Betrayal

Late-born and woman-souled I dare not hope,
The freshness of the elder lays, the might
Of manly, modern passion shall alight
Upon my Muse's lips, nor may I cope
(Who veiled and screened by womanhood must grope)
With the world's strong-armed warriors and recite
The dangers, wounds, and triumphs of the fight;
Twanging the full-stringed lyre through all its scope.
But if thou ever in some lake-floored cave
O'erbrowed by hard rocks, a wild voice wooed and heard,
Answering at once from heaven and earth and wave,
Lending elf-music to thy harshest word,
Misprize thou not these echoes that belong
To one in love with solitude and song.

Adieu to Belashanny!
where I was bred and born;
Go where I may, I'll think of you,
as sure as night and morn.
The kindly spot, the friendly town,
where every one is known,
And not a face in all the place
but partly seems my own;
There's not a house or window,
there's not a field or hill,
But, east or west, in foreign lands,
I'll recollect them still.
I leave my warm heart with you,
tho' my back I'm forced to turn,
Adieu to Belashanny,
and the winding banks of Erne!

No more on pleasant evenings
we'll saunter down the Mall,
When the trout is rising to the fly,
the salmon to the fall.
The boat comes straining on her net,
and heavily she creeps,
Cast off, cast off,she feels the oars,
and to her berth she sweeps;
Now fo...

My neighbour's curtain, well I see,

Is moving to and fin.
No doubt she's list'ning eagerly,

If I'm at home or no.

And if the jealous grudge I bore

And openly confess'd,
Is nourish'd by me as before,

Within my inmost breast.

Alas! no fancies such as these

E'er cross'd the dear child's thoughts.
I see 'tis but the ev'ning breeze

That with the curtain sports.

Once again, but how chang'd since my wand'rings began
I have heard the deep voice of the Lagan and Bann,
And the pines of Clanbrasil resound to the roar
That wearies the echoes of fair Tullamore.
Alas! My poor bosom, and why shouldst thou burn!
With the scenes of my youth can its raptures return?
Can I live the dear life of delusion again,
That flow'd when these echoes first mix'd with my strain?

It was then that around me, though poor and unknown,
High spells of mysterious enchantment were thrown;
The streams were of silver, of diamond the dew,
The land was an Eden, for fancy was new.
I had heard of our bards, and my soul was on fire
At the rush of their verse, and the sweep of their lyre:
To me 'twas not legend, nor tale to the ear,
But a vision of noontide...

    I

    There lay in a vale 'twixt lone mountains
        A garden entangled with flowers,
    Where the whisper of echoing fountains
        Stirred softly the musk-breathing bowers.
    Where torrents cast down from rock-masses,
        From caverns of red-granite steeps,
    With thunders sonorous clove passes
        And maddened dark gulfs with rash leaps,
        With the dolorous foam of their leaps.


    II

    And, oh, when the sunrays came heaping
        The foam of those musical chasms,
    With a scintillant dust as of diamonds,
    It seemed that white spirits were sweeping
        Down, down thro' those voluble chasms,
        Wild weeping in resonant spasms.
    And the wave from the red-hearted granite
      ...

    My country, I the walls, the arches see,
    The columns, statues, and the towers
    Deserted, of our ancestors;
    But, ah, the glory I do not behold,
    The laurel and the sword, that graced
    Our sires of old.
    Now, all unarmed, a naked brow,
    A naked breast dost thou display.
    Ah, me, how many wounds, what stains of blood!
    Oh, what a sight art thou,
    Most beautiful of women! I
    To heaven cry aloud, and to the world:
    "Who hath reduced her to this pass?
    Say, say!" And worst of all, alas,
    See, both her arms in chains are bound!
    With hair dishevelled, and without a veil
    She sits, disconsolate, upon the ground,
    And hides her face between her knees,
    As she bewails her miseries.
    Oh, weep, ...

That day we wandered 'mid the hills, so lone
Clouds are not lonelier, the forest lay
In emerald darkness round us. Many a stone
And gnarly root, gray-mossed, made wild our way:
And many a bird the glimmering light along
Showered the golden bubbles of its song.

Then in the valley, where the brook went by,
Silvering the ledges that it rippled from,
An isolated slip of fallen sky,
Epitomizing heaven in its sum,
An iris bloomed blue, as if, flower-disguised,
The gaze of Spring had there materialized.

I have forgotten many things since then
Much beauty and much happiness and grief;
And toiled and dreamed among my fellow-men,
Rejoicing in the knowledge life is brief.
"'Tis winter now, " so says each barren bough;
And face and hair proclaim 'tis wint...

My familiar ghost again
Comes to see what he can see,
Critic, son of Conscious Brain,
Spying on our privacy.

Slam the window, bolt the door,
Yet he'll enter in and stay;
In tomorrow's book he'll score
Indiscretions of today.

Whispered love and muttered fears,
How their echoes fly about!
None escape his watchful ears,
Every sigh might be a shout.

No kind words nor angry cries
Turn away this grim spoilsport;
No fine lady's pleading eyes,
Neither love, nor hate, nor ... port.

Critics wears no smile of fun,
Speaks no word of blame nor praise,
Counts our kisses one by one,
Notes each gesture, every phrase.

My familiar ghost again
Stands or squats where suits him best;
Critic, son of Conscious Brain,
L...

    One tone is mute within the starry singing,
    The unison fulfilled, complete before;
    One chord within the music sounds no more,
    And from the stir of flames forever winging
    The pinions of our sister, motionless
    In pits of indefinable duress,
    Are fallen beyond all recovery
    By exultation of the flying dance,
    Or rhythms holding as with sleep or trance
    The maze of stars that only death may free -
    Flung through the void's expanse.

    In gulfs depressed nor in the gulfs exalted
    Shall shade nor lightening of her flame be found;
    In space that litten orbits gird around,
    Nor in the bottomless abyss unvaulted
    Of unenvironed, all-outlying night.
    Allotted gyre nor lawless comet-flight
    Shall find, ...

Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain
Somewhere in ear-shot for the story's end,
Old Dublin merchant "free of the ten and four"
Or trading out of Galway into Spain;
Old country scholar, Robert Emmet's friend,
A hundred-year-old memory to the poor;
Merchant and scholar who have left me blood
That has not passed through any huckster's loin,
Soldiers that gave, whatever die was cast:
A Butler or an Armstrong that withstood
Beside the brackish waters of the Boyne
James and his Irish when the Dutchman crossed;
Old merchant skipper that leaped overboard
After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay;
You most of all, silent and fierce old man,
Because the daily spectacle that stirred
My fancy, and set my boyish lips to say,
"Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun";
P...

Pallas, observing Stella's wit
Was more than for her sex was fit,
And that her beauty, soon or late,
Might breed confusion in the state,
In high concern for human kind,
Fix'd honour in her infant mind.
    But (not in wrangling to engage
With such a stupid, vicious age)
If honour I would here define,
It answers faith in things divine.
As natural life the body warms,
And, scholars teach, the soul informs,
So honour animates the whole,
And is the spirit of the soul.
    Those numerous virtues which the tribe
Of tedious moralists describe,
And by such various titles call,
True honour comprehends them all.
Let melancholy rule supreme,
Choler preside, or blood, or phlegm,
It makes no difference in the case,
Nor is complexion honour's place....

O nightingale that on yon blooming spray
Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still,
Thou with fresh hopes the Lover’s heart dost fill,
While the jolly Hours lead on propitious May.
Thy liquid notes that close the eye of Day,
First heard before the shallow cuckoo’s bill,
Portend success in love. O if Jove’s will
Have linked that amorous power to thy soft lay,
Now timely sing, ere the rude bird of hate
Foretell my hopeless doom, in some grove nigh;
As thou from year to year hast sung too late
For my relief, yet had’st no reason why.
Whether the Muse or Love call thee his mate,
Both them I serve, and of their train am I.

Oh, thankless Crimean land! in ruin laid
        Are now the castles that were once your pride!
Here serpents and the owls from daylight hide,
        And robbers arm them for the nightly raid.
Upon the lettered marble boasts are made,
        Brave words on battered arms in gold descried,
And broken splendor years have scattered wide,
        Beside the dead who made them are arrayed.

The Greek set shining, columned marble here.
        The Latin put the Mongol horde to flight,
And Mussulmans prayed eastward morn and night.
        The owl and vulture of dark wing and drear
Are fluttering like black banners overhead
        In cities where the pest piles high the dead.

I.

Let me forget her face!
So fresh, so lovely! the abiding place
Of tears and smiles that won my heart to her;
Of dreams and moods that moved my soul's dim deeps,
As strong winds stir
Dark waters where the starlight glimmering sleeps.
In every lineament the mind can trace,
Let me forget her face!

II.

Let me forget her form!
Soft and seductive, that contained each charm,
Each grace the sweet word maidenhood implies;
And all the sensuous youth of line and curve,
That makes men's eyes
Bondsmen of beauty eager still to serve.
In every part that memory can warm,
Let me forget her form!

III.

Let me forget her, God!
Her who made honeyed love a bitter rod
To scourge my heart with, barren with despair;
To tea...

The sad nights are here and the sad mornings,
The air is filled with portents and with warnings,
Clouds that vastly loom and winds that cry,
A mournful prescience
Of bright things going hence;
Red leaves are blown about the widowed sky,
And late disconsolate blooms
Dankly bestrew
The garden walks, as in deserted rooms
The parted guest, in haste to bid adieu,
Trinklets and shreds forgotten left behind,
Torn letters and a ribbon once so brave -
Wreckage none cares to save,
And hearts grow sad to find;
And phantom echoes, as of old foot-falls,
Wander and weary out in the thin air,
And the last cricket calls -
A tiny sorrow, shrilling "Where? ah! where?"

"Uncovenanted Mercies" - From "Limits and Renewals" [1930]


Lo! The Wild Cow of the Desert, her yeanling estrayed from her,
Lost in the wind-plaited sand-dunes, athirst in the maze of them.
Hot-foot she follows those foot-prints, the thrice-tangled ways of them.
Her soul is shut save to one thing, the love-quest consuming her
Fearless she lows past the camp, our fires affright her not.
Ranges she close to the tethered ones, the mares by the lances held.
Noses she softly apart the veil in the women's tent.
Next, withdrawn under moonlight, a shadow afar off,
Fades. Ere men cry, "Hold her fast! darkness recovers her.
She the all-crazed and forlorn, when the dogs threaten her,
Only a side-tossed horn, as though a fly troubled her,
Shows she hath heard, till a lance in the ...

She dwelt within a convent wall
Beside the "blue Moselle,"
And pure and simple was her life
As is the tale I tell.

She never shrank from penance rude,
And was so young and fair,
It was a holy, holy thing,
To see her at her prayer.

Her cheek was very thin and pale;
You would have turned in fear,
If 't were not for the hectic spot
That glowed so soft and clear.

And always, as the evening chime
With measured cadence fell,
Her vespers o'er, she sought alone
A little garden dell.

And when she came to us again,
She moved with lighter air;
We thought the angels ministered
To her while kneeling there.

One eve I followed on her way,
And asked her of her life.
A faint blush mantled cheek and brow,
The sign...

My friend should meet me somewhere hereabout
To take me to that hiding in the hills.

I have broke their cage, no gilded one, I trow—
I read no more the prisoner’s mute wail
Scribbled or carved upon the pitiless stone;
I find hard rocks, hard life, hard cheer, or none,
For I am emptier than a friar’s brains;
But God is with me in this wilderness,
These wet black passes and foam-churning chasms—
And God’s free air, and hope of better things.

I would I knew their speech; not now to glean,
Not now—I hope to do it—some scatter’d ears,
Some ears for Christ in this wild field of Wales—
But, bread, merely for bread. This tongue that wagg’d
They said with such heretical arrogance
Against the proud archbishop Arundel—
So much God’s cause was fluent in it—is ...