll be that crowd, that barbarous crowd, through all the centuries,

And who can say but some young belle may walk and talk men wild

Who is my beauty’s equal, though that my heart denies,

But not the exact likeness, the simplicity of a child,

And that proud look as though she had gazed into the burning sun,

And all the shapely body no tittle gone astray.

I mourn for that most lonely thing; and yet God’s will be done,

I knew a phoenix in my youth so let them have their day.

A Thought From Propertius

SHE might, so noble from head

To great shapely knees

The long flowing line,

Have walked to the altar

Through the holy images

At Pallas Athene’s side,

Or been fit spoil for a centaur

Drunk with the unmixed wine.

Broken Dreams

THERE is grey in your hair.

Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath

When you are passing;

But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing

Because it was your prayer

Recovered him upon the bed of death.

For your sole sake--that all heart’s ache have known,

And given to others all heart’s ache,

From meagre girlhood’s putting on

Burdensome beauty--for your sole sake

Heaven has put away the stroke of her doom,

So great her portion in that peace you make

By merely walking in a room.

Your beauty can but leave among us

Vague memories, nothing but memories.

A young man when the old men are done talking

Will say to an old man, “Tell me of that lady

The poet stubborn with his passion sang us

When age might well have chilled his blood.”

Vague memories, nothing but memories,

But in the grave all, all, shall be renewed.

The certainty that I shall see that lady

Leaning or standing or walking

In the first loveliness of womanhood,

And with the fervour of my youthful eyes,

Has set me muttering like a fool.

You are more beautiful than any one

And yet your body had a flaw:

Your small hands were not beautiful,

And I am afraid that you will run

And paddle to the wrist

In that mysterious, always brimming lake

Where those that have obeyed the holy law

Paddle and are perfect; leave unchanged

The hands that I have kissed

For old sakes’ sake.

The last stroke of midnight dies.

All day in the one chair

From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged

In rambling talk with an image of air:

Vague memories, nothing but memories.

A Deep-Sworn Vow

OTHERS because you did not keep

That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;

Yet always when I look death in the face,

When I clamber to the heights of sleep,

Or when I grow excited with wine,

Suddenly I meet your face.

Presences

THIS night has been so strange that it seemed

As if the hair stood up on my head.

From going-down of the sun I have dreamed

That women laughing, or timid or wild,

In rustle of lace or silken stuff,

Climbed up my creaking stair. They had read

All I had rhymed of that monstrous thing

Returned and yet unrequited love.

They stood in the door and stood between

My great wood lecturn and the fire

Till I could hear their hearts beating:

One is a harlot, and one a child

That never looked upon man with desire,

And one it may be a queen.

The Balloon Of The Mind

HANDS do what you’re bid;

Bring the balloon of the mind

That bellies and drags in the wind

Into its narrow shed.

To A Squirrel At Kyle-Na-Gno

COME play with me;

Why should you run

Through the shaking tree

As though I’d a gun

To strike you dead?

When all I would do

Is to scratch your head

And let you go.

On Being Asked For A War Poem

I THINK it better that in times like these

A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth

We have no gift to set a statesman right;

He has had enough of meddling who can please

A young girl in the indolence of her youth,

Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

In Memory Of Alfred Pollexfen

FIVE-AND-TWENTY years have gone

Since old William Pollexfen

Laid his strong bones down in death

By his wife Elizabeth

In the grey stone tomb he made.

And after twenty years they laid

In that tomb by him and her,

His son George, the astrologer;

And Masons drove from miles away

To scatter the Acacia spray

Upon a melancholy man

Who had ended where his breath began.

Many a son and daughter lies

Far from the customary skies,

The Mall and Eades’s grammar school,

In London or in Liverpool;

But where is laid the sailor John?

That so many lands had known:

Quiet lands or unquiet seas

Where the Indians trade or Japanese.

He never found his rest ashore

Moping for one voyage more.

Where have they laid the sailor John?

And yesterday the youngest son,

A humorous, unambitious man,

Was buried near the astrologer;

And are we now in the tenth year?

Since he, who had been contented long,

A nobody in a great throng,

Decided he would journey home,

Now that his fiftieth year had come,

And “Mr. Alfred” be again

Upon the lips of common men

Who carried in their memory

His childhood and his family.

At all these death-beds women heard

A visionary white sea-bird

Lamenting that a man should die;

And with that cry I have raised my cry.

Upon A Dying Lady

I

HER COURTESY

WITH the old kindness, the old distinguished grace

She lies, her lovely piteous head amid dull red hair

Propped upon pillows, rouge on the pallor of her face.

She would not have us sad because she is lying there,

And when she meets our gaze her eyes are laughter-lit,

Her speech a wicked tale that we may vie with her

Matching our broken-hearted wit against her wit,

Thinking of saints and of Petronius Arbiter.

II

CERTAIN ARTISTS BRING HER DOLLS AND DRAWINGS

Bring where our Beauty lies

A new modelled doll, or drawing,

With a friend’s or an enemy’s

Features, or maybe showing

Her features when a tress

Of dull red hair was flowing

Over some silken dress

Cut in the Turkish fashion,

Or it may be like a boy’s.

We have given the world our passion,

We have naught for death but toys.

III

SHE TURNS THE DOLLS’ FACES TO THE WALL

Because to-day is some religious festival

They had a priest say Mass, and even the Japanese,

Heel up and weight on toe, must face the wall

--Pedant in passion, learned in old courtesies,

Vehement and witty she had seemed--; the Venetian lady

Who had seemed to glide to some intrigue in her red shoes,

Her domino, her panniered skirt copied from Longhi;

The meditative critic; all are on their toes,

Even our Beauty with her Turkish trousers on.

Because the priest must have like every dog his day

Or keep us all awake with baying at the moon,

We and our dolls being but the world were best away.

IV

THE END OF DAY

She is playing like a child

And penance is the play,

Fantastical and wild

Because the end of day

Shows her that some one soon

Will come from the house, and say--

Though play is but half-done--

“Come in and leave the play.”

V

HER RACE

She has not grown uncivil

As narrow natures would

And called the pleasures evil

Happier days thought good;

She knows herself a woman

No red and white of a face,

Or rank, raised from a common

Unreckonable race;

And how should her heart fail her

Or sickness break her will

With her dead brother’s valour

For an example still.

VI

HER COURAGE

When her soul flies to the predestined dancing-place

(I have no speech but symbol, the pagan speech I made

Amid the dreams of youth) let her come face to face,

Amid that first astonishment, with Grania’s shade

All but the terrors of the woodland flight forgot

That made her Dermuid dear, and some old cardinal

Pacing with half-closed eyelids in a sunny spot

Who had murmured of Giorgione at his latest breath--

Aye and Achilles, Timor, Babar, Barhaim all

Who have lived in joy and laughed into the face of Death.

VII

HER FRIENDS BRING HER A CHRISTMAS TREE

Pardon great enemy,

Without an angry thought

We’ve carried in our tree,

And here and there have bought

Till all the boughs are gay,

And she may look from the bed

On pretty things that may

Please a fantastic head.

Give her a little grace,

What if a laughing eye

Have looked into your face--

It is about to die.

Ego Dominus Tuus

HIC

ON the grey sand beside the shallow stream

Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still

A lamp burns on beside the open book

That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon

And though you have passed the best of life still trace

Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion

Magical shapes.

ILLE

By the help of an image

I call to my own opposite, summon all

That I have handled least, least looked upon.

HIC

And I would find myself and not an image.

ILLE

That is our modern hope and by its light

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind

And lost the old nonchalance of the hand;

Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush

We are but critics, or but half create

Timid, entangled, empty and abashed

Lacking the countenance of our friends.

HIC

And yet

The chief imagination of Christendom

Dante Alighieri so utterly found himself

That he has made that hollow face of his

More plain to the mind’s eye than any face

But that of Christ.

ILLE

And did he find himself

Or was the hunger that had made it hollow

A hunger for the apple on the bough

Most out of reach? and is that spectral image

The man that Lapo and that Guido knew?

I think he fashioned from his opposite

An image that might have been a stony face,

Staring upon a bedouin’s horse-hair roof

From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned

Among the coarse grass and the camel dung.

He set his chisel to the hardest stone.

Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life

Derided and deriding, driven out

To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread,

He found the unpersuadable justice, he found

The most exalted lady loved by a man.

HIC

Yet surely there are men who have made their art

Out of no tragic war, lovers of life,

Impulsive men that look for happiness

And sing when they have found it.

ILLE

No not sing,

For those that love the world serve it in action,

Grow rich, popular and full of influence,

And should they paint or write still it is action:

The struggle of the fly in marmalade.

The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,

The sentimentalist himself; while art

Is but a vision of reality.

What portion in the world can the artist have

Who has awakened from the common dream

But dissipation and despair?

HIC

And yet

No one denies to Keats love of the world;

Remember his deliberate happiness.

ILLE

His art is happy but who knows his mind?

I see a schoolboy when I think of him

With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,

For certainly he sank into his grave

His senses and his heart unsatisfied,

And made--being poor, ailing and ignorant,

Shut out from all the luxury of the world,

The coarse-bred son of a livery stable-keeper-

Luxuriant song.

HIC

Why should you leave the lamp

Burning alone beside an open book,

And trace these characters upon the sands?

A style is found by sedentary toil

And by the imitation of great masters.

ILLE

Because I seek an image not a book.

Those men that in their writings are most wise

Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.

I call to the mysterious one who yet

Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream

And look most like me, being indeed my double,

And prove of all imaginable things

The most unlike, being my anti-self,

And standing by these characters disclose

All that I seek; and whisper it as though

He .were afraid the birds, who cry aloud

Their momentary cries before it is dawn,

Would carry it away to blasphemous men.

A Prayer On Going Into My House

GOD grant a blessing on this tower and cottage

And on my heirs, if all remain unspoiled,

No table, or chair or stool not simple enough

For shepherd lads in Galilee; and grant

That I myself for portions of the year

May handle nothing and set eyes on nothing

But what the great and passionate have used

Throughout so many varying centuries.

We take it for the norm; yet should I dream

Sinbad the sailor’s brought a painted chest,

Or image, from beyond the Loadstone Mountain,

That dream is a norm; and should some limb of the devil

Destroy the view by cutting down an ash

That shades the road, or setting up a cottage

Planned in a government office, shorten his life,

Manacle his soul upon the Red Sea bottom.

The Phases Of The Moon

AN old man cocked his ear upon a bridge;

He and his friend, their faces to the South,

Had trod the uneven road. Their boots were soiled,

Their Connemara cloth worn out of shape;

They had kept a steady pace as though their beds,

Despite a dwindling and late risen moon,

Were distant. An old man cocked his ear.

AHERNE

What made that sound?

ROBARTES

A rat or water-hen

Splashed, or an otter slid into the stream.

We are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower,

And the light proves that he is reading still.

He has found, after the manner of his kind,

Mere images; chosen this place to live in

Because, it may be, of the candle light

From the far tower where Milton’s platonist

Sat late, or Shelley’s visionary prince:

The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,

An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil;

And now he seeks in book or manuscript

What he shall never find.

AHERNE

Why should not you

Who know it all ring at his door, and speak

Just truth enough to show that his whole life

Will scarcely find for him a broken crust

Of all those truths that are your daily bread;

And when you have spoken take the roads again?

ROBARTES

He wrote of me in that extravagant style

He had learnt from Pater, and to round his tale

Said I was dead; and dead I choose to be.

AHERNE

Sing me the changes of the moon once more;

True song, though speech: “mine author sung it me.”

ROBARTES

Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon,

The full and the moon’s dark and all the crescents,

Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty

The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in:

For there’s no human life at the full or the dark.

From the first crescent to the half, the dream

But summons to adventure and the man

Is always happy like a bird or a beast;

But while the moon is rounding towards the full

He follows whatever whim’s most difficult

Among whims not impossible, and though scarred,

As with the cat-o’-nine-tails of the mind,

His body moulded from within his body

Grows comelier. Eleven pass, and then

Athenae takes Achilles by the hair,

Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born,

Because the heroes’ crescent is the twelfth.

And yet, twice born, twice buried, grow he must,

Before the full moon, helpless as a worm.

The thirteenth moon but sets the soul at war

In its own being, and when that war’s begun

There is no muscle in the arm; and after

Under the frenzy of the fourteenth moon

The soul begins to tremble into stillness,

To die into the labyrinth of itself!

AHERNE

Sing out the song; sing to the end, and sing

The strange reward of all that discipline.

ROBARTES

All thought becomes an image and the soul

Becomes a body: that body and that soul

Too perfect at the full to lie in a cradle,

Too lonely for the traffic of the world:

Body and soul cast out and cast away

Beyond the visible world.

AHERNE

All dreams of the soul

End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body.

ROBARTES

Have you not always known it?

AHERNE

The song will have it

That those that we have loved got their long fingers

From death, and wounds, or on Sinai’s top,

Or from some bloody whip in their own hands.

They ran from cradle to cradle till at last

Their beauty dropped out of the loneliness

Of body and soul.

ROBARTES

The lovers’ heart knows that.

AHERNE

It must be that the terror in their eyes

Is memory or foreknowledge of the hour

When all is fed with light and heaven is bare.

ROBARTES

When the moon’s full those creatures of the full

Are met on the waste hills by country men

Who shudder and hurry by: body and soul

Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves

Caught up in contemplation, the mind’s eye

Fixed upon images that once were thought,

For separate, perfect, and immovable

Images can break the solitude

Of lovely, satisfied, indifferent eyes.

And thereupon with aged, high-pitched voice

Aherne laughed, thinking of the man within,

His sleepless candle and laborious pen.

ROBARTES

And after that the crumbling of the moon.

The soul remembering its loneliness

Shudders in many cradles; all is changed,

It would be the world’s servant, and as it serves,

Choosing whatever task’s most difficult

Among tasks not impossible, it takes

Upon the body and upon the soul

The coarseness of the drudge.

AHERNE

Before the full

It sought itself and afterwards the world.

ROBARTES

Because you are forgotten, half out of life,

And never wrote a book your thought is clear.

Reformer, merchant, statesman, learned man,

Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn,

Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all

Deformed because there is no deformity

But saves us from a dream.

AHERNE

And what of those

That the last servile crescent has set free?

ROBARTES

Because all dark, like those that are all light,

They are cast beyond the verge, and in a cloud,

Crying to one another like the bats;

And having no desire they cannot tell

What’s good or bad, or what it is to triumph

At the perfection of one’s own obedience;

And yet they speak what’s blown into the mind;

Deformed beyond deformity, unformed,

Insipid as the dough before it is baked,

They change their bodies at a word.

AHERNE

And then?

ROBARTES

When all the dough has been so kneaded up

That it can take what form cook Nature fancy

The first thin crescent is wheeled round once more.

AHERNE

But the escape; the song’s not finished yet.

ROBARTES

Hunchback and saint and fool are the last crescents.

The burning bow that once could shoot an arrow

Out of the up and down, the wagon wheel

Of beauty’s cruelty and wisdom’s chatter--

Out of that raving tide--is drawn betwixt

Deformity of body and of mind.

AHERNE

Were not our beds far off I’d ring the bell,

Stand under the rough roof-timbers of the hall

Beside the castle door, where all is stark

Austerity, a place set out for wisdom

That he will never find; I’d play a part;

He would never know me after all these years

But take me for some drunken country man;

I’d stand and mutter there until he caught

“Hunchback and saint and fool,” and that they came

Under the three last crescents of the moon,

And then I’d stagger out. He’d crack his wits

Day after day, yet never find the meaning.

And then he laughed to think that what seemed hard

Should be so simple--a bat rose from the hazels

And circled round him with its squeaky cry,

The light in the tower window was put out.

The Cat And The Moon

THE cat went here and there

And the moon spun round like a top,

And the nearest kin of the moon

The creeping cat looked up.

Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,

For wander and wail as he would

The pure cold light in the sky

Troubled his animal blood.

Minnaloushe runs in the grass

Lifting his delicate feet.

Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?

When two close kindred meet

What better than call a dance,

Maybe the moon may learn,

Tired of that courtly fashion,

A new dance turn.

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass

From moonlit place to place,

The sacred moon overhead

Has taken a new phase.

Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils

Will pass from change to change,

And that from round to crescent,

From crescent to round they range?

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass

Alone, important and wise,

And lifts to the changing moon

His changing eyes.

The Saint And The Hunchback

HUNCHBACK

STAND Up and lift your hand and bless

A man that finds great bitterness

In thinking of his lost renown.

A Roman Caesar is held down

Under this hump.

SAINT

God tries each man

According to a different plan.

I shall not cease to bless because

I lay about me with the taws

That night and morning I may thrash

Greek Alexander from my flesh,

Augustus Caesar, and after these

That great rogue Alcibiades.

HUNCHBACK

To all that in your flesh have stood

And blessed, I give my gratitude,

Honoured by all in their degrees,

But most to Alcibiades.

Two Songs Of A Fool

I

A SPECKLED cat and a tame hare

Eat at my hearthstone

And sleep there;

And both look up to me alone

For learning and defence

As I look up to Providence.

I start out of my sleep to think

Some day I may forget

Their food and drink;

Or, the house door left unshut,

The hare may run till it’s found

The horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

I bear a burden that might well try

Men that do all by rule,

And what can I

That am a wandering witted fool

But pray to God that He ease

My great responsibilities.

II

I slept on my three-legged stool by the fire,

The speckled cat slept on my knee;

We never thought to enquire

Where the brown hare might be,

And whether the door were shut.

Who knows how she drank the wind

Stretched up on two legs from the mat,

Before she had settled her mind

To drum with her heel and to leap:

Had I but awakened from sleep

And called her name she had heard,

It may be, and had not stirred,

That now, it may be, has found

The horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

Another Song Of A Fool

THIS great purple butterfly,

In the prison of my hands,

Has a learning in his eye

Not a poor fool understands.

Once he lived a schoolmaster

With a stark, denying look,

A string of scholars went in fear

Of his great birch and his great book.

Like the clangour of a bell,

Sweet and harsh, harsh and sweet,

That is how he learnt so well

To take the roses for his meat.

The Double Vision Of Michael Robartes

I

ON the grey rock of Cashel the mind’s eye

Has called up the cold spirits that are born

When the old moon is vanished from the sky

And the new still hides her horn.

Under blank eyes and fingers never still

The particular is pounded till it is man,

When had I my own will?

Oh, not since life began.

Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent

By these wire jointed jaws and limbs of wood,

Themselves obedient,

Knowing not evil and good;

Obedient to some hidden magical breath.

They do not even feel, so abstract are they,

So dead beyond our death,

Triumph that we obey.

II

On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw

A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,

A Buddha, hand at rest,

Hand lifted up that blest;

And right between these two a girl at play

That it maybe had danced her life away,

For now being dead it seemed

That she of dancing dreamed.

Although I saw it all in the mind’s eye

There can be nothing solider till I die;

I saw by the moon’s light

Now at its fifteenth night.

One lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon

Gazed upon all things known, all things unknown,

In triumph of intellect

With motionless head erect.

That other’s moonlit eyeballs never moved,

Being fixed on all things loved, all things unloved,

Yet little peace he had

For those that love are sad.

Oh, little did they care who danced between,

And little she by whom her dance was seen

So that she danced. No thought,

Body perfection brought,

For what but eye and ear silence the mind

With the minute particulars of mankind?

Mind moved yet seemed to stop

As ‘twere a spinning-top.

In contemplation had those three so wrought

Upon a moment, and so stretched it out

That they, time overthrown,

Were dead yet flesh and bone.

III

I knew that I had seen, had seen at last

That girl my unremembering nights hold fast

Or else my dreams that fly,

If I should rub an eye,

And yet in flying fling into my meat

A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat

As though I had been undone

By Homer’s Paragon

Who never gave the burning town a thought;

To such a pitch of folly I am brought,

Being caught between the pull

Of the dark moon and the full,

The commonness of thought and images

That have the frenzy of our western seas.

Thereon I made my moan,

And after kissed a stone,

And after that arranged it in a song

Seeing that I, ignorant for so long,

Had been rewarded thus

In Cormac’s ruined house.

Michael Robartes And The Dancer (1921)

Michael Robartes And The Dancer

HE

OPINION Is not worth a rush;

In this altar-piece the knight,

Who grips his long spear so to push

That dragon through the fading light,

Loved the lady; and it’s plain

The half-dead dragon was her thought,

That every morning rose again

And dug its claws and shrieked and fought.

Could the impossible come to pass

She would have time to turn her eyes,

Her lover thought, upon the glass

And on the instant would grow wise.

SHE

You mean they argued.

HE

Put it so;

But bear in mind your lover’s wage

Is what your looking-glass can show,

And that he will turn green with rage

At all that is not pictured there.

SHE

May I not put myself to college?

HE

Go pluck Athena by the hair;

For what mere book can grant a knowledge

With an impassioned gravity

Appropriate to that beating breast,

That vigorous thigh, that dreaming eye?

And may the devil take the rest.

SHE

And must no beautiful woman be

Learned like a man?

HE

Paul Veronese

And all his sacred company

Imagined bodies all their days

By the lagoon you love so much,

For proud, soft, ceremonious proof

That all must come to sight and touch;

While Michael Angelo’s Sistine roof

His “Morning” and his “Night” disclose

How sinew that has been pulled tight,

Or it may be loosened in repose,

Can rule by supernatural right

Yet be but sinew.

SHE

I have heard said

There is great danger in the body.

HE

Did God in portioning wine and bread

Give man His thought or His mere body?

SHE

My wretched dragon is perplexed.

HE

I have principles to prove me right,

It follows from this Latin text

That blest souls are not composite,

And that all beautiful women may

Live in uncomposite blessedness,

And lead us to the like--if they

Will banish every thought, unless

The lineaments that please their view

When the long looking-glass is full,

Even from the foot-sole think it too.

SHE

They say such different things at school.

Solomon And The Witch

AND thus declared that Arab lady:

‘Last night, where under the wild moon

On grassy mattress I had laid me,

Within my arms great Solomon,

I suddenly cried out in a strange tongue

Not his, not mine.”

And he that knew

All sounds by bird or angel sung

Answered: “A crested cockerel crew

Upon a blossoming apple bough

Three hundred years before the Fall,

And never crew again till now,

And would not now but that he thought,

Chance being at one with Choice at last,

All that the brigand apple brought

And this foul world were dead at last.

He that crowed out eternity

Thought to have crowed it in again.

A lover with a spider’s eye

Will find out some appropriate pain,

Aye, though all passion’s in the glance,

For every nerve: lover tests lover

With cruelties of Choice and Chance;

And when at last that murder’s over

Maybe the bride-bed brings despair

For each an imagined image brings

And finds a real image there;

Yet the world ends when these two things,

Though several, are a single light,

When oil and wick are burned in one;

Therefore a blessed moon last night

Gave Sheba to her Solomon.”

“Yet the world stays”:

”If that be so,

Your cockerel found us in the wrong

Although he thought it worth a crow.

Maybe an image is too strong

Or maybe is not strong enough.”

“The night has fallen; not a sound

In the forbidden sacred grove

Unless a petal hit the ground,

Nor any human sight within it

But the crushed grass where we have lain;

And the moon is wilder every minute.

Oh, Solomon! let us try again.”

An Image From A Past Life

HE

NEVER until this night have I been stirred.

The elaborate star-light throws a reflection

On the dark stream,

Till all the eddies gleam;

And thereupon there comes that scream

From terrified, invisible beast or bird:

Image of poignant recollection.

SHE

An image of my heart that is smitten through

Out of all likelihood, or reason,

And when at last,

Youth’s bitterness being past,

I had thought that all my days were cast

Amid most lovely places; smitten as though

It had not learned its lesson.

HE

Why have you laid your hands upon my eyes?

What can have suddenly alarmed you

Whereon ‘twere best

My eyes should never rest?

What is there but the slowly fading west,

The river imaging the flashing skies,

All that to this moment charmed you?

SHE

A sweetheart from another life floats there

As though she had been forced to linger

From vague distress

Or arrogant loveliness,

Merely to loosen out a tress

Among the starry eddies of her hair

Upon the paleness of a finger.

HE

But why should you grow suddenly afraid

And start--I at your shoulder--

Imagining

That any night could bring

An image up, or anything

Even to eyes that beauty had driven mad,

But images to make me fonder.

SHE

Now she has thrown her arms above her head;

Whether she threw them up to flout me,

Or but to find,

Now that no fingers bind,

That her hair streams upon the wind,

I do not know, that know I am afraid

Of the hovering thing night brought me.

Under Saturn

Do not because this day I have grown saturnine

Imagine that lost love, inseparable from my thought

Because I .have no other youth, can make me pine;

For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought,

The comfort that you made? Although my wits have gone

On a fantastic ride, my horse’s flanks are spurred

By childish memories of an old cross Pollexfen,

And of a Middleton, whose name you never heard,

And of a red-haired Yeats whose looks, although he died

Before my time, seem like a vivid memory.

You heard that labouring man who had served my people. He said

Upon the open road, near to the Sligo quay--

No, no, not said, but cried it out--”You have come again

And surely after twenty years it was time to come.”

I am thinking of a child’s vow sworn in vain

Never to leave that valley his fathers called their home.

November 1919.

Easter, 1916

I HAVE met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done

Of a mocking tale or a gibe

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,

Being certain that they and I

But lived where motley is worn:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

That woman’s days were spent

In ignorant good will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers

When young and beautiful,

She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school

And rode our winged horse;

This other his helper and friend

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,

So sensitive his nature seemed,

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vain-glorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,

The rider, the birds that range

From cloud to tumbling cloud,

Minute by minute they change;

A shadow of cloud on the stream

Changes minute by minute;

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,

And a horse plashes within it

Where long-legged moor-hens dive,

And hens to moor-cocks call.

Minute by minute they live:

The stone’s in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is heaven’s part, our part

To murmur name upon name,

As a mother names her child

When sleep at last has come

On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death;

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.

We-know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in a verse--

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

September 15, 1916.

Sixteen Dead Men

O BUT we talked at large before

The sixteen men were shot,

But who can talk of give and take,

What should be and what not?

While those dead men are loitering there

To stir the boiling pot.

You say that we should still the land

Till Germany’s overcome;

But who is there to argue that

Now Pearse is deaf and dumb?

And is their logic to outweigh

MacDonagh’s bony thumb?

How could you dream they’d listen

That have an ear alone

For those new comrades they have found

Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone,

Or meddle with our give and take

That converse bone to bone.

The Rose Tree

“O WORDS are lightly spoken,”

Said Pearse to Connolly,

“Maybe a breath of politic words

Has withered our Rose Tree;

Or maybe but a wind that blows

Across the bitter sea.”

“It needs to be but watered”

James Connolly replied,

“To make the green come out again

And spread on every side,

And shake the blossom from the bud

To be the garden’s pride.”

“But where can we draw water”

Said Pearse to Connolly,

“When all the wells are parched away?

O plain as plain can be

There’s nothing but our own red blood

Can make a right Rose Tree.”

On A Political Prisoner

SHE that but little patience knew,

From childhood on, had now so much

A grey gull lost its fear and flew

Down to her cell and there alit,

And there endured her fingers’ touch

And from her fingers ate its bit.

Did she in touching that lone wing

Recall the years before her mind

Became a bitter, an abstract thing,

Her thought some popular enmity:

Blind and leader of the blind

Drinking the foul ditch where they lie?

When long ago I saw her ride

Under Ben Bulben to the meet,

The beauty of her country-side

With all youth’s lonely wildness stirred,

She seemed to have grown clean and sweet

Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird:

Sea-borne, or balanced on the air

When first it sprang out of the nest

Upon some lofty rock to stare

Upon the cloudy canopy,

While under its storm-beaten breast

Cried out the hollows of the sea.

The Leaders Of The Crowd

THEY must to keep their certainty accuse

All that are different of a base intent;

Pull down established honour; hawk for news

Whatever their loose phantasy invent

And murmur it with bated breath, as though

The abounding gutter had been Helicon

Or calumny a song. How can they know

Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,

And there alone, that have no solitude?

So the crowd come they care not what may come.

They have loud music, hope every day renewed

And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

Towards Break Of Day

Was it the double of my dream

The woman that by me lay

Dreamed, or did we halve a dream

Under the first cold gleam of day?

I thought: “There is a waterfall

Upon Ben Bulben side,

That all my childhood counted dear;

Were I to travel far and wide

I could not find a thing so dear.”

My memories had magnified

So many times childish delight.

I would have touched it like a child

But knew my finger could but have touched

Cold stone and water. I grew wild

Even accusing heaven because

It had set down among its laws:

Nothing that we love over-much

Is ponderable to our touch.

I dreamed towards break of day,

The cold blown spray in my nostril.

But she that beside me lay

Had watched in bitterer sleep

The marvellous stag of Arthur,

That lofty white stag, leap

From mountain steep to steep.

Demon And Beast

FOR certain minutes at the least

That crafty demon and that loud beast

That plague me day and night

Ran out of my sight;

Though I had long pernned in the gyre,

Between my hatred and desire,

I saw my freedom won

And all laugh in the sun.

The glittering eyes in a death’s head

Of old Luke Wadding’s portrait said

Welcome, and the Ormonds all

Nodded upon the wall,

And even Stafford smiled as though

It made him happier to know

I understood his plan.

Now that the loud beast ran

There was no portrait in the Gallery

But beckoned to sweet company,

For all men’s thoughts grew clear

Being dear as mine are dear.

But soon a tear-drop started up

For aimless joy had made me stop

Beside the little lake

To watch a white gull take

A bit of bread thrown up into the air;

Now gyring down and pernning there

He splashed where an absurd

Portly green-pated bird

Shook off the water from his back;

Being no more demoniac

A stupid happy creature

Could rouse my whole nature.

Yet I am certain as can be

That every natural victory

Belongs to beast or demon,

That never yet had freeman

Right mastery of natural things,

And that mere growing old, that brings

Chilled blood, this sweetness brought;

Yet have no dearer thought

Than that I may find out a way

To make it linger half a day.

O what a sweetness strayed

Through barren Thebaid,

Or by the Mareotic sea

When that exultant Anthony

And twice a thousand more

Starved upon the shore

And withered to a bag of bones:

What had the Caesars but their thrones?

The Second Coming

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

A Prayer For My Daughter

ONCE more the storm is howling and half hid

Under this cradle-hood and coverlid

My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle

But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill

Whereby the haystack and roof-levelling wind,

Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;

And for an hour I have walked and prayed

Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour

And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,

And under the arches of the bridge, and scream

In the elms above the flooded stream;

Imagining in excited reverie

That the future years had come,

Dancing to a frenzied drum,

Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not

Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,

Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,

Being made beautiful overmuch,

Consider beauty a sufficient end,

Lose natural kindness and maybe

The heart-revealing intimacy

That chooses right and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull

And later had much trouble from a fool,

While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,

Being fatherless could have her way

Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man.

It’s certain that fine women eat

A crazy salad with their meat

Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;

Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned

By those that are not entirely beautiful;

Yet many, that have played the fool

For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise,

And many a poor man that has roved,

Loved and thought himself beloved,

From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree

That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,

And have no business but dispensing round

Their magnanimities of sound,

Nor but in merriment begin a chase,

Nor but in merriment a quarrel.

Oh, may she live like some green laurel

Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,

The sort of beauty that I have approved,

Prosper but little, has dried up of late,

Yet knows that to be choked with hate

May well be of all evil chances chief.

If there’s no hatred in a mind

Assault and battery of the wind

Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,

So let her think opinions are accursed.

Have I not seen the loveliest woman born

Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,

Because of her opinionated mind

Barter that horn and every good

By quiet natures understood

For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,

The soul recovers radical innocence

And learns at last that it is self-delighting,

Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,

And that its own sweet will is heaven’s will;

She can, though every face should scowl

And every windy quarter howl

Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bride-groom bring her to a house

Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;

For arrogance and hatred are the wares

Peddled in the thoroughfares.

How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?

Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,

And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

June 1919.

A Meditation In Time Of War

FOR one throb of the Artery,

While on that old grey stone I sat

Under the old wind-broken tree,

I knew that One is animate

Mankind inanimate phantasy.

To Be Carved On A Stone At Thoor Ballylee

I, THE poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green slates,

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George;

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

Notes

The Hosting of the Sidhe.--The gods of ancient Ireland, the Tuatha De Danaan, or the Tribes of the goddess Danu, or the Sidhe, from Aes Sidhe, or Sluagh Sidhe, the people of the Faery Hills, as these words are usually explained, still ride the country as of old. Sidhe is also Gaelic for wind, and certainly the Sidhe have much to do with the wind. They journey in whirling wind, the winds that were called the dance of the daughters of Herodias in the Middle Ages, Herodias doubtless taking the place of some old goddess. When the country people see the leaves whirling on the road they bless themselves, because they believe the Sidhe to be passing by. Knocknarea is in Sligo, and the country people say that Maeve, still a great queen of the western Sidhe, is buried in the cairn of stones upon it. I have written of Clooth-na-Bare in The Celtic Twilight. She “went all over the world, seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to hill, and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted, until, at last, she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough Ia, on the top of the bird mountain, in Sligo.” I forget, now, where I heard this story, but it may have been from a priest at Collooney. Clooth-na-Bare would mean the old woman of Bare, but is evidently a corruption of Cailleac Bare, the old woman of Bare, who, under the names Bare, and Berah, and Beri, and Verah, and Dera, and Dhira, appears in the legends of many places.--1899-1906.

The Host of the Air.--This poem is founded on an old Gaelic ballad that was sung and translated for me by a woman at Ballisodare in County Sligo; but in the ballad the husband found the keeners keening his wife when he got to his house.--1899.

He mourns for the Change that has come upon Him and His Beloved, and longs for the End of the World.--My deer and hound are properly related to the deer and hound that flicker in and out of the various tellings of the Arthurian legends, leading different knights upon adventures, and to the hounds and to the hornless deer at the beginning of, I think, all tellings of Usheen’s journey to the country of the young. The hound is certainly related to the Hounds of Annwoyn or of Hades, who are white, and have red ears, and were heard, and are, perhaps, still heard by Welsh peasants, following some flying thing in the night winds; and is probably related to the hounds that Irish country people believe will awake and seize the souls of the dead if you lament them too loudly or too soon. An old woman told a friend and myself that she saw what she thought were white birds, flying over an enchanted place, but found, when she got near, that they had dogs’ heads; and I do not doubt that my hound and these dog-headed birds are of the same family.

I got my hound and deer out of a last century Gaelic poem about Oisin’s journey to the country of the young. After the hunting of the hornless deer, that leads him to the seashore, and while he is riding over the sea with Niamh, he sees amid the waters--I have not the Gaelic poem by me, and describe it from memory--a young man following a girl who has a golden apple, and afterwards a hound with one red ear following a deer with no horns. This hound and this deer seem plain images of the desire of man “which is for the woman,” and “the desire of the woman which is for the desire of the man,” and of all desires that are as these.

I have read them in this way in The Wanderings of Usheen or Oisin, and have made my lover sigh because he has seen in their faces “the immortal desire of immortals.”

The man in my poem who has a hazel wand may have been Aengus, Master of Love; and I have made the boar without bristles come out of the West, because the place of sunset was in Ireland, as in other countries, a place of symbolic darkness and death.--1899.

The Cap and Bells.--I dreamed this story exactly as I have written it, and dreamed another long dream after it, trying to make out its meaning, and whether I was to write it in prose or verse. The first dream was more a vision than a dream, for it was beautiful and coherent, and gave me the sense of illumination and exaltation that one gets from visions, while the second dream was confused and meaningless. The poem has always meant a great deal to me, though, as is the way with symbolic poems, it has not always meant quite the same thing. Blake would have said, “the authors are in eternity,” and I am quite sure they can only be questioned in dreams.--1899.

The Valley of the Black Pig.--All over Ireland there are prophecies of the coming rout of the enemies of Ireland, in a certain Valley of the Black Pig, and these prophecies are, no doubt, now, as they were in the Fenian days, a political force. I have heard of one man who would not give any money to the Land League, because the Battle could not be until the close of the century; but, as a rule, periods of trouble bring prophecies of its near coming.

A few years before my time, an old man who lived at Lisadill, in Sligo, used to fall down in a fit and rave out descriptions of the Battle; and a man in Sligo has told me that it will be so great a battle that the horses shall go up to their fetlocks in blood, and that their girths, when it is over, will rot from their bellies for lack of a hand to unbuckle them. If one reads Rhys’ Celtic Heathendom by the light of Frazer’s Golden Bough, and puts together what one finds there about the boar that killed Diarmuid, and other old Celtic boars and sows, one sees that the battle is mythological, and that the Pig it is named from must be a type of cold and winter doing battle with the summer, or of death battling with life.--1899-1906.

The Secret Rose.--I find that I have unintentionally changed the old story of Conchubar’s death. He did not see the Crucifixion in a vision but was told of it. He had been struck by a ball made out of the dried brains of an enemy and hurled out of a sling; and this ball had been left in his head and his head had been mended, the Book of Leinster says, with thread of gold because his hair was like gold. Keeling, a writer of the time of Elizabeth, says, “In that state did he remain seven years, until the Friday on which Christ was crucified, according to some historians; and when he saw the unusual changes of the creation and the eclipse of the sun and the moon at its full, he asked of Bucrach, a Leinster Druid, who was along with him, what was it that brought that unusual change upon the planets of Heaven and Earth. ‘Jesus Christ, the Son of God,’ said the Druid, ‘who is now being crucified by the Jews.’ ‘That is a pity,’ said Conchubar; ‘were I in his presence I would kill those who were putting him to death.’

And with that he brought out his sword, and rushed at a woody grove which was convenient to him, and began to cut and fell it; and what he said was, that if he were among the Jews, that was the usage he would give them, and from the excessiveness of his fury which seized upon him, the ball started out of his head, and some of the brain came after it, and in that way he died. The wood of Lanshraigh, in Feara Rois, is the name by which that shrubby wood is called.”

I have imagined Cuchulain meeting Fand “walking among flaming dew,” because, I think, of something in Mr. Standish O’Grady’s books.

I have founded the man “who drove the gods out of their liss,” or fort, upon something I have read about Caolte after the battle of Gabra, when almost all his companions were killed, driving the gods out of their liss, either at Osraighe, now Ossory, or at Eas Ruaidh, now Asseroe, a waterfall at Ballyshannon, where Ilbreac, one of the children of the goddess Danu, had a liss. But maybe I only read it in Mr. Standish O’Grady, who has a fine imagination, for I find no such story in Lady Gregory’s book.

I have founded “the proud dreaming king” upon Fergus, the son of Roigh, but when I wrote my poem here, and in the song in my early book, “Who will drive with Fergus now,” I only knew him in Mr. Standish O’Grady, and my imagination dealt more freely with what I did know than I would approve of to-day.

I have founded him “who sold tillage, and house, and goods,” upon something in “The Red Pony,” a folk tale in Mr. Larminie’s West Irish Folk Tales. A young man “saw a light before him on the high road. When he came as far, there was an open box on the road, and a light coming up out of it. He took up the box. There was a lock of hair in it. Presently he had to go to become the servant of a king for his living. There were eleven boys. When they were going out into the stable at ten o’clock, each of them took a light but he. He took no candle at all with him. Each of them went into his own stable.

When he went into his stable he opened the box. He left it in a hole in the wall. The light was great. It was twice as much as in the other stables.” The king hears of it, and makes him show him the box. The king says, “You must go and bring me the woman to whom the hair belongs.” In the end, the young man, and not the king, marries the woman.--1899-1906.

The Shadowy Waters.--I published in 1902 a version of “The Shadowy Waters,” which, as I had no stage experience whatever, was unsuitable for stage representation, though it had some little success when played during my absence in America in 1904, with very unrealistic scenery before a very small audience of cultivated people.

On my return I rewrote the play in its present form, but found it still too profuse in speech for stage representation. In 1906 I made a stage version, which was played in Dublin in that year and is now in my volume of plays. The present version must be considered as a poem only.--1922.

Prefatory Poem.--”Free of the ten and four” is an error I cannot now correct, without more rewriting than I have a mind for. Some merchant in Villon, I forget the reference, was “free of the ten and four.” Irish merchants exempted from certain duties by the Irish Parliament were, unless memory deceives me again for I am writing away from books, “free of the eight and six.”--1914.

Poems beginning with that “To a Wealthy Man” and ending with that “To a Shade”.--In the thirty years or so during which I have been reading Irish newspapers, three public controversies have stirred my imagination. The first was the Parnell controversy. There were reasons to justify a man’s joining either party, but there were none to justify, on one side or on the other, lying accusations forgetful of past service, a frenzy of detraction. And another was the dispute over “The Playboy.” There may have been reasons for opposing as for supporting that violent, laughing thing, though I can see the one side only, but there cannot have been any for the lies, for the unscrupulous rhetoric spread against it in Ireland, and from Ireland to America. The third prepared for the Corporation’s refusal of a building for Sir Hugh Lane’s famous collection of pictures. . . .

[NOTE.--I leave out two long paragraphs which have been published in earlier editions of these poems. There is no need now to defend Sir Hugh Lane’s pictures against Dublin newspapers. The trustees of the London National Gallery, through his leaving a codicil to his will unwitnessed, have claimed the pictures for London, and propose to build a wing to the Tate Gallery to contain them. Some that were hostile are now contrite, and doing what they can, or letting others do unhindered what they can, to persuade Parliament to such action as may restore the collection to Ireland.--Jan. 1917.]

These controversies, political, literary, and artistic, have showed that neither religion nor politics can of itself create minds with enough receptivity to become wise, or just and generous enough to make a nation. Other cities have been as stupid--Samuel Butler laughs at shocked Montreal for hiding the Discobolus in a cellar--but Dublin is the capital of a nation, and an ancient race has nowhere else to look for an education. Goethe in Wilhelm Meister describes a saintly and naturally gracious woman, who getting into a quarrel over some trumpery detail of religious observance, grows--she and all her little religious community--angry and vindictive.

In Ireland I am constantly reminded of that fable of the futility of all discipline that is not of the whole being. Religious Ireland--and the pious Protestants of my childhood were signal examples--thinks of divine things as a round of duties separated from life and not as an element that may be discovered in all circumstance and emotion, while political Ireland sees the good citizen but as a man who holds to certain opinions and not as a man of good will. Against all this we have but a few educated men and the remnants of an old traditional culture among the poor.

Both were stronger forty years ago, before the rise of our new middle class which showed as its first public event, during the nine years of the Parnellite split, how base at moments of excitement are minds without culture.--1914.

Lady Gregory in her Life of Sir Hugh Lane assumes that the poem which begins “Now all the truth is out”, was addressed to him. It was not; it was addressed to herself.--1912.

The Dolls.--The fable for this poem came into my head while I was giving some lectures in Dublin. I had noticed once again how all thought among us is frozen into “something other than human life.” After I had made the poem, I looked up one day into the blue of the sky, and suddenly imagined, as if lost in the blue of the sky, stiff figures in procession. I remembered that they were the habitual image suggested by blue sky, and looking for a second fable called them “The Magi” (p. 231), complementary forms of those enraged dolls.--1914.

”Unpack the Loaded Pern” (p. 263).--When I was a child at Sligo I could see above my grandfather’s trees a little column of smoke from “the pern mill,” and was told that “pern” was another name for the spool, as I was accustomed to call it, on which thread was wound. One could not see the chimney for the trees, and the smoke looked as if it came from the mountain, and one day a foreign sea-captain asked me if that was a burning mountain.--1919.

The Phases of the Moon, The Double Vision of Michael Robartes, Michael Robartes and the Dancer.--Years ago I wrote three stories in which occurs the names of Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne. I now consider that I used the actual names of two friends, and that one of these friends, Michael Robartes, has but lately returned from Mesopotamia where he has partly found and partly thought out much philosophy. I consider that John Aherne is either the original of Owen Aherne or some near relation of the man that was, and that both he and Robartes, to whose namesake I had attributed a turbulent life and death, have quarrelled with me. They take their place in a phantasmagoria in which I endeavour to explain my philosophy of life and death, and till that philosophy has found some detailed exposition in prose certain passages in the poems named above may seem obscure. To some extent I wrote them as a text for exposition.--1922.

A Note on the Setting of these Poems to Music.--A musician who would give me pleasure should not repeat a line, or put more than one note to one syllable. I am a poet not a musician, and dislike to have my words distorted or their animation destroyed, even though the musician claims to have expressed their meaning in a different medium.--1922.

W. B. Y.

THE END

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Table of Contents

Preface

The Wind Among The Reeds (1899)

The Hosting Of The Sidhe

The Everlasting Voices

The Moods

The Lover Tells Of The Rose In His Heart

The Host Of The Air

The Fisherman

A Cradle Song

Into The Twilight

The Song Of Wandering Aengus

The Song Of The Old Mother

The Heart Of The Woman

The Lover Mourns For The Loss Of Love

He Mourns For The Change That Has Come Upon Him And His Beloved And Longs For The End Of The World

He Bids His Beloved Be At Peace

He Reproves The Curlew

He Remembers Forgotten Beauty

A Poet To His Beloved

He Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes

To His Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear

The Cap And Bells

The Valley Of The Black Pig

The Lover Asks Forgiveness Because Of His Many Moods

He Tells Of A Valley Full Of Lovers

He Tells Of The Perfect Beauty

He Hears The Cry Of The Sedge

He Thinks Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil Of His Beloved

The Blessed

The Secret Rose

Maid Quiet

The Travail Of Passion

The Lover Pleads With His Friend For Old Friends

A Lover Speaks To The Hearers Of His Songs In Coming Days

The Poet Pleads With The Elemental Powers

He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead

He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven

He Thinks Of His Past Greatness When A Part Of The Constellations Of Heaven

The Fiddler Of Dooney

The Old Age Of Queen Maeve (1903)

Baile And Aillinn (1903)

In The Seven Woods (1904)

In The Seven Woods

The Arrow

The Folly Of Being Comforted

Old Memory

Never Give All The Heart

The Withering Of The Boughs

Adam’s Curse

Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland

The Old Men Admiring Themselves In The Water

Under The Moon

The Ragged Wood

O Do Not Love Too Long

The Players Ask For A Blessing On The Psalteries And On Themselves

The Happy Townland

The Shadowy Waters (1906)

Dedication To Lady Gregory

The Harp Of Aengus

The Shadowy Waters

From The Green Helmet And Other Poems (1912)

His Dream

A Woman Homer Sung

The Consolation

No Second Troy

Reconciliation

King And No King

Peace

Against Unworthy Praise

The Fascination Of What’s Difficult

A Drinking Song

The Coming Of Wisdom With Time

On Hearing That The Students Of Our New University Have Joined The Agitation Against Immoral Literature

To A Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators Of His And Mine

The Mask

Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation

At The Abbey Theatre

These Are The Clouds

At Galway Races

A Friend’s Illness

All Things Can Tempt Me

The Young Man’s Song

Responsibilities (1914)

Responsibilities

The Grey Rock

The Two Kings

To A Wealthy Man Who Promised A Second Subscription To The Dublin Municipal Gallery If It Were Proved The People Wanted Pictures

September 1913

To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing

Paudeen

To A Shade

When Helen Lived

On Those That Hated “The Playboy Of The Western World,” 1907

The Three Beggars

The Three Hermits

Beggar To Beggar Cried

Running To Paradise

The Hour Before Dawn

A Song From The Player Queen

The Realists

I. The Witch

II. The Peacock

The Mountain Tomb

I. To A Child Dancing In The Wind

II. Two Years Later

A Memory Of Youth

Fallen Majesty

Friends

The Cold Heaven

That The Night Come

An Appointment

I. The Magi

II. The Dolls

A Coat

CODA

The Wild Swans At Coole (1919)

The Wild Swans At Coole

In Memory Of Major Robert Gregory

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

Men Improve With The Years

The Collar-Bone Of A Hare

Under The Round Tower

Solomon To Sheba

The Living Beauty

A Song

To A Young Beauty

To A Young Girl

The Scholars

Tom O’roughley

The Sad Shepherd

Lines Written In Dejection

The Dawn

On Woman

The Fisherman

The Hawk

Memory

Her Praise

The People

His Phoenix

A Thought From Propertius

Broken Dreams

A Deep-Sworn Vow

Presences

The Balloon Of The Mind

To A Squirrel At Kyle-Na-Gno

On Being Asked For A War Poem

In Memory Of Alfred Pollexfen

Upon A Dying Lady

Ego Dominus Tuus

A Prayer On Going Into My House

The Phases Of The Moon

The Cat And The Moon

The Saint And The Hunchback

Two Songs Of A Fool

Another Song Of A Fool

The Double Vision Of Michael Robartes

Michael Robartes And The Dancer (1921)

Michael Robartes And The Dancer

Solomon And The Witch

An Image From A Past Life

Under Saturn

Easter, 1916

Sixteen Dead Men

The Rose Tree

On A Political Prisoner

The Leaders Of The Crowd

Towards Break Of Day

Demon And Beast

The Second Coming

A Prayer For My Daughter

A Meditation In Time Of War

To Be Carved On A Stone At Thoor Ballylee

Notes