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?

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 the 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 stormbroken 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.

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 man, nor angry 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.

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.

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.

'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.'

SANG 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.'

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.

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.

But who could have foretold

That the heart grows old?

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.

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.

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?

'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 zigzag 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.'

SHEPERD

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.

SHEPERD

            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.

SHEPERD

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.

SHEPERD

            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.

SHEPERD

            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.

SHEPERD

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.

SHEPERD

            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.

SHEPERD

                    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 in the lengthening shadows,

Where the sheep are thrown in the pool,

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.

SHEPERD

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 eves;

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.

SHEPERD

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 practice 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.'

SHEPERD

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 newtorn bark

But put no name and leave them at her door.

To know the mountain and the valley grieve

May be a quiet thought to wife and mother,

And children when they spring up shoulder high.

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 banished;

And I have nothing but harsh sun;

Heroic mother moon has vanished,

And now that I have come to fifty years

I must endure the timid sun.

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.

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.

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.'

'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

Dumbfounded before a knave,

Should give to my friend

A pretence of wit.'

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.

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.

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.

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 blemishwith 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 to make men wild through all the centuries,

And maybe there'll be some young belle walk out to make 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

HANDS, do what you're bid;

Bring the balloon of the mind

That bellies and drags in the wind

Into its narrow shed.

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.

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.

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,

Wras 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.

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,

While wondering still to be a shade, with Grania's shade

All but the perils 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

WVve 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.

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 sweetshop 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 stablekeeper—

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.

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.

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 chose 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 sixand-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 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.

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.

I

A SPECKLED cat and a tame hare

Eat at ray 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.

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.

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 may be 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.

"Unpack the loaded pern"

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.

W. B. Y.