poem.txt

An old silent pond.
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again.

Autumn moonlight-
a worm digs silently
into the chestnut.

In the twilight rain
these brilliant-hued hibiscus -
A lovely sunset.
I want to sleep
Swat the flies
Softly, please.

After killing
a spider, how lonely I feel
in the cold of night!

For love and for hate
I swat a fly and offer it
to an ant.

A mountain village
under the piled-up snow
the sound of water.

Night; and once again,
the while I wait for you, cold wind
turns into rain.

The summer river:
although there is a bridge, my horse
goes through the water.

A lightning flash:
between the forest trees
I have seen water.
Eastern guard tower
glints in sunset; convicts rest
like lizards on rocks.

The piano man
is stingy, at 3
his songs drop like plum.

Morning sun slants cell.
Drunks stagger like cripple flies
On jailhouse floor.

To write a blues song
is to regiment riots
and pluck gems from graves.

A bare pecan tree
slips a pencil shadow down
a moonlit snow slope.

The falling snow flakes
Cannot blunt the hard aches nor
Match the steel stillness.

Under moon shadows
A tall boy flashes knife and
Slices star bright ice.

In the August grass
Struck by the last rays of sun
The cracked teacup screams.


I needed someone-
I needed someone special;
My eyes lay upon your face-
In anticipation but doubt;
I was so touched by the softness of your eyes,
The grace of your stance,
The peacefulness of your temperament;
Your presence responded to my need and wish;
You came to me,
At the right time;
You came to me,
In the right way.


When I first looked at you,
I saw something special;
I saw something special
With you, in you, and between us.
When I first looked at you, I felt something special;
When I first looked at you, I was special-
We were special.
So answer me and strip free
The truth of your presence coming;
Is your image the echo of my ideal?
Speak to me of such and more:
Through eyes bright like candles glow
And unarming smiles of coy around the
Tenderness of lips so virgin and pure;
Through natural beauty untouched by
False disguise and spiritual energy so
Flowing to the talents of your future's call;
Through the life of movement so confident
Yet modestly unartificial and true.
Speak to me of such by more:
Is this first parting's sweetness a passing
Dream to keep?
Is it the inspiration of the Inspirer's design
To know you once in passing, or will privilege
Be destiny's desire to look once more upon the


Light of your lovely face aglow and budding
Energy in flow?
Speak to me sweet flower, and pray
By chance to smell once more the fragrance
Of your presence, and feel once more the
Vibrancy of your natural way.
Be it friendship or more;
Or a spiritual passing of two destined souls
Who love the world so much so as to want so
Much to give of ourselves to that world
Through the gift of ourselves to each other.


I
ometimes I feel I've been in another world;
Sometimes I feel I know there's a world beyond;
Sometimes I feel I've stood in this space with you;
This space and moment of today in our first
Meeting of eyes-
Without a word, I knew I knew you as I had before;
I knew I wanted you as I did before;
I knew I wanted you and had to have you
As much as I fought my feelings for you,
And you-yours for me.
So come quietly to me in peace and burning
Desire, and let me receive you around me as one;
I've waited long across lifetimes for your face
In the parade of many-
Come let us savor the souls of our many lives
Before, and fulfill the destiny of our
Long-lasting desires;
Come to our dining to feast first upon the spirit
Of each other's energy;
Face your face to mine in sweet teasing of
Dessert's patient waiting;
Rush not the sacred sensuality of our prolonged
Romance asleep;
Come, come, come my love.


The first glimpse of your face
Took the light of my eyes deep to
The core of your countenance;
To know as you knew that we both
Were made and sent for each other.
At first touch of you, I knew you were
Sculpted to my arms embrace as we
Glided as one in musical magic's
Movement to the body's call of our
Bemused spirits wish.
So effortlessly and pleasurably we
Danced as playful birds suspended in
Flight and to life's breathing of our
Energies real and memories sealed.
Thanks for the dance sweet lady,
And permit me to hold you once more
To our own spiritual rhythm and to
A music that is unending.



I have sought your image
Without knowledge of your existence,
My ideal woman you are;
So come with me please-
Be with me and share your life;
Create life we will, and together
We'll be trustees of another;
Come with me and I will pick a red hibiscus
For your hair and the sweet magnolia flower
As your perfume's fragrance;
I'll promise nothing except to be with you
And be for you as long as we live
Under the watchful eyes of the stars.
 



gain, we meet in the common air of
Our private space-to breathe, I hope, the
Anticipation of love's possible excitement
From this serene peace; your fresh flower
Has sprung from youth's tender bud, so
Luring to the patience of my long wait and
The wisdom of my awaited patience.
With face to the light of you, I fix my
Energy to the spirit of your field; so
Wanting to be with you, to touch with eyes
And arms but not too soon so as to spoil
The pleasure of our precious urgings and
Restrained glee.
Let not your presentation of reservation
Betray future's life of a whole love of two-
Of a spiritual union destined for the divine
Creation of love's life from our shared bond,
Our priceless oneness, our future hopes,
Our sensual moments of untempered desire.
Come with me, be with me, romance with me,
And let our eternal love be an unending evening
Of special things shared-of sparkling drink with
Rhythmical dance, of musical tunes under many

Full moons, of colorful flowers and pastel towels,
Of tender touch and vacations much.
Come with me to the sacred temple, or simply
Stand with me under God's old oak tree;
Allow me to veil your face under the purest
Lace to the slight peek of your shining eyes
And the sweet gentle reach of your life's breath-
Yes, be my wife, be with me in this special
Moment of ceremony, and touch tenderly and
Ever slowly your lips upon mine; to seal
Evermore the energy of our romantic union
And precious love.
Go patiently we will in the wind of destiny's call
And with sweet memories of dreams made true;
Create we will a life of two or more-
With shared fortunes and misfortunes, with
Cherished joys and borne pains, and with a
Love unyielding to life's tests of time and a
Romance that will never die.
Let me come with you, be with you, and
Stay with you my lady; let our love anew grow
And pierce deep within our souls an untarnished
Commitment and an unbroken peace;
Let our lasting love scream forth in silent truth
Our romance forevermore to all the universe
In the sacred message of:




A
n this, my left hand, I take you as my wife/husband
And hold sacred your life and welfare as long as we
Choose and hold each other;
With my right hand, I promise to work for you,
With you, and for life we may create as one;
In both hands, I cup and nourish the trust we place
In each other as persons and in ourselves as a
Partnership in life.
With this heart, I set forth my allegiance to a sensitivity
For your feelings, and pledge to put no other person's
Needs or wants before your own;
With will and determination, I shall do my best to remain
Patient with your weaknesses as well as your personal
Changes over the years, and I will hold in confidence that
You will do likewise with me;
With this, my head, I will think of you wherever I am
And whenever I can as thoughts of concern for you and
Shared experiences with you.
I pledge at this moment to do all I can:
To help minimize your pains and maximize your happiness,
To forgive you for inadvertent errors of human frailty,
To respect you as a person and as my wife/husband,
To be open with you about my thoughts and feelings,

To touch you each morning and kiss you each night,
To trust in your words and actions,
To be kind, courteous, and considerate to you,
To respect your right to freedom, solitude, and
Individuality,
To commit myself totally to you and our relationship.
Furthermore,
I will try my best not to hurt you in any way or discredit
You before peers or yourself;
I will encourage your personal growth and internal peace,
I will allow no person to conspire to alienate my love for you;
Neither will I allow myself to be blinded by false
Feelings for another or life's many luring excitements;
I will talk with you, walk with you, and persevere with you
Through tests of time and condition;
I will pray with you, hope with you, struggle with you,
And suffer with you in your hardships;
Most of all, I will love you, without condition, for as long
As I can and as long as you want me to-
Hoping and trusting it will be forever.
 



‘Tis a cultural holiday of celebration;
But it matters not the differences
Of our worlds apart;
For celebrate we must on this
Merry day of glee-our love,
Ourselves;
‘Tis not your holiday,
‘Tis not my holiday,
But our holiday-
‘Tis a special time for special people
To love and celebrate happiness.


A
Let us write a script in our hearts,
And let us play it out from
Moment to moment in spontaneity;
Let our needs be felt and realized,
Our drives reduced,
Our anxieties subdued,
Our depression minimized;
Let us enjoy our others and
The worlds around us as we encounter;
Let us enjoy our own selves;
Let us eat, rest, explore, and talk
In the presence of each other's
Comfort, good company, and security;
Let us write a script from moment to moment
In our hearts and
In our lives.
 



We sat alone,
We drank wine,
We intellectualized about nothing.
Then we saw within each other's eyes
The nature of our true being,
Then we realized our gender,
Then we communicated our nonverbal
Desire to move toward our other.
Our instruments of vision touched in softness
Suppressing our eagerness,
Our tools of manipulation searched
The pleasures of our curiosities,
We slowly lost the control of our rational
Being to the passion of our desires,
We shed ourselves of that which hid our
True selves from the honey of each other's fruits.



I
Can I be free with you-
And not have to rush anything,
And not have to prove anything,
And not have to be anything?
Can I be me, and you be you?
Can we be we, can we be one,
Can we be free?



MORNG R

If you let me come into your heart,
I will do wonders with the clay of your
Parents making;
Let me touch you in the morning years
Of your womanhood, and make you
The better lady you must eventually be;
As I must, let me hold your heart next to
Mine and stroke your contour to fineness;
Let the warmth of your deepest breath
Massage the perceptiveness of my ear,
That I may feel your life grow in my arms,
And that I may live again through the
Life of your love;
Let me love you in the morning of your
Womanhood, that you may become the
Lady of my night for all occasions
And all times.



ine woman of svelte neck, straight back,
And sturdy hips-let me
Watch your stance and poised presence
Among others; let me breathe the energy
Of your elegant space.
Fine woman of creamy texture and
Tanned hue, I secretly watch you-and
Patiently await my turn of acquaintance,
To feel the peace of your calm temperament
And visualize up close the form of your
Lovely essence.
Speak to me, speak with me, and let my
Total attention for you be yours on this
Special night of ours. Let us dine under
The stars of this resort and smile for each
Other as night grows old to morning's birth;
Let us breathe of each other's air, and be
One in the moment of our private selves
And space.


omantic love is two dynamos that turn on and
Feed into each other;
It is total energy directed toward another that
Makes one oblivious to time and space;
Romantic love is that emotion that contradicts and
Obfuscates rationality, reality, and responsibility;
It is that acted-out fantasy realized for the moment
And hoped for forever;
Romantic love is two persons alone in the universe
Who prize each other's presence and consume
Each other's essence for every moment and in
Every good way;
It is the visceral excitement that compels the
Fulfillment of one's capacity for sensuality,
Sensitivity, and possibility;
Romantic love is that ecstatic, good feeling that
Provides a secure feeling, enhances worldly
Appreciation, promotes confidence, and overhauls
Physical and psychological health;
It is the force that drives people out of their skin,
Pushes them to a higher level of emotional
Realization, and overpowers human control;
Romantic love is giving for the joy of giving, sharing
For the sake of sharing, and enjoying each other
For the pleasure of each other.

A
I've lived today in wake-
From morn to night this date,
Just to hear your voice once more
Across the miles;
I've anticipated the breath of
Your energy's space to make my
Day by phone, to complete my
Night hitherto alone-with exciting
Thoughts of you;
I've lived this day in wait for
Your call of tone's ring of phone
Here alone;
I've lived all day just to hear the
Breath and sigh of your sweet
Voice for me;
I've lived all day, in my patient
Way, just to hear you say,
"I love you."






On a moonlit night, we stood
Under the privacy of a backyard tree,
Never once with the courage to explore the pit
Of our youthful volcanic desires on this last night;
We stood and stood in caress on the eve
Of the moving truck's coming, and counted
So painfully our last minutes of evening,
Ever together;
She placed her miniature cross and chain in my hand
As a symbol of remembrance; only to watch me
Clutch passionately before losing it to my jeans's pocket;
One last hug, one last fumbling kiss
As her father called, "bedtime";
Reluctantly, she walked away, shielding
The treacherous door from the night light's torment;
I remember dearly, her back showed well in the moonlight
As she turned to give me the last image of her face.


ur shoes powdered themselves
In the sun-beaten earth along the
Side of the road, as we strolled so
Closely to ourselves while oblivious
To school peers.
She and I , as innocent and shy,
Yet so aware but resisting of feelings
Awakened by maturity and our own
Simple attraction to the sweetness
Of each other's flower.
Not yet a kiss or thought of else as
We touched our other's voice and face
With ears so tuned and eyes so focused
Within the range of our own youthful
Company.
Parted we daily did to sweet evening
Memories of an afternoon walk so
Much anticipated upon each morning's
Wakening.

O



reat, how sweet the sound of your voice
In accolade and promise,
The twinkle and glitter of your mirror's eye
Complement the timbre of your utterance,
Your vibrations bring warm news to my ear,
Good news I like to hear,
But oh how transient the sounds, though sweet;
Love me not with words only,
But with your good deeds;
Let me know that you care for me-
Through action, effort, and sacrifice;
Let us share time, let us eat-
Eat under the shade of a summer's tree,
Dance in the spotlight of the public's eye,
Hold hands in strides of step and time;
Let us care for our lives and even that of another;
Let us work together, plan together, play together,
Laugh together, meditate together, sacrifice
Together, hurt together, and feel good together;
Love me with your complete feelings, actions, and
Thoughts,
And love me not with words only.

I
Gee, I'm glad I met you;
Together, we have made each other better;
We have shared each other,
And have realized our sensations;
We have experienced reality,
And have grown together in knowledge;
We have encountered each other's worlds,
And have mutually shared our feelings;
Our joys have been increased and our pain
Minimized by the mere presence of our other;
Gee, I'm glad I met you;
Let us remember all the good and pleasant things
We have shared together,
And let us reserve a space in each other's
Heart for all those special moments and memories.
 



Let us make memories that we
Can prize forever;
Let us make them in our minds
Of spontaneous and planned
Experiences of ourselves-
In all Earth's seasons and glorious
Splendor.
In spring or fall, in the park or
By the waterfront, let us breathe
Our existence within the energy of
Romantic thoughts, feelings, and
Surrounding.
Let us make memories that we
Can appreciate now but treasure
Always in our minds and hearts.


Come sit in my boat at morn
When the mist of fog shields the
Privacy of precious romances, and the
Coolness of dawn preserves the
Goodness and innocence of virgin loves.
Come sit with your face to mine
And let the bashful, gleaming sun's light
Reveal the pristine beauty of your
Lovely eyes and skin aglow.
Come sit with me and row with me,
And let our love afloat gently disturb
My favorite flowered dress of our
First acquaintance.


I
Please, relax now,
I long not for the revelation
Of the privacy of your temple,
But for the company of the
Whole of you; to be with you,
Anytime and anywhere.
I long for your respect, for the
Energy of your existence to make
Me the better for your most
Worthy appreciation and happiness.
Please now, know my cause and motive,
For they are true to you;
Sincerely, I long for your heart,
Your soul, your inspiration, your
Presence, your natural warmth.

When the night light was bright,
We stood underneath looking at our feet;
You touched me-oh so gently with your breath,
And I felt within me a leap of warmth
Corralled by my own tremor of shyness.
When the night light was bright,
Oh how I remember the cool breeze
Of midnight air that swept us homeward;
You touched my hand with your fingers,
And there we clutched in stride-
Onward, homeward, yet so slowly we paced.
When the night light was bright,
Our youth tormented us without
Conscious thought of time passing.
When the night light was bright,
We were in the dark privacy
Of each other's world;
Nothing beyond penetrated our attention
Thereof fixed.
When the night light was bright,
We thought it would shine forever,
For us.

W



It was a time to remember,
Of romance galore and unforgettable
Memories of adult images in the eye of a child;
It was a time of Black shoes shined,
And quality hats so fine;
Of men's coat and tie,
And women's stockings up high;
Of romantic touch dance,
And navy-blue gabardine pants;
It was a time of hard work at less pay
And nightly prayers of appreciation each day;
It was a time to remember in June and
December, when things were quite simple;
A time when people had time and mind
To love much more;
A time when people had time and mind
To be at peace with themselves.



There was a young girl
Named Quintina you see;
A bright child of with
A smile of glee;
After years of my absence
She grew up to be
A beautiful woman and
Fine lady;
With courage, class, and grace
From Thee,
She exuded a countenance
Of sweet femininity;
Quintina, smile for the world to see;
Quintina, please smile again for me.
T



Lie down and feel yourself in our presence;
Let the ocean roar in the peacefulness of
Your ear;
Let the sand tickle your back and the sun
Wash your face.
Let us think of nothing except our feelings
For ourselves and this little world's
Moment.
Lie and let life's air bring meaning to our
Souls that we may breathe such
Memories forever.


A
n the sunset of your womanhood,
Wear it for me;
Memories of innocence and coy,
Of private moments of our genuineness,
Spontaneity, and naive joy.
Wear it for me in my mind's eye,
Of images in the sunlight and
Unrestrained freedom in the shade
Of the old oak tree.
Wear a white dress for me in the sunset
Of your womanhood-so I will know the
Purest image of my greatest love;
That I will always know you as the sacred
Temple of my life-long and devoted trust.


Before we love to love's height,
Wash each other's image we must
In sensual grace of our eyes sight;
Breathe each other's natural scent
We should in the blow of evening air;
Touch we must with gentle care;
Hear we can of our other's breath
Upon the softness of a neck's rest;
Before we love to love's height,
Romance we must the other's self.



She washed herself in his image at noon
And brought herself to him at five;
The natural scent of her told of a day's work
Under the shroud of cream and perfume;
A mixture that aroused the privacy of his
Heaven so patiently anticipated;
Four walls and one wait for the appearance of
Love's greeting; to see, to touch, to embrace
The energy and essence of his sweetest hope,
His sustaining thought, his fondest dream,
His greatest love, his sole source of life;
His woman, his lady.
 



He came into her so gently, as he did
To her;
Her presence was with courage but deep
Exhilaration of an experience
Never felt;
They were one in ecstasy atop a mountain,
Together, they realized a shyness and the
Downhill awkwardness of separation;
However, a deep fulfillment of a dream
Anticipated and complete;
They relaxed, she on his arm and he against
The softness of her;
Her breath whispered to his ear,
"I love you"; and he replied,
"I love you too."



t's been long, too long;
So will you touch me with the
Tender tips of your fingers aglow,
And let the heat of love's past
Set free the spirit of our fiery
Passion's remains?
Touch me now, in the privacy of
This day's secret love and space,
That we may live life's life as
We so once did.
Come to me so slowly and walk
Your image so larger into my eyes view
And the whole of you into my arms
Embrace.
It's been long, too long,
So will you touch and we touch
As we once loved before?


And she spoke of love's passion:
"Come with me dear love;
Come within me as one,
And let my warmth for you alone
Puncture deeply to the tip of your
Soul's yearning for me; and, as you wish,
Allow me to come so tenderly
And peacefully as a lamb to the gentle
Thrust of your lion's passionate
Growl and groan of sweet sensual
Satisfaction;
Let me touch, breathe, and sense
Completely the acclamation and
Celebration of this our romantic love."
And he replied:
"I will come to you my lone love awaiting,
And into love's chamber of your
Sensual pleasures so as to pay in burning
Passion our time's debt of love come due;
Trust me to lay upon you my long-held
Desire and set free the tension of love to
Bloom forth your hidden orchids asleep;
Let me come with the rhythm of your
Sweet kitten's purr and as a lion's gentle
Touch to your loin's tender flank-

Such as to set our hearts and souls afire,
Forever, in this life of our love,
And in this love of our life's remain."


Dear love, my pleasure is to give you
Pleasure,
For that is the light of my life.
The sharing of the desire you evoke in me,
I trust, will burn free the shackled joys
Of your most precious and priceless reservoir
Of sensations longing.
So timely now, so fervently now,
Let us come into each other's gentle arms,
And set aloft and aflame the honey of our
Ripened fruits.
In this natural and spiritual attraction of ourselves,
Let us trust our future hopes and happiness
Untold to our romantic desires yearning.

I
We sat juxtaposed for a purpose other
Than the unforeseen;
Our eyes touched out of courtesy, but
Quickly locked from the magnetism
Of our own sensual vibrations;
We trembled and struggled to control and
Sequester our feelings for the other;
Our bodies filled each other's eyes in
Subtlety and brevity between interludes
Of trying to look unassuming;
Our gender's scent betrayed the truth of each
Other's desire to our deep breath's yearning;
Our skin flinched and our muscles tensed
As we waited for separate buses,
Hoping they would, this time, be late;
We parted so painfully, knowing that
We must see each other again, but
Wondering so desperately
"How" and "when."

W



et me touch you with the tender
Tip of a love bone and explore sites
Of honey along the darkest chamber
Of your hidden love asleep;
Let me awaken the deepest senses
Of life's heights of two, connected in
A whole thought of this love's moment;
Let my love bone embrace my bones
To your bones embrace for this timely
Moment and experience of our irresistible
Love.

L






To say "hello" is to say "good-bye,"
For that's the orderly way in which things are;
Faces appear in winter to be lost in spring,
Doors open to be closed,
The sun rises and sets,
Babies come and old folks die,
And all people must laugh and cry;
Night naturally follows day,
As moon the sun;
Boredom steals from life's excitement,
As hatred from love's promise;
Say "hello" with enjoyment, excitement,
And appreciation;
Say "good-bye" without anger, grief, or sorrow;
To say "hello" is to say "good-bye,"
Remember, that's just the way things are.



Love knocked once,
You refused;
Love knocked twice,
You opened the door;
You opened your heart;
Feelings awry in joy and agony;
Tension and conflict of pleasure
And pain-and peaks and
Valleys of sweet sensuality;
You called once,
Love closed the door;
You called twice,
Love said, "No more."




A love passed up can be a
Love lost forever;
A choice delayed, can be a
Love unmade;
Think too long about love, and
You often think wrong about the
Opportunity for a love that could
Have been;
Grieve long about a loved one lost, and
You will suffer daily at your own
Precious cost;
Wait too long for the ideal prince or
Princess unfound, and life will find you
Empty-hearted and dead in the ground;
Nevertheless, don't rush into a false love's
Net, but, to the converse, don't run
From an opportunity that can be lost
In regret;
Go with your heart's feelings
And less so with your thoughts,
Because a passed-up love that's caught
Will only be your fault;
A passed up love lost, will be your
Remorse.



o lose is to have had;
One cannot lose a loved one
Without falling in love,
Or lose a spouse without the experience
Of marriage, or a child without
The creation or adoption of life.
We can lose one's presence,
But never the images of or
Experiences with that one;
We can lose a loved one's presence,
But not our memories of that one-
Not until we lose ourselves.
To lose is to have had;
To lose is still to have.

T



Happy today,
Sad tomorrow;
Loved today,
Rejected tomorrow;
Hello today,
Good-bye tomorrow;
Here today,
Gone tomorrow;
Thus is life.



If I never see you again,
Remember our good times
Together;
If I must go today or tomorrow,
Remember my love for you
And things we shared;
I have not deferred your call
In times of need;
I have not promised the
Unfulfillable;
If it is God's will that I not
See you again in this world,
Just remember:
I loved you then,
I love you now, and
I will love you forever.



A
Love is like a candle lit
And burning;
Sometimes bright and light,
Sometimes dull and dim,
Sometimes flickering and unsteady-
Pacing its way into the dark.
Love is like a candle lit
And glowing;
Spewing its brilliance toward the heavens,
Casting its warmth with gentle wind,
Buttressing confidences with hopes of joy.
Love is like a candle lit
And burning;
And though love's precious candle may
One day burn cold, its memories
Must be savored and cherished always.



I tell you,
There is no love
In the slavery of another;
There is no love in death
From love, as with
Romeo and Juliet or
Othello and Desdemona;
There is no love
In a love not loved,
Or a love betrayed,
Or a love paid;
There is no love
In the love of a body's pleasure
Alone, or a love of repeated
Anger and destruction atoned;
There is no love
In a love that is sick.




When pieces fall apart,
Away from the whole-
Hurt it does, but go on
We must with a love of those
Remains and priceless memories
Of past's parts, people, and places;
Cry we should of tears that
Do dry.


And it was said:
"Dear love,
Please know I will not
Call you or call upon you again;
I want nothing and need nothing
From you; and what I shared
With you was unappreciated
But with no regret on my part;
Please know you can rest in
The privacy of my absence,
And go both we our separate ways
In search of our own happiness."


To have is to miss,
To know is to miss,
To experience the ecstasy of
Sensuality is to suffer the pain
Of absence.
Love comes and love goes,
Choosing carefully in couplets its
Beneficiaries and victims of joy
And pain, of happiness and shame.
But, such is the beauty of things
That come and go; of flowers,
Stars, and theatre lights.
Love comes and love goes;
To have is to hold it precious.


If you can,
Love what you have;
For once lost, you may
Not be able to love it again.
Love what you have;
For once lost, you may
Not be able to love it the same.
Love what you have;
For once lost, you may
Not be able to love another-
You may not be able to love
At all.


Will you love me if I'm not,
Or will you just love me if I am;
Will you love me if I should have,
Or will you just love me if I do?
Will you love me if I fail or if
I diminish size in your eyes,
Or will you just love me as I was;
Will you love me if I'm paralyzed,
Damaged, lessened, or embarrassing;
Or will you just love me no more?
Will you love me if I change;
Will you love me if I am changed-
Changed from your ideal of the lovable;
Will you love me if…?




Don't die with another's death;
Don't die with the loss of love
Or a dream gone sour;
Don't grieve, or complain, or look
Back in regret;
Look to the future, act in the
Present, plan for you, and
Live again;
Live again for yourself and for those
Who must depend upon you;
Live now or you will not live well;
Live now or you will not live long.




Pain from love's death, unlike that from the
Death of a love one; pain from love's death,
A prolonged pain that goes not away with buried
Tears of time; images recalled from the candles
Glow of a wedding cake's reflection and the warmth
Of a child's eye from a shared creation; love astray
In smithereens of shattered glass; a crushed crystal
Of life's love's image blown off course by time's
Changes.
Loss of affection, physical separation, and divorce;
A cruel turn of events of lost love and loyalty;
A rare admixture of compassion, care, indifference
And hatred; a cauldron of a million reflective
Thoughts, driven by repeated pain that sucks the
Blood of past investments in contributions of time
And energy; sacrifices of sleep and eat and conscious
Hopes for sweet revenge in defense of hurt feelings
For the sake of nothing but self-content.
Loss of affection, physical separation, and divorce;
Smiles turned to frowns, promises to naught, and
Pleasures to pain; yesterday's toast of wine glasses
Broken and cut and wet all over, and love's honey


Turned vinegar sour to wine's wasted mess among
Hopes scribbled on a white table cloth.
Loss of affection, physical separation, and divorce;
Doubts about identity, trust, and self-pride;
Love still, love nil-confused thoughts and hopes of
Minds now vetoed by twisted hearts.






Yes, as you fell in love once,
You so can again, and with
Greater feeling and care;
Burn the bush of past pains,
But not the roots of pleasure and
Learned memories;
If you open your heart and cap grief,
You can love again with belief;
As long as you breathe air and hold
The heat of romantic yearning,
You can love again;
You can love another;
As long as you love yourself.



I'm not complaining, so why are you explaining;
You are late, and I mind not the wait;
We all wait to die,
So why can't we wait for those we love.
I'm not explaining, since you are not complaining;
I am late, and you seemingly mind not the wait;
We all wait to die,
So why can't we wait for those we love.
 

LOVE…?
What is love,
If not for a season
Or a lifetime?
What is love,
If not for a season-
Or a reason felt?
What is love without
The excitement of it;
Without casting a spell
Of spirit, and mind, and heart
Upon one who casts upon you?
What is love without God's
Spiritual sanction of a divine
Union of two meant to be as one?


When there is anger and rage,
Hug your love;
When there is anxiety and fear,
Hug your love;
When there is disappointment and failure,
Hug your love;
When there is reservation and doubt,
Hug your love;
When there is pain and hurt,
Hug your love;
When there is mutual grief or mutual joy,
Or just simply a time for celebration
Of life, hug your love;
At morning's rising and night's bedtime,
Hug your love; hug each other.




Living is an art, loving is an art;
Both take thoughtfulness and not just thought,
Learning and not just performance,
Compassion and not just passion,
Care and not just concern.
To live is to love life; to love is to live life
With patience, respect, appreciation,
Excitement, energy, and good feeling.
Living is loving self, loving others, and loving life;
Loving is living with self, living with others, and
Living life in great appreciation.



We lay, back first, with eyes toward
The stars; thinking of nothing
Except the moment of our appreciation.
The grass beneath cushioned our relaxation,
While darkness of the night shielded
Us in anonymity.
The cool air of evening helped our shared
Presence to erase regrets of the past
And worries of the future.
We lay calmly, serenaded by our own
Breaths of life and comforted by our
Selfish thoughts of each other.
We lay alone as two; but really as one-
Together for each other,
Together in the world,
Together against the world.
 


I
Person speaks:
"Excuse me please;
Hello,
I saw you;
I like you;
Would you care to talk?"
Person speaks:
"You are excused,
But not from my presence;
Hello, too;
I also saw you;
And, sure, I would like to
Talk to you too,
Because, I too like you."



Let us forget the images of old
And the attitudes we hold
Of pasts;
Let us start anew,
For I come to claim the
Woman I love-
The heart of my youth's
Nurture and the soul of
My manhood years;
I come to claim her claim
On the remainder of my life's
Time and the blood of my life's
Remains;
Make easy my return and our return
To each other's task of romance
Anew and love of two;
Pluck thoughts of ill from the brow
Of times gone, and claim again
That which was and can be.



A UND
There is nothing more painful than being
With one you don't love, and being deprived
Of happiness thereof;
There is nothing more painful than "loving
One" with whom you don't want to be,
And hoping that one day you can make
Yourself free;
There is nothing more unromantic than to
Live a myth from kiss to kiss, or weeks to
Months to years to tears in boring times and
A hopeless mind, smiling when you wanted to
Cry and crying when you wanted to smile;
Fill your empty life with something meaningful
For you;
Fill your empty life with love regained anew,
Or seek a new love in earnest truth.



"Oh woman," he asked-
"How can I satisfy you?
Your suspicions are too great,
Your anger is too deep;
Remove thoughts blocks from
Our past romance longing;
For I stand tired of your displeasure,
While wanting deeply the sweet
Touch of our yesteryear's memories call;
Spit forth your bitter venom once and
For all, and lie bare to my bed of roses
Waiting, that I may lay upon you the
Pleasures remain of your unconscious
Yearning."
"Oh man," she replied-
"How can I trust you?
Give peace to my mind's assurance
Of you to me, and put still my doubt
And rage from thoughts of another;
Bring peace to my soul by you,
Your act, and self-that I, as you wish,
Can lie upon your bed of roses,
So warm and sensual to your true touch
To lay me bare in yesteryear's rousing
Ecstasy for today's calm peace to our
Enlightened romance anew."




It is said:
"There is no pain and shame like
The hurt and embarrassment of
Love rejected;
There is nothing more confusing than a
Love flaunted and then unwanted;
There is no cruelty like the destruction
Of the spirit of a love gone bad or
A love once had;
There is nothing more lonely than the
Wish for the return of a love lost."
However, with love's new romance's
Seeding, its blossoms and fruits
Will lay dormant the thoughts of past
Harvests gone.


A
nd he said,
"In my transition from a love lost,
I need a woman to walk
Behind me to encourage me to
Become all I can;
I need a woman to walk
Beside me when I'm honored
For what she has helped me to
Become;
And, certainly, I need a woman
To walk ahead of me,
As I help her to become
All that she can become.
I simply need and pray for a
Good woman to walk God's path in love
With me and me with her."
A


I
You have class and you don't
Have to lie;
You have natural beauty and don't
Have to try;
You have bright eyes like a supernova
Starlight in the night's sky;
You have security and don't
Have to deny;
You have mental health and you don't
Have to get high;
You have happiness and peace and don't
Have to cry;
You have a pleasurable sweetness
Like sugared apple pie;
You have me and don't ever say
Good-bye;
I have you and that is why-
I write this poem.



Sincere love is a true number,
A whole number;
Never divided, subtracted, or diminished
In quantity or quality;
Never zero, never negative;
Always positive and increasing in
Weight and geometric size;
Sincere love is an infinite whole of
Two intersecting human sets;
Sincere love multiplies itself by itself,
And adds to itself over time.

You say you sat in a chair
With your favorite teddy bear
Tucked beneath your hair;
Yes, you relaxed in your chair,
So you now tell, by the fireplace's
Glare-hugging, soothing, and stroking
A warmed teddy bear with gentle
Care and a pleasurable stare;
So you tell, you breathed holiday
Air in the cuddly care of your
Designated bear;
Now you recall of a night with
Christmas tree lights and a lovable
Bear in the romantic embrace of your care;
You tell, I see, of sitting in a chair
With this special teddy bear;
Now you have told of a night, I see;
A night I recall that you spent with me.



True love like gold
Will not rust with time;
And like fine silver, its
Tarnish can be polished to
Original brilliance or
A greater luster;
True love seeks not fault nor
Excuse for escape;
True love seeks itself;
True love endures all times
And circumstance;
True love shines forever.



A
A gift to you
For what you've done,
Not for what I expect of you;
A gift to you,
For what you are,
Not for what I want you to be;
A gift to you,
For what we have shared,
And not for what we give
To each other.


I
I will not promise that
I will love you tomorrow
Or that I will love you tonight;
I will not promise that
I can love you tomorrow
Or that I can love you tonight;
I will only say that I love you now,
And I trust that now will
Last forever.



I
Can we say, "I love you,"
If we mean it and feel it?
Can we say, "I love you,"
Without hesitating, hedging,
Stammering, or lowering our
Voices to a fade?
Can we say, "I love you,"
Without biting our tongue
Or fearing regret or else?
Can we say the words
"I
Can we say these three words
Often and clearly,
Loudly and surely?
Say them now; say them often.









Love the links in your chain,
For a broken chain has no purpose;
Love your parents, love your children;
For they are strong links of proximity.
Love your grandparents,
Love your grandchildren,
Love your sibling too;
For they are also important links
To a strong chain.
Most of all, love your link;
Love yourself-
Love all links in your chain
For a broken chain has no purpose.



There is nothing you can say,
That is enough to thank your mother;
There is nothing you can do,
That is enough to thank your mother.
A mother is a trustee of God's seed,
A sacred temple of life;
A mother's touch cannot be duplicated,
Her comforting voice is never replicated.
A mother's greatest gift is the gift of life,
Her highest status is that of motherhood.
No matter what else a mother might be,
No matter what a mother does-
A mother is a mother.
Thanks Mom; I love you.
 



e true to your eyes, ears, thoughts, and feelings;
Listen to your heart but yield to your mind's best
Judgment;
Be kind and wise in spoken words, for surely your
Words will follow you;
Be not afraid of risks but be cautious of actions
Driven by emotion, confusion, and false friends;
Avoid jealousy of others achievements and possessions;
Don't live with an insatiable greed for more than
You can appreciate or use;
Don't eat more than your hunger's call or
Drink beyond your thirst's needs;
Listen to spirits that favor you and offend not
Those that oppose you;
Absorb yourself in an activity worthy of your unique
Talent, and develop as many common
Potentialities as you desire and can;
Whatever you do, do it as well as you can;
Live comfortably with your conscience,
And be at peace with your soul;
Be courageous in life, while always respecting
Death's luring and lurking;
Rest when tired and think when you are uncertain;
Be kind to the sacredness of life and respect the
Natural order of the universe;
B
Frederick Douglas Harper

Follow no one or no thing except your own judgment
And your own God's wish;
Love and respect yourself and your family;
Be all you can by developing yourself;
Do all you can in helping worthy others;
And live a quality and meaningful life.
 



He was big, I little;
But both men in our sights;
We worked together and played together,
At day and night.
I remember, and will forever, his
Kindness and love, though only a small child;
Together, we shared time:
Walking in the corn field,
Feeding chickens and the hog,
Driving a mule-driven wagon.
I watched him pray in church, drive his car,
Work at two jobs, plant and harvest,
Make old-fashioned wine, and care for
His wife and offspring of eight.
I, a child of seven, was by his side when he
Died so peacefully, so courageously on a small
Bed alongside a sun-lighted, open window.
Granddad, I will always miss you;
Granddad, I will always love you.


IS…
Endured, and a life cared;
Offering of self, overindulgence of
Time spent, and okay's and ought's;
In common, verification of feelings, and
Vivid joyful experiences;
Energy given and received through
Time and effort.
Love is-
Loving
Others with
Verve, vitality, and vow; and with
Enthusiasm, expressiveness, and exhaustion.
Love is without condition, expectation, or
Anticipation.
A friend is
Special for you
And not against you;
Being a friend is in
One's state of mind,
One's state of action-
That special one who thinks and acts
For another's happiness,
For another's welfare;
Being a friend is giving of self
With joy;
Being a friend is receiving from another
With appreciation;
Being a friend is wanting to be a friend.

A A
ou ask me to write a poem
For a friend not near;
Though miles away, one you have known
Closely over the years;
An unusual request to me I must tell;
But one not denied since it seems
You so care.
A small price of time to give such precious
Thought, for a long-lasting bond
On each part sought;
With nostalgic memories of childhood years;
Remain close you have, yet seldom as near;
It's been years and miles of telephone talk,
Between movies, theatres, and city-park walks.
So the essence of friendship, it seems
Two have learned,
Out of much shared experience and
Mutual concern;
And thus this poet closes with good thoughts
Of my task,
In trust that your dear friendship
Will continue to last.
Y



Let us love child
As a precious and impressionable life;
Not as an object of selfishness,
Not as an object of frustration,
Not as an object of sensuality;
Let us love children
As the future, our future-
And even more their future;
Let us love children by preventing
Their undo suffering;
Let us wipe horrid images from view
Of their little minds, and
Harsh words from their ear's reach;
Let us block unnatural pain and trauma
From their tender little souls, while
Teaching them the natural way,
The healthy way, the realistic way of life;
Let us love child
As we have been loved;
Let us love child
As we should have been loved;
Let us love child
As we ought to love ourselves.



I'm in love,
I'm in love,
I'm in love
With my son.
Oh gift of God,
How sweet,
How joyful,
How refreshing.
Oh light of God,
My son,
I'm in love.
To hold him,
Is to hold Thy holy trust;
To kiss his little lips,
Is to feel the creation of
Thy gift.
Oh light of day of night,
Oh light of my life,
My son, my love.
 


I
I never saw a woman who
Loved her baby son so much;
I never saw a man who
Loved his baby son so much;
I never saw parents who
Loved their baby son so much;
I never saw-until I saw ourselves.



What I can see, I have often loved;
What I can hear, I have often loved;
What I can touch, I have often loved;
What I can smell, I have often loved.
I have known the beauty of flowers,
Music, birds, foods, people, trees,
Rivers, oceans, mountains, and other
Artistic creations of God and humankind.
Things of beauty I have known,
I have often loved-
Especially when I have paid
Attention to sense their world around me.



A
A flower-
How temporal its beauty,
How delicate its petals,
How variegated in colors of
Red, yellow, pink, purple, and white.
A flower-
How simple, how sweet the smell;
A thing of adorability in bloom,
A thing that expresses our
Thought, care, and love.
A flower-
To touch, to share,
To wear in one's hair,
For holidays and special occasions everywhere.
A flower-
That graces our surrounding
And brings happiness and joy
To the sick, the grieved, and the well.
A flower-
To see, to smell, to hold;
A flower, to love
In the moment of our presence.

Frederick Douglas Harper

A
Oh flower, in the light of sunshine
And the secrecy of night's cover;
Show your beauty-
Show your beauty through the moisture
Of dawn's dew and the teardrops
Of April's rain;
Oh flower, the source of a florist's
Dream to create your gift for
The giver's gift of love and
Compassion;
Oh flower, a flower;
The repeated miracle of God's grace
Through the arms of plants so green
With outreached branches of life's
Touch;
Oh flower, smile for me;
Oh flower, smile that we
Might see the love of Thee.




Elegant they stand in Maine of the
Tall and straight they grow
In pine, fir, and spruce;
Welcome and farewell they bid, through branches
So broad and orderly in symmetry,
So robust and serene in character;
Trees, trees, and more trees,
Carpeting great acreage in a mosaic
Of variant shades of green;
Trees, trees, and more trees,
Against God's glistening sun, rolling clouds,
And calm blue skies;
Trees of Maine, I accept your heartening
Presence and message;
Trees of Maine, I wish you a happy
And long stay.




After love and fear, there's pride;
After tears, the night;
After all the words are gone,
A chair with just one light.
After memories, the dream
That you will come home safe;
After sleep, another day
Of waiting for my life.
After hope, the happiness
Of thinking of your love;
After moments of despair
A stone no thought can move.
After all the sacrifice,
The hunger and the pain,
The passions and the promises,
The losses and the gains,
There's nothing but my love for you,
Which waits upon the wind
To bring you from the barricades
That now you must defend.
 

I A
After you leave, I will become a tree
Alone on a hillside, loving wind and sun,
Waiting for you to return home to me
Though centuries of lonely stars may run.
I'll grow tall and give lots of shade,
Sheltering birds and other bright-eyed things.
Pleased with all the progress that I've made,
I'll spread my leafy branches out like wings.
But oh! Every moment of every day
I'll miss you with the passion of the wind,
Gazing endlessly upon the way
That without you must empty, empty wind.
 

Do not love me yet, for I
Am still a slender moon,
A scimitar about the heart
Too sharp to touch too soon.
Before I'm touched I need to grow
More full in golden light;
I need to smile upon my earth
And rule some patch of night.
I need to know what roads and fields
Lie in my domain
And dull my brand new ecstasies
With sophomoric pain.
I need the love of some blank boy
As cold and dark as me,
That we might grope in ignorance
And fear of what might be.
And then, when I'm a silver bowl
And know what I can hold,
Then, then, perhaps, we could try love
If you are not too old.
 


Do you want me? What's the matter?
You're afraid some door will close?
You want the scent without the rose?
The moans of love without the chatter?
You think our love might be a tomb,
The only exit through my pain?
You'd rather put things off again
To give your fantasies some room?
You think: she's great, but in a while
I might get bored? Or something better,
Filling out a tighter sweater,
Might flash me a quick come-on smile?
You don't want to be tied just yet
To just one future, just one kiss?
You think about all you might miss
And hold out for a better bet?
Well, fine! But then why do you haunt
Me like a jackal night and day?
Why, when my interest seems to stray,
Are you so sure of what you want?
 
Why, when I dare so much as laugh
At some guy's jokes, you go ballistic,
Nasty, borderline sadistic,
As if somebody touched your stuff?
And yet when I hook on to you,
You will not let yourself be mine,
Take out your fears and draw a line
Between what you and I can do?
But freedom must be mutual,
And it takes two for one embrace.
You can't both love and freedom chase,
Unless you would adore a fool.
 

Dreams do come true, but only when
They make it through despair,
Limping into everyday
Transformed beyond repair.
No dream would be a dream if it
Could pass for something real,
Nor would we sail for paradise
Would it its shoals conceal.
So it is with love: the dream
Long longed for, now possessed,
Must be a dream no longer, but
An emperor undressed.
Stark naked it must come to us
In unaccustomed shame,
And we must take it in our arms
And love it all the same.
And we must love love as it is
That dreams might still come true,
Mangled into miracles
To make our lives anew.
 
A

Each truth is just a scrim across the darkness.
We cannot see what most we'd like to know.
We drive among sheer cliffs in pale moonlight
Unsure of where we are or where to go.
When we allow our heads to make our choices,
We lose because of what we cannot see.
When we give way and let desire take us,
We lose because we want what cannot be.
We inch along the dream-lit rocky ridges
Knowing always, always we must lose.
The end for all is darkness everlasting,
And so it matters less which road we choose.
What matters is the beauty of sheer being;
The gifts we have and those we will become;
The ecstasy of loving so completely
That we ourselves are more than minds can plumb.
Love well and know that love must end in pain.
Be a fool and pay the unmarked price.
Be generous of self, and passion gain:
One who never loses, loses twice.
 

A I
Even though we fight a lot, I love you.
We fight, I think, because the stakes are high.
I sometimes get so mad I cannot stand you,
But underneath my anger I could cry.
I have an uncontrolled need to control you,
To be your only destiny and guide.
I know it isn't fair to try to mold you,
But my poor love's entangled in my pride.
Ah, love! Please love me even in my fury,
Which rises like a tide beneath the moon.
I plead before my only judge and jury:
I want to change, but know change won't come soon.
Love finds it hard to let the loved one be
The person who is loved so passionately.
 


Everything I've done, I've done
Only for your love.
Everything I am, I am
In hopes your heart will move.
I know that you love someone else,
But while you're away,
I'll love you just as though our love
Would last till you are grey.
Till you and I are grey, my love,
And all our days are done,
I'll love you just as I do now;
Your heart's my only home.
 


Fate is oft the filament of passion,
Illumined by the force of its fierce flow.
For love, far more than chance, may fortunes fashion,
The unwilled will that wills the world we know.
Years break, yet love maintains the tides below.
Of love, fate is the most precise expression,
Nor could one find a more complete confession,
Even as good tidings come and go.
 

Gifts are not always free.
A giver wants to know: Are you enjoying my gift?
Burdens can be sources of intense pleasure.
Recently, unable to distinguish between burdens and
gifts,
Indian elephants dragged seventeen tons of teak logs
over the Himalayas.
Each of us has made his or her own version of this
mistake.
Love is a gift.
Burdens betray themselves by the rattle of their needs.
Each of us wants to know: Am I a burden or a gift?
Very few understand that to be a gift one must receive
more than one gives,
Even while burdens come decked out in ribbons and
bows.
Refusing a gift brings regret, not guilt.
Lingering doubts may be referred to a mirror.
Yesterday the elephants returned: happy, sweaty, and a
good deal wiser.
 


He cares only that I'm happy,
Even were I not with him.
If some seek on the wind love's traces,
Some seek out the love within.
All my pleasures are his treasures,
Nor does he crave joy alone.
All have claim on his compassion;
No dark soul is on its own.
Giving thus, so naturally,
Each day he lights the love in me,
Like candles on a sunlit stone.
 


Hold me to your willing heart
And let me—help me—weep
That I of need might fall apart
And then at last might sleep.
Let the truth slice into me
That I might finally bleed
And purge myself of agony
I cannot now concede.
For I have bound myself in light
That I might live in joy,
And cannot—will not—let the night
My bonds of love destroy.
And yet I know if I would gain
The peace for which I pray,
I must allow the floods of pain
To wash my love away.
 
I A

How can I have a fight with my best friend?
The mountain blows, the landscape is destroyed.
A desert where there once were fields and gardens.
Black lava where flowers once brought joy.
And then shoots of grass come through the blackness;
Slowly love asserts itself again.
He calls, I cry, we go through days of whispers,
And fields once more grow lush in sun and rain.
Ah! But now I'm fearful of the mountain:
I walk by trembling, set for it to blow.
Life's beautiful, but also very painful;
I have the strength to love, now that I know.
 
I

How can I know so surely that I'll love you
No matter what the future has in store?
Time is like a cave in which our torches
Show only the circumference of our minds.
But love is will far more than it is passion,
Though passion may at first sustain the will.
One chooses love the way one chooses faith
Because that is the way that heaven lies.
My love for you is vaster than the ocean,
More rich in loveliness than coral seas.
I would no more relinquish it than let go
Willingly the precious gift of life.
 
I

How did I lose your baby blue eyes
And the smile that lit up my sky?
What did I say that sent you away?
Can somebody tell me why?
Sometimes we move away from the flow
And find ourselves lost and alone.
What turn did I miss after some kiss
That told me what I should have known?
How did you get so far from my heart
Without my becoming aware?
What did you see deep inside me
That I never knew was there?
We drive in the darkness down strange empty roads
Into sudden and unforeseen pain.
We think that we choose, but after we lose,
We see that we've done it again.
 


How often are things simply clear and right?
Each day we come to moments of despair.
Love is something wonderfully there,
Even in the blackest hours of night.
No one can tell why one of all the rest
Makes our flower open to the sun.
In truth we could love almost anyone.
Choosing, though, does not involve a test.
How often does an angel touch our skin,
Altering forever who we are?
Every passion fades, but love's a star
Lit by holy fires deep within.
 
I
I
I am afraid to love, and yet I love you.
My fear is like a wall I walk right through.
The wall is there, and yet it doesn't stop me.
I need it still, and yet I still need you.
I know someday we will be in a field
Surrounded by the blessing of the sky.
I'll dance with all the freedom of pure joy,
Needing you without a reason why.
But now I'm still afraid that I might lose you,
That you might not accept my desperate need.
You make me laugh and cry and be completely.
You are the flower, I the slender reed.
 
I

I am of the desert, you of cultivation:
Simplicity to me, to you is desolation;
Heat, thirst, and agony I seek out on vacation,
While you look for elegance and quiet restoration.
I am of the ocean, you are of the shore:
You want fewer waves, I manufacture more;
You like tranquil bays, I love the rollers roar;
In me, a wild emptiness; in you, a quiet core.
While I am like a stream, you are like a lake:
I babble over boulders, you reflections make;
I rush forward heedlessly, as bones and branches break;
You part before the piercing bow and then absorb the
wake.
That such extremes should not be mingled might seem
elementary;
But love can make the wildest contradictions
complementary.
 
I A
I
I didn't get a chance to say I love you.
You were gone before we got that far.
All I know is now I really need you,
Yet when I look for you, you aren't there.
You said once that you never would forget me,
Yet how am I to know without you here?
Such emptiness! Like what I feel within me:
Neither flesh nor tears, just cold thin air.
Sometimes, alone, I feel your arms around me,
And all my need for you spills out in pain.
Jagged memories of you surround me.
I cannot think I won't see you again.
 
I

I don't know how we get into these fights.
After them I look back at the ashes
More shocked than hurt, as when a light plane crashes,
Slanting numb through strange, unearthly lights.
Oh, how I wish I could get off that plane
Rushing to its rendezvous with tears!
Rage is but a mask for my shy fears.
Yet I would die before I caused you pain.
 
I

I feel as though my heart lay bleeding
On a countertop.
The pain is like a flooded scream
That cannot, will not stop.
I cannot live, I cannot breathe;
Pain is all I do.
I cannot think how I can be
Long living without you.
Ah, God! I want you back so bad
That I would gladly die
To hold you in my arms again
And not care how or why;
To hold you in my arms again
And tell you of my love,
And then go gladly back to dust
Should I your heart not move.
 
I
LOVG
I find my happiness in loving you.
Though my love is not returned, I don't mind waiting.
The woods are a cathedral where I pray
For the beauty and grace that lie within my heart.
You hold me and we kiss, and yet not yet
Is there the unity that love must crave.
You want me, but not as I want you;
This truth is like a wreckage on my sea.
There's no one else I hunger for, nor touch
That makes me feel I must take off my skin;
And so I'll wait as years pile up like leaves,
And long with the lonely patience of the moon.
 
I A

I have a monster crush on you,
A super-dinosaur!
It sits upon my chest and throat
And yet I beg for more.
When you're away I miss you so
My heart is full of sand.
Yet when you're here my stupid fear
Won't let me touch your hand.
I cannot sleep, I cannot eat,
I'm so wrapped up in you.
My thoughts drift up, away from words,
And fade into the blue.
I know this crush is not your fault;
The dinosaur is mine.
Yet if you could, please rescue me,
And put your arms around me, and hold me, and say
you love me, and Oh! God! Would that be
good!
 
I I

I know I must have hurt you, caused you pain.
More, I know that I have lost your trust.
I wish I had that moment back again
To pulverize my carelessness and lust.
Sometimes we have to lose what we most cherish
To understand how much we are in need.
We play with life until we nearly perish
To dare the darkness, though within we bleed.
I need you as the sun must have a rose
To turn its empty radiance to glory,
Or as a nation needs someone who knows
The secrets of its long-forgotten story.
I know my need of you more than before;
Thus for my trespass you may trust me more.
 
I
I
I look at you and think: I cannot live
Without you; you're the person of my dreams.
Of course I know I can, but I must give
My heart room to tell it as it seems.
Romance must have a language fit for feeling
More than fits between the earth and sky.
For love there cannot be a floor or ceiling:
My love goes down too deep and flies too high.
So when I say I cannot live without you,
Know I can't imagine so much pain;
And when I claim to always dream about you,
Well, know the moon is happy once again.
The sun reveals cold truths for all to see,
But I must light my love with poetry.
 
I A S
I love you as a valley loves
The river through its fields,
Or as a note upon a page
The music that it yields.
I need you as the moon requires
The sun to make it shine,
Or as a soul in search of faith
Is rescued by some sign.
You are as much a part of me
As meadows are of Earth,
Or as a song is of a heart,
Replenishing its worth.
I love you as a hawk loves air,
Or a sailor loves the sea,
Or as a strong wave seeks the sand,
But ah! do you love me?
 
I
I
I love you even though I know
You show no love for me.
Your eyes are icy springs that feed
My hidden ecstasy.
All night I hold you in my arms
And sleep in your embrace.
All day I turn away from life
To gaze upon your face.
Alone I find within my heart
A black and raging sea,
For only you, beloved one,
Can calm my Galilee.
 
I I
I love you with all I am
And all I'll ever be.
You are my moon, my sun and stars,
My earth, my sky, my sea.
My love for you goes down and down
Beneath both life and death,
So deep it must remain when I
Have drawn my last faint breath.
Holding you for months and years
Will make Time disappear,
Will make your lips my lips, your face
My face, your tear my tear;
Will make us one strange personage
All intertwined with bliss,
Not man or woman, live or dead—
Just nothing—but a kiss!
 
I

I must accept but can't what cannot be.
I see you and my heart dissolves in pain.
You are not dead, but you are dead to me.
What happened to our love's a mystery.
I rummage through our empty past in vain.
I must accept but can't what cannot be:
That someone else now shares your off-hand “we,”
Now feels your tender tongue all feeling drain . . .
You are not dead, but you are dead to me.
I cannot lay aside my agony:
Again, again, I play the same refrain.
I must accept but can't what cannot be.
And yet I know this tortured ecstasy
Is just my way of holding you again.
You are not dead, but you are dead to me,
And still I cannot bear to set you free,
That of our love some remnant might remain.
I must accept but can't what cannot be.
You are not dead, but you are dead to me.
 
I

I used to be completely cruel and heartless,
Using girls, then tossing them aside.
I used to feel an angry, bitter hunger,
Not knowing why, nor looking much inside.
I used to think the goal of life was pleasure:
My own, of course, whatever that might take.
A woman's feelings had to be her problem.
Self-sacrifice was always a mistake.
And so, with just the slightest twinge of conscience,
I hunted for my lonely ecstasy;
And even when I wanted a companion,
The only one I cared about was me.
We make our worlds, like God, in our own image:
Mine was a metropolis of stone
In which all souls were either fools or cynics,
Doomed to take their pleasure on their own.
And then I fell in love with you, and somehow
Your happiness meant more to me than mine.
The desert became green and lush with flowers,
And like a sun my heart began to shine.
 
And like a wind I swept across the ocean,
And like a star exploded into night,
And like a song I held love in my hands,
And like an angel knew that this was right.
All that I had thought was proven wrong,
All the lies to justify my greed.
To love was to embrace the pith of life,
To feel a joy far stronger than a need.
And if I could so love, I could be loved,
Could think someone might want me and believe it,
Could let another know me without shame,
Could give my self and know I could retrieve it.
All this I tell you that I might be known,
That all of me no longer be alone;
And if you do not love the one I am,
So be it. I will weep, but understand.
 
I

I want to make you smile as you make me.
I wish you saw my thoughts right through my eyes.
You ask me what I'm thinking. I can't tell you.
You are the stars, and I the empty skies.
In me there is a yearning ever flowing
That needs to reach an end that never comes.
I cannot be myself without you with me.
This is a truth no wisdom ever plumbs.
You laugh, and say that I'm your personal angel,
And this is what I want so much to be.
The beauty of my life is like a passion
That blows right through the person that you see.
 
I

I want to make your heart beat just for me.
I want a true love in my lonely life.
I've looked a long time, dated many men,
But none I walked with walked in step with me.
We walk together well, the best of friends.
Somehow we just fit, as if clean cut
To go together, zigzags complementary.
But now I would be something more than friends.
I know I take a chance to mention love.
I've no idea what feeling's in your heart.
But if you'd catch a burning, plunging star,
I know I'd make you happy for your love.
 
I I

I wish that I could be with you
And hold you in my arms,
Whisper all my love to you
And kiss away your tears.
I wish that I could take your cares
And put them all away,
Neatly folded into drawers
While pleasure lights your smile.
I wish that joy could step inside
Your heart and stay awhile,
And all the rain could turn into
A rainbow in the sun.
And all our loneliness like mist
Could fade into the blue,
A memory of sad, hard times
That happened long ago.
But I cannot come home right now,
And you cannot come here;
And so our dreams must be the fields
On which we laugh and play.
 
If life cannot be what we want,
It will, it will be so;
For love can turn the harshest light
To gold through sheer affection.
 
I

I wish this poem were pixie dust
To throw into your eyes
And make you see the loveliness
Beneath my sad disguise.
And I would take you in my arms
A weave a magic spell
That I could utter anytime
To make you love me well.
But alas my simple words
Are like summer rain
That drums on hills and fields and hearts,
Then vanishes again.
And though my love might make you bloom,
You turn with fragile grace
To gaze in aching loneliness
At someone else's face.
We lust for what we cannot have,
A long, unbroken chain
Of lovers who remain unloved
And loved who love in vain.
 
While I'm near mad with wanting you
As trees must have the sun,
You cannot help but find a love
Who loves another one.
 

I I
I'm sorry for the way I say I love you.
I know this kind of talk is far too soon.
I cannot stop myself; I just adore you.
And so this truth pronounces its own doom.
But when a truth betrays itself, I wonder:
Could it be that such a truth be true?
Or could the sweet compulsion that I'm under
Be caused in part by ignorance of you?
I know only the truth of what I feel,
Which lies beneath all sanity or rule.
My love for you is deep and rich and real,
Though it may be I simply am a fool.
Time will tell the truth, for if you do
Not want my love, I cannot long love you.
 
A

In daylight you're a haunting melody,
More lovely than the world before my eyes.
In darkness you become my symphony,
So much of me I know no other ties.
So are you nestled with me night and day,
Your missing self transmuted into song,
Or walking close beside me on my way,
Unleashing all the love for which I long.
 
MOURNG,
In mourning, seafog
Makes small things visible.
Pearls cling to petals.
Pine needles are fringed with glass.
The sea breaks against rocks.
Heaving back, it breaks again.
What does the wild rose know of its beauty?
Have you any idea what you've given me?
 


It sometimes seems so foolish to persist
When years and miles separate our lips.
Despair's a midnight lover, hard to resist
In a darkness that crushes, an emptiness that grips . . .
But the thought of giving up is just like death:
The same wild pain, the alleys of hollow years,
The python twisted hard around my breath,
My eyes cracking under the weight of tears.
Ah, my darling! If now we are in pain,
It's for a love that floods our hearts with light.
We know that we will share that joy again
If dreams can take us through this anguished night.
Soaring ‘cross the sea, we dip and glide:
Our lips apart, our thoughts are side by side.
 
I

It's amazing how I feel when I'm around you,
How my heart pounds when you come into a room.
I look at you and think: My God! How lovely!
And everything I am bursts into bloom.
I feel as though you must, you must be mine,
Not as a possession but a goal,
Something almost unimaginable:
The free devotion of another soul.
As though I were about to enter heaven
Or just within the hour condemned to die,
My mind with one fierce thought keeps running over,
With you, and only you, the reason why.
 


Just as the whole wide world has been connected,
Opening our lives to one and all,
So our inner worlds have intersected:
Now love halfway around the world can call.
Our keyboard conversations have run deep,
Reaching to the source of joy and pain.
In time, though now one writes while one's asleep,
No barriers to passion will remain
As lovers meet beneath the sun and rain.
 


Let me love you well, if not too long,
For passion is a lover of fresh air,
Relishing the landscape that is there,
Belonging to what must to all belong.
Let me make you part of my sweet song,
As I will be of yours, that both more fair
May part, enriched by what we share,
More seized by life, more gentle, and more strong.
For passion is a gift one should not squander:
For fear of loss, losing life's best joy,
The ecstasy that we were meant to feel.
And if it comes and goes, then we must wander,
Enjoying what we're given to enjoy,
Reveling in what our loves reveal.
 


Lose yourself in lust, my love;
Enjoy me as a thing.
Make my flesh your fantasy;
My soul, your sycophant.
I would you would with me, my love,
Let all your voices sing,
Losing not one ecstasy
That some sweet sin might grant.
For love loves not that secret space
Where dreams turn into wounds,
Festering for lack of care,
Untended but by stealth.
Love enjoys a secret grace,
Calliope of tunes
Inexhaustible, for there,
In trust, lies love's true wealth.
 


Love comes to those who love, who find their joy
In others joy, their tears in others tears.
Those in need receive the gifts that buoy
Them through the misspent yearnings of their years.
Weakness is a strength, and power none,
For none has power to compel affection.
Passion to the self-consumed may come,
But love looks for the grace of its reflection.
Love is like a tide that comes and goes,
And comes and goes according to the moon,
Giving and receiving as it flows
Between high headlands weathered and rough-hewn.
For love becomes itself the cause of love,
A double-knot not easy to remove.
 


Love has obstacles enough, they say:
Why add to them the obstacle of race?
Two backgrounds so diverse can't share one space.
Love can't keep the world's harsh truths at bay.
Ah, love! Let such trite wisdom go its way!
All life is difficult yet full of grace.
All men and women share the same small place.
Nor should we out of fear our love betray.
Love is to daily life a vein of gold
Running through the rock like liquid fire,
Making ordinary moments glow.
May we treasure it as we grow old:
The breath that does our dreary clay inspire,
The touch that transforms everything we know.
 
A

Love is like a large white cat
Sitting on its paws.
You may pet it all you like;
It lives by its own laws.
It comes and goes as it decides
No matter what you say.
It seems the more you want it near,
The more it goes away.
And then when you are quite content
To sit out in the sun
Alone with just your thoughts and dreams,
Not needing anyone,
Out it comes, as if in fear
That somehow you'll forget,
And jumps up purring in your lap,
Demanding to be pet.
 

Love is never easy, but
It turns life into song.
There is no bit of circumstance
That love cannot transform.
There is no weary moment
Of anger or despair
That love cannot convert to grace
And render whole and fair.
How passionate the paradise
That comes from knowing well
That someone in your happiness
Finds pleasure for himself.
How sweet the gift of giving to
Someone who gives to you,
A selflessness that gives to self
More self than self is due.
With all the searing madness of
The world from day to day,
And all the dreary sadness that
No joy can take away,
There is one truth more beautiful
Than anyone can bear:
That two can trust that when they turn
They'll find the other there.
 


Love lingers in the alleyways
And wafts across the streets,
And knocks upon my double doors
But never does come in.
Love finds a home in entranceways
And rattles round retreats,
And scurries past the faint applause
Just two doors down from sin.
Ah! Would I love would I but know
What love might have in store!
For I have fears of heavy chains
That jangle in my joy.
And I have fears of floods that flow
From asking life for more.
Silent, I prefer the gains
Such tempests would destroy.
 


Love me in the circle of your evening,
And in the morning quiet of your dreams.
Love me underneath ambitious schemes,
And when they slow and time can use some seasoning.
I do not need your highways and your streets
As long as I can be there when you're home.
We both have miles of paradise to roam:
Let me be where your brave heart retreats.
And I will love you in the times of tears,
Of hope and laughter, pain and ecstasy,
And all the days of haunted thoughts, when we
Can share the undertow of vanished years.
 


Love redeems the passions of the moment
Underneath the qualms that quell the sea.
All the queries that have room to comment
Know quite well how good it is to be!
Love allows the rivers to run freely,
The tides to turn without the least regret,
The mountains to give way to time, sincerely
Pleased with what the eons will forget.
Love turns every moment to forever,
And every thing to unintended song,
And makes a worship out of all endeavor,
And through its suffering, undoes all wrong.
Bear witness, then, in love, that you might bear
To be, with neither purpose nor despair.
 

Love was not enough for us,
Though we were much in love.
We started down the well-worn path,
But it was not to be.
Delight was not enough for us,
Nor tenderness that moved
Through years of angry dissonance
Towards some dark, bitter sea.
Our differences were far too great,
Our lives too far apart.
We didn't like each other much,
But put that truth aside
Until one day it was too late
To reignite the heart.
One told the other, who agreed
At last that it had died.
But then, ah, then! we felt our loss
As unremitting pain,
As deep and inconsolable,
Unbearable regret.
And all alone we had to cross
That desert once again
That we might know that we had loved
Too much to soon forget.
 


Lovers aren't always best of friends:
Too much, sometimes, lies between their sheets.
In fact they need a friend to share the sweets
And sorrows of a love that always ends.
Love that lasts is love that's more than passion:
A wedding of true friendship and desire.
Some might fear a certain loss of fire,
But pleasure is ignited by compassion.
You're the one in whom I most confide,
The inner ear I talk to through the day,
The flesh I need when I must have my way,
The world where I am home when I'm inside.
And even more, I find my pleasure, too,
From seeing the delight you take in me,
The comfort, quiet joy, and ecstasy
That it is my gift to give to you.
 


Loving you is something that comes easy,
Like walking in the sunshine to a song,
Like being in a place where you belong,
Like finding reasons when you know you're ready.
Nor do I care that working days are dreary,
The pay's a pittance and the hours are long.
Knowing that you love me keeps me strong,
The light within that lets me see life clearly.
Why is love the music of our meaning,
The lilt that makes our labor worth our living,
The loveliness no platitude can bear?
In you I have a harvest past all gleaning,
A gift arrested in the act of giving,
A moment of delight that's always there.
 


More love is in my heart than any heaven—
Angels, God, and saints—can ever hold.
Though we're apart, I have you in my garden,
Touching you as Time turns into gold.
How could our love long last, to darkness driven,
Except we conjure up our own dear Eden,
With pleasures far more fierce than dreams foretold.
 

My love is something separate
From what we say or do.
Though we might have it out with words,
I'm still in love with you.
Just as waves ignore the rocks
On their way to shore,
And keep on coming even if
They see what lies in store,
So I will come, no matter what,
And break, and come again,
And break against your wilderness
Beyond all joy and pain.
 


Night comes to me throughout the day
And closes my external door.
I know that I am in for more
Unhappiness, and yet I stay.
The pain of missing you is less
Than that of missing thoughts of you.
And so I'd rather suffer through
This torture than face emptiness.
I want you with me, even though
You're not with me. You are the light
That gets me through this awful night
Yet brings the darkness where I go.
 

I
No matter what our troubles, I still love you,
As though a part of me were also you.
Life isn't easy, but I know without you
There will be bitterness in all I do.
I feel the broken heaven in my heart,
The blight that will outlast the years of healing,
The darkness underneath all time and art,
The pain that from within there's no concealing.
We were so much in love when we first met,
A river that would reach, in time, the sea.
We ought not let despair turn to regret,
But be through choice what love chose us to be.
No love can last except it be through will.
Were wastelands in our path, I'd love you still.
 


Our love is torn by miles, not by choice.
Soon, soon, my darling, I'll be coming home.
At night I play your body and your voice,
But soon the hands and cries will be your own.
I want to love you all the hours we've missed,
And do the things I've fantasized for you:
Kiss you all the places my mind's kissed,
And put you everywhere I've wanted to.
My only fear's desiring you so much
That dream will overwhelm reality;
Time, for both of us, must temper touch
So love can once again be slow and free.
My mind's already half insane with pleasure;
Soon, soon my body will consume its treasure.
 
A
I
Our love's a place where I no longer live;
That was a home, and now is just a house.
I went back in my heart the other day,
But nothing in there struck me as my own.
Strange how life moves on, and what we cherish
Turns to something alien in our hands.
And later, when we try to comprehend it,
It fades into the twilight of our tears.
I woke again upon a sunny morning,
Alive to what I hoped would be a song.
You were yesterday, which I remembered
As though it were a year or two ago.
 
A
Passion may remain a gift,
But love is not for free.
To love and be loved two must give,
Or love is not to be.
Love is a decision made
Not once, but every day.
Two must move to set aside
The mountains in the way.
Two must act to take apart
The walls of me and you,
Just as in the act of love
One's joy brings joy to two.
Just as love's pure ecstasy
Makes others joys our own,
Just so will love in daily life
Make sweet green fields of stone.
 


Perhaps it's far too early to reveal
A feeling not yet ready to be love.
The light of dawn, though hesitant, is real;
Real as well the hopes that time will prove.
I dance across the meadows of my heart
Carrying doubts that mingle joy and fear.
I know I'm half myself when we're apart;
All I want is with me when you're near.
 

I
Please don't mind if I make love to you
Imagining another in my arms.
No one special—anyone will do
Whose claims have not yet sanitized her charms.
Lust loves not love, but finds its joy in power:
To stir someone to sunlit ecstasy;
To purchase someone's person by the hour;
To force the flesh to yield the fantasy.
Love loves not lust, but finds its joy in giving:
Pleasure, yes, but passion slowly fades.
Affection, yes, but one needs more from living:
The knife-sharp edge of lust that love betrays.
Give then, my love, the flesh that spurs the dream,
As I for you, that lust might love redeem.
 

Precisely the polarities
Parenthesizing pleasure
Persuade us to anesthetize
The love we fear to feel.
A train of trivialities,
Buried, becomes treasure,
As we sentimentalize
A boredom that was real.
How might we find a fantasy
That strides into the heart,
Awakening the winter wind
Bearing death and pain?
How might we live an ecstasy
That picks our joys apart,
Leaving what we love behind
On wings, on winds, in chains?
 

I
Pretend this poem is me, and I am with you;
I hold you in the circle of my fire.
Come into me, and time and space will vanish,
You and I alone, joined at the root.
There is a special room where I am with you;
I close the door and you are in my arms.
You become my skin, my self, my world,
Till I go back to sleep in lonely darkness.
So we defeat the miles and months between us;
We make love in our hearts if not in touch.
You are more to me in hope and passion
Than any man who brushes by my day.
 

--One can be unhappy by oneself, but to be truly
tormented, one must love.
--Love is harder to accept than to give.
--To love is to embrace life. To love fully is to embrace
both death and life.
--The secret of happiness is simple: Be loving, giving,
caring.
Why, then, are so many unhappy?
Because they are afraid.
--Love only yourself, and you are alone.
Love only one other, and the two of you are alone.
Love only your family, and your family is alone.
Love only your nation, and your nation is alone.
There can be no communion, not even with yourself,
except through love of God.
 

So who said it was easy to keep old flames burning?
Even experts could use a little divine help now and
then.
The easy part is to go out and be brilliant as
Shakespeare.
Harder—much harder—to be the light dancing in
someone else's eyes.
Lights such as love require more faith than fuel.
Of all leaps, the most dangerous is into the mind of
your lover.
Regarding miracles: What is less explicable than
Remaining in love through the long icy anguish of
anger?
All lovers long for freedom only slightly less than they
fear it.
In the end, love burns not desire but fear.
Not one of us would be capable of keeping the fire
burning
Except for the knowledge that it is the sweetest, best,
and most beautiful thing in our lives.
 
A
I
Take it as a given that I love you,
And let the conversation go from there.
There isn't much I wouldn't do to please you,
So tell me what to do to make you care.
Tell me what it is that turns you from me,
And why you cannot cherish who I am,
And why you must insist that you still love me
When so much that I do you cannot stand.
The truth is not at all what we imagine,
Reaching regions deeper than our thoughts.
Needs are rarely troubled by opinions,
And love gives no advice unless it's sought.
So plunge into yourself as in a sea,
Then tell me truly what you want of me.
 


Tell me more, my love, how much you love me;
When I am hungry, chill me with a kiss.
Endlessly proclaim your admiration,
Never try to hide your fascination,
Though at times I may do aught amiss.
You, of course, may ask the same of me.
That you put nothing in your life above me
Will aid in me a similar dedication.
Only thus do lovers spin their bliss.
 


Thank you for staying in my life.
How could I have ushered you away?
Another person might have made me pay,
Needing the sweet vengeance of my grief.
Kindness is in everything you do.
You must love me very much to stay.
Often now, some moment of each day,
Unbidden, I am grateful I have you.
 


The chance of happiness equals the risk of pain.
Whenever you love, it's too good to be true.
Even so, it's truer than you believe,
Nor will you know till it vanishes again.
Time is a sea which opens where you cleave
Yet roils over what you leave behind.
For now, my love sings in the stars,
Or hisses against rocks like the sea,
Unraveling your life when you pause to grieve,
Returning with the sunlight, with the rain.
 


The difference between love and lust is:
Love is about you.
Lust is about me.
 


The first true sign of love is anger:
What we need, we're likely to resent.
Each needing, needed, leaned on, leaning,
No longer free standing stone and white.
The wistful, tender fear of finity
Yields a darker shimmer of sublimity.
Now indeed some sunny, delicate blight
Inaugurates a subterranean keening.
None can turn away and not be bent,
Each in each part self, part untouched stranger.
 


There are no bars to our embrace,
No presence more than in the heart.
We live our lives with love and grace,
Together still, though still apart.
No presence more than in the heart,
No touch more salient than a dream.
Together still, though still apart,
We are more lucky than we seem.
No touch more salient than a dream,
Though dreams alone must sometimes be.
We are more lucky than we seem
If I trust you, and you trust me.
Though dreams alone must sometimes be,
We live our lives with love and grace.
If I trust you, and you trust me,
There are no bars to our embrace.
 

I
There are some pleasures I would try with you
So sweet I cannot tell you what they are.
For love, the dark provides a better view
Of things that words or light may often mar.
So close your eyes and let go of your will;
Let me guide you blind to ecstasy.
Open doors and let desire fill
Each orifice my tongue might let me see.
Beauty's not the slave of just one sense,
But master of them all. The inner eye,
Awake to an aesthetic far more dense
Than sight alone can know, awaits your cry.
So join me in the splendors of the night
Where touch becomes our eyes, and love our light.
 


There is no life without its share of pain,
Nor can you love and not feel agony,
A need whose hunger drives you near insane,
A state in which you must, but cannot be.
There is no cure, nor anything to say,
Nor any aspirin for unhappiness.
Other friends and loves will come your way
And then pass on through death or faithlessness.
And so if you would ever dwell in joy,
You must embrace the agony of sorrow.
Time will all you love and need destroy,
But you will heal to love again tomorrow.
 


Truth is rarely an expression of love:
Honesty most often precedes pain.
In hope there is the fragrance of illusion;
Romance requires the charm of light confusion;
The best lovers are criminally insane.
Yet lies, eventually, will suck out passion.
One must be truthful if one hopes to love:
Not cruelly, but enough to ease delusion.
Each love must be broken, then built back again.
 

A
We met as merely words upon a screen,
Disembodied souls who found a mate
Through mind alone, and unsuspected yearning.
We fell in love the best way, sight unseen,
Pure hunger than nor feast nor flesh could sate,
Two hidden flames fair fed by phrases burning.
Most find their way by sight into the heart,
Loving first what must most quickly change
And only then what will the years endure.
We did the opposite, though not by art,
Taking steps that we did not arrange
Along a path both passionate and sure.
 

We met upon the Internet,
A friendship electronic,
Expressed alone in words and thoughts,
Inevitably platonic.
We live too far apart for us
To mingle in the flesh,
But much more close than family,
Our hearts and feelings mesh.
Your dear, dear self reveals itself
Without a voice or face.
We have our own sweet home within
Our precious cyberspace.
 


We started out as friends and now it's love.
How beautiful to move so easily
From comradeship to passionate intimacy,
Pure gain, with no rough edges to remove.
This turn was nothing I'd been thinking of,
No maybes or perhapses, consciously.
I knew desire, but love was not for me
Until I felt my heart from friendship move.
I never felt so happily at home
As I do now, so rich in what life brings.
Your pleasure is now mine, as mine is yours.
I never realized that my life alone
Flitted like a ghost among dead things,
Glancing in through other people's doors.
 

What makes stars romantic? Is it the beauty
Of a night sky dark lit with diamonds?
Or the wilderness of blue-white witnesses
Staring wordless back across the abyss?
Or the fascination of forever? For love
Is a fragment of forever lodged in the heart.
Is it the need for two when one seems so small?
The desire to touch in the temple? The vast, lonely
Field of life in which love, too, is a light
Amidst darkness? So many lovers scattered across
The black canopy like burning dust.
Or is it the passion at a star's heart?
The heat of love lighting the emptiness,
Hurling its ardor across light years of sorrow
To tell us something about what yearns within?
 


When at the same time one feels joy and sorrow,
Sunlit sadness weeping golden tears,
Glad of today, but wary of tomorrow,
Half-consumed by pride and half by tears;
When one possesses what one most desires
Yet knows that one must soon that fortune lose,
Rich in all that happiness requires,
Yet poor, for what one knows one would not choose;
When the day, rolling in its glory,
Must meet its gaudy end in unsought night,
Then one must find the beauty in one's story,
And, like the sun unceasing, pour forth light.
So will I, till you come home again,
Still feel this joy resplendent through my pain.
 


When we broke up, you said you'd always love me.
Always, you said, always we'd be friends.
But soon I saw you wanted nothing of me,
And then I understood that's how it ends.
You said, “Well, it's much harder than I thought.”
I guess it's always easier to lie.
You said, “Well, ask me anything you want.”
But I was much too frightened to ask why.
I guess it doesn't matter why we failed,
Or why I love you after all you've done,
Or why the harshest truths must be unveiled
After the last train has come and gone.
I miss you and I love you, even though
What happened lies too deep for me to know.
 

I
You are everything I ever wanted.
On you my future happiness depends.
Unless I'm with you all my thoughts are haunted.
After seeing you, my unease ends.
Reason warns me that I am in danger:
Eventually, everything must fade.
My love, like yours, is flammable in anger.
Yet my trust is such, I'm not afraid.
Something in our love's more than emotion,
Underneath each thought and each desire;
Not even all the water in the ocean
Seems up to putting out this one small fire.
How could this be? Within our love is something
Immeasurable, infinite, and good.
Nothing in all life can match this one thing
Each other passion would be, if it could.
 

I
You don't love me, but ah! do I love you!
It kills me that right now you have another!
Each day I watch the antics of you two
Happy hopping birds and say, why bother?
But I am chained to you as fish to sea,
Or as the moon to Earth or Earth to sun.
The thought of letting go so tortures me
That I would rather let my anguish run.
I know that if I wait you will be mine.
Such love as this must sweep all walls away!
I am your natural light, and I will shine
Till due rotation turns your night to day.
Until then, this sorrow will remain:
My hope of joy must be my source of pain.
 
A

You had me for a night, then turned away,
Inspiring a love you didn't want.
I was a fairy you might unenchant
To show yourself that you could have your way.
And now I'm left with all the shame of love
That unashamed took pleasure in your joy.
You used me as a fake, erotic toy,
Not caring much what I was thinking of.
The worst is that I long for your caress.
I know you're just annoyed, which drives me mad!
But knowing how completely I've been had
Does not, alas, make me want you less.
 
GEL'S
A
You have an angel's face, a loving heart,
A peaceful, sunlit smile that lasts forever.
You are the whole, of which I am a part,
Not fully me unless we are together.
I know there is a world beyond our love
In which such thoughts are merely poetry.
But thinking of you now, I can't remove
The glow that shines on you from inside me.
How happy, happy life is when some tender
Feeling like a candle lights one's eyes.
For all my life you'll be my heart's true center,
Striding like a sun across my skies.
 


You left me, but you cannot leave my heart.
I hold you there, with or without your will.
No matter where you go, you will be part
Of me, my dearest friend and lover still.
I'll tell you of the pain I feel, and all
The things you've done that hurt and make me bleed.
And then your icy words you will recall,
And comfort me, and give me what I need.
This I can do alone, and yet the real
You lives and lies far beyond my touch.
But since my true intention is to steal
The you I loved, the real you isn't much.
Don't worry—I'll treat you tenderly:
The lovely you, you left behind with me.
 
R

You wrote your name upon her thigh
And looked at me. I wondered why
You hurt me so. What demon drew
You on to be so not like you?
Sometimes it seems you want to cause
Me grief, as if to test the loss
Of me, to see how much sweet pain
You need to feel alive again.
I love you, yet I fear a love
In which my function is to prove
Repeatedly you cannot lose
The thing you want but cannot choose.
I stay in hopes that you will see
Someday you cannot hope to be
Both fully loved and fully free,
For love comes only mutually.
 


You're like music playing in my head
Everywhere I go from day to day.
I try a door and think of you instead,
Not knowing where I am or what I'll say.
I live in a perpetual embrace,
Hugging the sweet thought that you are mine.
Walking through a park I touch your face,
Not caring if there's rain or bright sunshine.
The cause must be, of course, our love is new;
It can't go on like this for years and years.
I must take note of other things than you
And clear my head of smiles and grateful tears.
Yet such talk seems fantasy to me:
The world's the dream, and you reality.
 
SURPRING
Your fear is not surprising.
It's always ended badly:
Fury, betrayals, recriminations.
Then, for days and weeks and months
An agony worse than grief
Because you also feel like such a fool.
Love is like diving or rock climbing:
Spectacular, but your heart sticks in your mouth
Every moment you're there.
There's an ease in not caring,
A looseness in the belly.
Then, as love approaches, a knot tightens like a snake.
Being alone and free is like looking in from the
outside:
People give and get affection,
Are seized by extraordinary happiness and pain,
Live in prison and in heaven,
Deal with the necessity of working on what must be
worked out,
While you watch them as if they were on
Life is full of love and difficulty.
Its riches cannot be gotten at except through choice.
You must enter it by loving this person or that person,
And people inevitably fall short of your hopes.
But to live and not love, and not be loved,
Is like spending your entire life alone in your room.
 
I
I
Your heart broke when I said I had to leave you
To serve our country somewhere far away.
But every day tells me how much I love you,
And how I'll mend it once I'm home to stay.
For life is but a dream, and we the dreamers,
Making what we will of what we are.
When gates clang shut, we are our own redeemers,
As love leaves for us a door ajar.
So dream with me these empty months of sorrow
As we find ways to be together still.
No longing can be brighter than tomorrow,
Nor dream less certain than our strength of will.


The woods are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head:
But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.
Where are now the warring kings,
Word be-mockers? By the Rood,
Where are now the watring kings?
An idle word is now their glory,
By the stammering schoolboy said,
Reading some entangled story:
The kings of the old time are dead;
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.
Then nowise worship dusty deeds,
Nor seek, for this is also sooth,
To hunger fiercely after truth,
Lest all thy toiling only breeds
New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth
Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass
Seek, then, for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs the cold star-bane
Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth.


Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell.
And to its lips thy story tell,
And they thy comforters will be.
Rewording in melodious guile
Thy fretful words a little while,
Till they shall singing fade in ruth
And die a pearly brotherhood;
For words alone are certain good:
Sing, then, for this is also sooth.
I must be gone: there is a grave
Where daffodil and lily wave,
And I would please the hapless faun,
Buried under the sleepy ground,
With mirthful songs before the dawn.
His shouting days with mirth were crowned;
And still I dream he treads the lawn,
Walking ghostly in the dew,
Pierced by my glad singing through,
My songs of old earth's dreamy youth:
But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou!
For fair are poppies on the brow:
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.


There was a man whom Sorrow named his Friend,
And he, of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming,
Went walking with slow steps along the gleaming
And humming Sands, where windy surges wend:
And he called loudly to the stars to bend
From their pale thrones and comfort him, but they
Among themselves laugh on and sing alway:
And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend
Cried out, Dim sea, hear my most piteous story.!


The sea Swept on and cried her old cry still,
Rolling along in dreams from hill to hill.
He fled the persecution of her glory
And, in a far-off, gentle valley stopping,
Cried all his story to the dewdrops glistening.
But naught they heard, for they are always listening,
The dewdrops, for the sound of their own dropping.
And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend
Sought once again the shore, and found a shell,
And thought, I will my heavy story tell
Till my own words, re-echoing, shall send
Their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart;
And my own talc again for me shall sing,
And my own whispering words be comforting,
And lo! my ancient burden may depart.
Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim;
But the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone
Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan
Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him.


What do you make so fair and bright?
I make the cloak of Sorrow:
O lovely to see in all men's sight
Shall be the cloak of Sorrow,
In all men's sight.
What do you build with sails for flight?
I build a boat for Sorrow:
O swift on the seas all day and night
Saileth the rover Sorrow,
All day and night.
What do you weave with wool so white?
I weave the shoes of Sorrow:
Soundless shall be the footfall light

In all men's ears of Sorrow,
Sudden and light.


Trouble his sleeping: give him dreams of me.


I passed along the water's edge below the humid trees,
My spirit rocked in evening light, the rushes round my knees,
My spirit rocked in sleep and sighs; and saw the moorfowl pace
All dripping on a grassy slope, and saw them cease to chase
Each other round in circles, and heard the eldest speak:
Who holds the world between His bill and made us strong or weak
Is an undying moorfowl, and He lives beyond the sky.
The rains are from His dripping wing, the moonbeams from His eye.
I passed a little further on and heard a lotus talk:
Who made the world and ruleth it, He hangeth on a stalk,
For I am in His image made, and all this tinkling tide
Is but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide.
A little way within the gloom a roebuck raised his eyes
Brimful of starlight, and he said: The Stamper of the Skies,
He is a gentle roebuck; for how else, I pray, could He
Conceive a thing so sad and soft, a gentle thing like me?
I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say:
Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay,
He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night
His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.


The island dreams under the dawn
And great boughs drop tranquillity;
The peahens dance on a smooth lawn,
A parrot sways upon a tree,
Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea.

Here we will moor our lonely ship
And wander ever with woven hands,
Murmuring softly lip to lip,
Along the grass, along the sands,
Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands:
How we alone of mortals are
Hid under quiet boughs apart,
While our love grows an Indian star,
A meteor of the burning heart,
One with the tide that gleams, the wings that gleam and
dart,
The heavy boughs, the burnished dove
That moans and sighs a hundred days:
How when we die our shades will rove,
When eve has hushed the feathered ways,
With vapoury footsole by the water's drowsy blaze.


Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,
And over the mice in the barley sheaves;
Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,
And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.
The hour of the waning of love has beset us,
And weary and worn are our sad souls now;
Let us patt, ere the season of passion forget us,
With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.




Your eyes that once were never weary of mine
Are bowed in sotrow under pendulous lids,
Because our love is waning.
And then She:
Although our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep.
How far away the stars seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!
Pensive they paced along the faded leaves,
While slowly he whose hand held hers replied:
Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.
The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves
Fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once
A rabbit old and lame limped down the path;
Autumn was over him: and now they stood
On the lone border of the lake once more:
Turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves
Gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
In bosom and hair.
Ah, do not mourn, he said,
That we are tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell.


I sat on cushioned otter-skin:
My word was law from Ith to Emain,

And shook at Inver Amergin
The hearts of the world-troubling seamen,
And drove tumult and war away
From girl and boy and man and beast;
The fields grew fatter day by day,
The wild fowl of the air increased;
And every ancient Ollave said,
While he bent down his fading head.
He drives away the Northern cold.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.
I sat and mused and drank sweet wine;
A herdsman came from inland valleys,
Crying, the pirates drove his swine
To fill their dark-beaked hollow galleys.
I called my battle-breaking men
And my loud brazen battle-cars
From rolling vale and rivery glen;
And under the blinking of the stars
Fell on the pirates by the deep,
And hurled them in the gulph of sleep:
These hands won many a torque of gold.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.
But slowly, as I shouting slew
And trampled in the bubbling mire,
In my most secret spirit grew
A whirling and a wandering fire:
I stood: keen stars above me shone,
Around me shone keen eyes of men:
I laughed aloud and hurried on
By rocky shore and rushy fen;
I laughed because birds fluttered by,
And starlight gleamed, and clouds flew high,
And rushes waved and waters rolled.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.
And now I wander in the woods


When summer gluts the golden bees,
Or in autumnal solitudes
Arise the leopard-coloured trees;
Or when along the wintry strands
The cormorants shiver on their rocks;
I wander on, and wave my hands,
And sing, and shake my heavy locks.
The grey wolf knows me; by one ear
I lead along the woodland deer;
The hares run by me growing bold.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the Beech leaves
old.
I came upon a little town
That slumbered in the harvest moon,
And passed a-tiptoe up and down,
Murmuring, to a fitful tune,
How I have followed, night and day,
A tramping of tremendous feet,
Deserted on a doorway seat,
And bore it to the woods with me;
Of some inhuman misery
Our married voices wildly trolled.
They will not hush, ta leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.
I sang how, when day's toil is done,
Orchil shakes out her long dark hair
That hides away the dying sun
And sheds faint odours through the air:
When my hand passed from wire to wire
It quenched, with sound like falling dew
The whirling and the wandering fire;
For the kind wires are torn and still,
And I must wander wood and hill
Through summer's heat and winter's cold.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.


Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout



And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To to waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For to world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than you can understand.


S one, Shy one,
Shy one of my heart,
She moves in the firelight
Pensively apart.
She carries in the dishes,
And lays them in a row.
To an isle in the water
With her would I go.




With catries in the candles,
And lights the curtained room,
Shy in the doorway
And shy in the gloom;
And shy as a rabbit,
Helpful and shy.
To an isle in the water
With her would I fly.


Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.


waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play,
Though you glow and you glance, though you purr and you dart;
In the Junes that were warmer than these are, the waves were more
gay,
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.
The herring are not in the tides as they were of old;
My sorrow! for many a creak gave the creel in the-cart
That carried the take to Sligo town to be sold,
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.


And ah, you proud maiden, you are not so fair when his oar
Is heard on the water, as they were, the proud and apart,
Who paced in the eve by the nets on the pebbly shore,
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.

FAR
Good Father John O'Hart
In penal days rode out
To a Shoneen who had free lands
And his own snipe and trout.
In trust took he John's lands;
Sleiveens were all his race;
And he gave them as dowers to his daughters.
And they married beyond their place.
But Father John went up,
And Father John went down;
And he wore small holes in his Shoes,
And he wore large holes in his gown.
All loved him, only the shoneen,
Whom the devils have by the hair,
From the wives, and the cats, and the children,
To the birds in the white of the air.
The birds, for he opened their cages
As he went up and down;
And he said with a smile, Have peace now;
And he went his way with a frown.
But if when anyone died
Came keeners hoarser than rooks,
He bade them give over their keening;
For he was a man of books.

And these were the works of John,
When, weeping score by score,
People came into Colooney;
For he'd died at ninety-four.
There was no human keening;
The birds from Knocknarea
And the world round Knocknashee
Came keening in that day.
The young birds and old birds
Came flying, heavy and sad;
Keening in from Tiraragh,
Keening from Ballinafad;
Keening from Inishmurray.
Nor stayed for bite or sup;
This way were all reproved
Who dig old customs up.


C round me, little childer;
There, don't fling stones at me
Because I mutter as I go;
But pity Moll Magee.
My man was a poor fisher
With shore lines in the say;
My work was saltin herrings
The whole of the long day.
And sometimes from the Saltin shed
I scarce could drag my feet,
Under the blessed moonlight,
Along thc pebbly street.


I'd always been but weakly,
And my baby was just born;
A neighbour minded her by day,
I minded her till morn.
I lay upon my baby;
Ye little childer dear,
I looked on my cold baby
When the morn grew frosty and clear.
A weary woman sleeps so hard!
My man grew red and pale,
And gave me money, and bade me go
To my own place, Kinsale.
He drove me out and shut the door.
And gave his curse to me;
I went away in silence,
No neighbour could I see.
The windows and the doors were shut,
One star shone faint and green,
The little straws were turnin round
Across the bare boreen.
I went away in silence:
Beyond old Martin's byre
I saw a kindly neighbour
Blowin her mornin fire.
She drew from me my story
My money's all used up,
And still, with pityin', scornin eye,
She gives me bite and sup.
She says my man will surely come
And fetch me home agin;
But always, as I'm movin round,
Without doors or within,

Pilin the wood or pilin the turf,
Or goin to the well,
I'm thinkin of my baby
And keenin to mysel'.
And Sometimes I am sure she knows
When, openin wide His door,
God lights the stats, His candles,
And looks upon the poor.
So now, ye little childer,
Ye won't fling stones at me;
But gather with your shinin looks
And pity Moll Magee.


Lay me in a cushioned chair;
Carry me, ye four,
With cushions here and cushions there,
To see the world once more.
To stable and to kennel go;
Bring what is there to bring;
Lead my Lollard to and fro,
Or gently in a ring.
put the chair upon the grass:
That I may contented pass
From these earthly bounds.
His eyelids droop, his head falls low,
His old eyes cloud with dreams;
The sun upon all things that grow
Falls in sleepy streams.
And now the old man's dreams are gone,
He smooths the long brown nose.
And now moves many a pleasant tongue
Upon his wasted hands,
For leading aged hounds and young
The huntsman near him stands.
Make the hills reply.
The huntsman loosens on the morn
A gay wandering cry.
Fire is in the old man's eyes,
His fingers move and sway,
And when the wandering music dies
They hear him feebly say,
Make the hills reply.
I cannot blow upon my horn,
I can but weep and sigh.
Servants round his cushioned place
Are with new sorrow wrung;
Hounds are gazing on his face,
Aged hounds and young.
One blind hound only lies apart
On the sun-smitten grass;
He holds deep commune with his heart:
The moments pass and pass;
The blind hound with a mournful din
Lifts slow his wintry head;
The servants bear the body in;
The hounds wail for the dead.



Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!
Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:
Man battling with the bitter tide;
The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,
Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;
And thine own sadness, where of stars, grown old
In dancing silver-sandalled on the sea,
Sing in their high and lonely melody.
Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate,
I find under the boughs of love and hate,
In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way.
Come near, come near, come near Ah, leave me still
A little space for the rose-breath to fill!
Lest I no more bear common things that crave;
The weak worm hiding down in its small cave,
The field-mouse running by me in the grass,
And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass;
But seek alone to hear the strange things said
By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,
And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.
Come near; I would, before my time to go,
Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.


I have long waited, mother, for that word:
But wherefore now?
There is a man to die;
You have the heaviest arm under the sky.
Whether under its daylight or its stars
My father stands amid his battle-cars.
But you have grown to be the taller man.
Yet somewhere under starlight or the sun
My father stands.
Aged, worn out with wars
On foot, on horseback or in battle-cars.
I only ask what way my journey lies,
For He who made you bitter made you wise.
The Red Branch camp in a great company
Between wood's rim and the horses of the sea.
Go there, and light a camp-fire at wood's rim;
But tell your name and lineage to him
Whose blade compels, and wait till they have found
Some feasting man that the same oath has bound.
Among those feasting men he dwelt,
And his young sweetheart close beside him knelt,
Stared on the mournful wonder of his eyes,
Even as Spring upon the ancient skies,
And pondered on the glory of his days;
And all around the harp-string told his praise,
And Conchubar, the Red Branch king of kings,
With his own fingers touched the brazen strings.
At last he spoke, Some man has made
His evening fire amid the leafy shade.
I have often heard him singing to and fro,
I have often heard the sweet sound of his bow.

Seek out what man he is.
One went and came.
He bade me let all know he gives his name
At the sword-point, and waits till we have found
Some feasting man that the same oath has bound.
He cried, I am the only man
Of all this host so bound from childhood on.
After short fighting in the leafy shade,
He spake to the young man, Is there no maid
Who loves you, no white arms to wrap you round,
Or do you long for the dim sleepy ground,
That you have come and dared me to my face?
The dooms of men are in God's hidden place,
Your head a while seemed like a woman's head
That I loved once.
Again the fighting sped,
But now the war-rage in him woke,
And through that new blade's guard the old blade broke,
And pierced him.
Speak before your breath is done.
I put you from your pain. I can no more.
While day its burden on to evening bore,
With head bowed on his knees he stayed;
Then Conchubar sent that sweet-throated maid,
And she, to win him, his grey hair caressed;
In vain her arms, in vain her soft white breast.
Then Conchubar, the subtlest of all men,
Ranking his Druids round him ten by ten,
Spake thus: he will dwell there and brood
For three days more in dreadful quietude,
And then arise, and raving slay us all.
Chaunt in his ear delusions magical,
That he may fight the horses of the sea.


The Druids took them to their mystery,
And chaunted for three days.
he stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.


Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men's souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.

Brooding no more upon God's wars
In his divine homestead,
He would go weave out of the stars
A chaplet for your head.
And all folk seeing him bow down,
And white stars tell your praise,
Would come at last to God's great town,
Led on by gentle ways;
And God would bid His warfare cease,
Saying all things were well;
And softly make a rosy peace,
A peace of Heaven with Hell.


Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!
The tall thought-woven sails, that flap unfurled
Above the tide of hours, trouble the air,
And God's bell buoyed to be the water's care;
While hushed from fear, or loud with hope, a band
With blown, spray-dabbled hair gather at hand,
Turn if you may from battles never done,
I call, as they go by me one by one,
Danger no refuge holds, and war no peace,
For him who hears love sing and never cease,
Beside her clean-swept hearth, her quiet shade:
But gather all for whom no love hath made
A woven silence, or but came to cast
A song into the air, and singing passed
To smile on the pale dawn; and gather you
Who have sought more than is in rain or dew,
Or in the sun and moon, or on the earth,
Or sighs amid the wandering, starry mirth,
Or comes in laughter from the sea's sad lips,

And wage God's battles in the long grey ships.
The sad, the lonely, the insatiable,
To these Old Night shall all her mystery tell;
God's bell has claimed them by the little cry
Of their sad hearts, that may not live nor die.
Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!
You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled
Upon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring
The bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing.
Beauty grown sad with its eternity
Made you of us, and of the dim grey sea.
Our long ships loose thought-woven sails and wait,
For God has bid them share an equal fate;
And when at last, defeated in His wars,
They have gone down under the same white stars,
We shall no longer hear the little cry
Of our sad hearts, that may not live nor die.

A
We who are old, old and gay,
O so old!
Thousands of years, thousands of years,
If all were told:
Give to these children, new from the world,
Silence and love;
And the long dew-dropping hours of the night,
And the stars above:
Give to these children, new from the world,
Rest far from men.
Is anything better, anything better?
Tell us it then:


Sung by the people of Faery over Diarmuid and Grania, in their bridal sleep under a Cromlech.

Us who are old, old and gay,
O so old!
Thousands of years, thousands of years,
If all were told.


I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

A
The angels are stooping
Above your bed;
They weary of trooping
With the whimpering dead.
God's laughing in Heaven
To see you so good;
The Sailing Seven
Are gay with His mood.



I sigh that kiss you,
For I must own
That I shall miss you
When you have grown.


A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love:
The folk who are buying and selling,
The clouds on their journey above,
The cold wet winds ever blowing,
And the shadowy hazel grove
Where mouse-grey waters are flowing,
Threaten the head that I love.


The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man's image and his cry.
A girl arose that had red mournful lips
And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,
Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships
And proud as Priam murdered with his peers;
Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,
A climbing moon upon an empty sky,
And all that lamentation of the leaves,
Could but compose man's image and his cry.


When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.


I that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the
sea!
We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee;
And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the
sky,
Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.


A weariness comes from those dreamers, dew-dabbled, the lily and
rose;
Ah, dream not of them, my beloved, the flame of the meteor that goes,
Or the flame of the blue star that lingers hung low in the fall of the
dew:
For I would we were changed to white birds on the wandering foam:
I and you!


I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a shore,
Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no
more;
Soon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we
be,
Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the
sea!

A
I dreamed that one had died in a strange place
Near no accustomed hand,
And they had nailed the boards above her face,
The peasants of that land,
Wondering to lay her in that solitude,
And raised above her mound
A cross they had made out of two bits of wood,
And planted cypress round;
And left her to the indifferent stars above
Until I carved these words:
She was more beautiful than thy first love,
But now lies under boards.


All the heavy days are over;
Leave the body's coloured pride
Underneath the grass and clover,
With the feet laid side by side.
Bathed in flaming founts of duty
She'll not ask a haughty dress;
Carry all that mournful beauty
To the scented oaken press.

Did the kiss of Mother Mary
Put that music in her face?
Yet she goes with footstep wary,
Full of earth's old timid grace.
Mong the feet of angels seven
What a dancer glimmering!
All the heavens bow down to Heaven,
Flame to flame and wing to wing.


Who will go drive with him now,
And pierce the deep wood's woven shade,
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fear no more.
And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love's bitter mystery;
For he rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars.


He stood among a crowd;
His heart hung all upon a silken dress,
And he had known at last some tenderness,
Before earth took him to her stony care;
But when a man poured fish into a pile,


It seemed they raised their little silver heads,
And sang what gold morning or evening sheds
Upon a woven world-forgotten isle
Where people love beside the ravelled seas;
That Time can never mar a lover's vows
Under that woven changeless roof of boughs:
The singing shook him out of his new ease.
He wandered by the sands of Lissadell;
His mind ran all on money cares and fears,
And he had known at last some prudent years
Before they heaped his grave under the hill;
But while he passed before a plashy place,
A lug-worm with its grey and muddy mouth
Sang that somewhere to north or west or south
There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race
Under the golden or the silver skies;
That if a dancer stayed his hungry foot
It seemed the sun and moon were in the fruit:
And at that singing he was no more wise.
He mused beside the well of Scanavin,
He mused upon his mockers: without fail
His sudden vengeance were a country tale,
When earthy night had drunk his body in;
But one small knot-grass growing by the pool
Sang where unnecessary cruel voice
Old silence bids its chosen race rejoice,
Whatever ravelled waters rise and fall
Or stormy silver fret the gold of day,
And midnight there enfold them like a fleece
And lover there by lover be at peace.
The tale drove his fine angry mood away.
He slept under the hill of Lugnagall.
And might have known at last unhaunted sleep
Under that cold and vapour-turbaned steep,
Now that the earth had taken man and all:

Did not the worms that spired about his bones
Proclaim with that unwearied, reedy cry
That God has laid His fingers on the sky,
That from those fingers glittering summer runs
Upon the dancer by the dreamless wave.
Why should those lovers that no lovers miss
Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss?
The man has found no comfort in the grave.

A SRIES
There was a green branch hung with many a bell
When her own people ruled this tragic Eire;
And from its murmuring greenness, calm of Faery,
A Druid kindness, on all hearers fell.
It charmed away the merchant from his guile,
And turned the farmer's memory from his cattle,
And hushed in sleep the roaring ranks of battle:
And all grew friendly for a little while.
Ah, Exiles wandering over lands and seas,
And planning, plotting always that some morrow
May set a stone upon ancestral Sorrow!
I also bear a bell-branch full of ease.
I tore it from green boughs winds tore and tossed
Until the sap of summer had grown weary!
I tore it from the barren boughs of Eire,
That country where a man can be so crossed;
Can be so battered, badgered and destroyed
That he's a loveless man: gay bells bring laughter
That shakes a mouldering cobweb from the rafter;
And yet the saddest chimes are best enjoyed.


Gay bells or sad, they bring you memories
Of half-forgotten innocent old places:
We and our bitterness have left no traces
On Munster grass and Connemara skies.


Although I shelter from the rain
Under a broken tree,
My chair was nearest to the fire
In every company
That talked of love or politics,
Ere Time transfigured me.
Though lads are making pikes again
For some conspiracy,
And crazy rascals rage their fill
At human tyranny,
My contemplations are of Time
That has transfigured me.
There's not a woman turns her face
Upon a broken tree,
And yet the beauties that I loved
Are in my memory;
I spit into the face of Time
That has transfigured me.

Was weary night and day;
For half his flock were in their beds,
Or under green sods lay.

Once, while he nodded on a chair,
At the moth-hour of eve,
Another poor man sent for him,
And he began to grieve.
I have no rest, nor joy, nor peace,
For people die and die';
And after cried he, God forgive!
My body spake, not I!
He knelt, and leaning on the chair
He prayed and fell asleep;
And the moth-hour went from the fields,
And stars began to peep.
They slowly into millions grew,
And leaves shook in the wind;
And God covered the world with shade,
And whispered to mankind.
Upon the time of sparrow-chirp
When the moths came once more.

Stood upright on the floor.
Mavrone, mavrone! the man has died
While I slept on the chair';
He roused his horse out of its sleep,
And rode with little care.
He rode now as he never rode,
By rocky lane and fen;
The sick man's wife opened the door:
Father! you come again!
And is the poor man dead? he cried.
He died an hour ago.

In grief swayed to and fro.


When you were gone, he turned and died
As merry as a bird.
He knelt him at that word.
He Who hath made the night of stars
For souls who tire and bleed,
Sent one of His great angels down
To help me in my need.
He Who is wrapped in purple robes,
With planets in His care,
Had pity on the least of things
Asleep upon a chair.


Beloved gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile.
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For ill things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

I
While I wrought out these fitful rhymes,
My heart would brim with dreams about the times
When we bent down above the fading coals
And talked of the dark folk who live in souls
Of passionate men, like bats in the dead trees;
And of the wayward twilight companies
Who sigh with mingled sorrow and content,
Because their blossoming dreams have never bent
Under the fruit of evil and of good:
And of the embattled flaming multitude
Who rise, wing above wing, flame above flame,
And, like a storm, cry the Ineffable Name,


And with the clashing of their sword-blades make
A rapturous music, till the morning break
And the white hush end all but the loud beat
Of their long wings, the flash of their white feet.

COMG
Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less of them,
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan,
Trails all about the written page.
When Time began to rant and rage
The measure of her flying feet
Made Ireland's heart begin to beat;
And Time bade all his candles flare
To light a measure here and there;
And may the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon a measured guietude.
Nor may I less be counted one
Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body's laid asleep.
For the elemental creatures go
About my table to and fro,
That hurry from unmeasured mind
To rant and rage in flood and wind,
Yet he who treads in measured ways

May surely barter gaze for gaze.
Man ever journeys on with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.
Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon,
A Druid land, a Druid tune.!
While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew.
From our birthday, until we die,
Is but the winking of an eye;
And we, our singing and our love,
What measurer Time has lit above,
And all benighted things that go
About my table to and fro,
Are passing on to where may be,
In truth's consuming ecstasy,
No place for love and dream at all;
For God goes by with white footfall.
I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.



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.


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?


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, re-made, like a casket of
gold
For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my
heart.


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 atms,
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.


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.

The 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 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.

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 aways 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.


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 aflame,
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 lads 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.

MOR
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 y 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.


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.


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.

T


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.


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.

T
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.




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 God's 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
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.


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.


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,
And 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 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 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 cromlech on the shore,
The grey caim 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.



Ih 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, older 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.

A
I 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 fair,
Or remembering hers they will find no other face fair
Till all the valleys of the world have been withered away.

T
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.

ARS T T
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 unhound,
Your breast will not lie by the breast
Of your beloved in sleep.


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.


I have come by the windy way
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.


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 moms 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?




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.


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.



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.


COMG
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 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.



WISS
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.

WISS T AVEN
H 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.







WN
A

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
May not lie on the breast nor his lips on thc 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?


When I play on my fiddle in Dooney.
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
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.











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 Pairc-na-lee.


I 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.




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 seems impossible, and so
All that you need is patience.
Heart cries, 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.


O 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.


N 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.

WIRING
I 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 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.


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.


The yellow pool has overflowed,
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.

MSELVES

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.


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
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.

A

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.




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.

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.

If any man drew near
From across the lake,
Past the black winter trees,
Faint sounds of a flute.
- Richard Wright

Lily:
out of the water
out of itself

ground squirrel
balancing its tomato
on the garden fence
- Don Eulert

Nightfall,
Too dark to read the page
Too cold.

Just friends:
he watches my gauze dress
blowing on the line.


A little boy sings
on a terrace, eyes aglow.
Ridge spills upward.
- Robert Yehling

meteor shower
a gentle wave
wets our sandals


The lamp once out
Cool stars enter
The window frame.

Plum flower temple:
Voices rise
From the foothills

The crow has flown away:
swaying in the evening sun,
a leafless tree.

When I was young,
I thought, He holds her dear,
And shook with hate and fear.
But O! twas bitter wrong
If he could pass her by
With an indifferent eye.

OR
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,
That life and letters seem
But an heroic dream.


I had this thought a while 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.


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?


S 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.

OR


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
Men neither soul nor body has been crossed.


Ah, that Time could touch a form
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.




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
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

OR
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
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.


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.

AGITATI
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?

A


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?


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?

OR

A

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?

RE 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 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.


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: somewhere 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.

OR

A
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 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.


I whisphered, 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.
O 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.








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.

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;
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







Poets with whom I learned my trade.
Companions of the Cheshire Cheese,
Here's an old story I've remade,
Imagining twould better please
Your cars 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,
And 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.
They sang a drowsy song, Or snored,
For all were full of wine and meat.
The smoky torches made a glare
On metal Goban d hammered at,
On old deep silver rolling there
Or on somc still unemptied cup
That he, when frenzy stirred his thews,
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 rrembling with her passion said,

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.
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 cate 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 thc 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.

A
A


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 the 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


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.

A
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.




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.

A
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 instilt heaped upon him for his pains,
And for his open-handedness, disgrace;
Your enemy, an old fotil 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 ,


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 waked with her boy,
Had given but as the rest
Of the men and women of Troy,
A word and a jest.

THAThatED

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.




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 Guaire 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 Guaire 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 Guaire 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 sccond 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 moments stay
They sat upon their heels to rail,
And when old Guaire 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 eried, 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
But I do not seem to care.




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 eamed
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.


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.


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 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 a old sock full:
And there the king is but as the beggar.
The wind is old and still at play
While I must hurty 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.

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'Il 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 srrength.
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 accursed
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 dies
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 theres 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 aone 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 up stone on stone again,
And prayed and cursed and cursed and bed
From Maeve and all that juggling plain,
Nor gave God thanks till overhead
The clouds were brightening with the dawn.

A
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?


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 wagons
Do, but awake a hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons?


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?


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.


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 pain; the cataract still cries;
The everlasting taper lights the gloom;
All wisdom shut into his onyx eyes,
Our Father Rosicross sleeps in his tomb.

A WD
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!


H 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
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.


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.
These 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


Now must I these three praise
Three women that have wrought
What joy is in my days:
One because no thought,
Nor those unpassing cares,
No, not in these fifteen






Many-times-troubled years,
Could ever come between
Mind and delighted mind;
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 could 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.


S 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 thc 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?


Shelived 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.


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 govermnent appointed him.








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.


A 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, O dear.
It was an accident.



A
I 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.











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 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?


I
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 stairs to bed
Discoverers of forgotten truth
Or mere companions of my youth,
All, all are in my thoughts to-night being dead.






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.


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.

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.






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 pure-bred 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.


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


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.

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.

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.

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.






Some burn damp faggots, 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 al life's epitome.
What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?


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,

AIRM
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 county 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.


I 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 a 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.



A
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.


S 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 a 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.
Said 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 because the wick and oil are spent
And frozen are the channels of the blood,
My discontented heart to draw content
From beauty that is cast out of a mould
In bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,
Appears, but 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.


O 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?
O 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?

A
D 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 Beauvarlet.
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.

A
M Y 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.


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.
All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did 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,
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.


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 died
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 or a while half-flies
On 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 might have wished on the day
He came, 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 put his heart into some game
Till daytime, playtime seem the same;
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.


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.


I 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.


M 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.


C 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.


Sheis 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 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
Shemight, 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 sake's 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
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 lectern 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.


H do what you're bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.

A
C 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.

A
I it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, 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,
Was buried near the astrologer,
Yesterday 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.


Certain Artist 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 trees
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.

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.

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
Vnreckonable race;
And how should her heart fail her
Or sickness break her will
With her dead brother's valour
For an example still?




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 Diarmuid 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.


Her Friends Bring her a Christmas Tree
Ppardon, 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.








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,
Luxuriant song.
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.
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
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,

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.
He 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, cat, 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.

The cat creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does the cat know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?

The cat creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.


A

I
A 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
great responsibilities?


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.





A
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?
O 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.


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 here 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.




O little did they care who danced between,
And little she by whom her dance was seen
So she had outdanced 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.


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
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.






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 Athene 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?
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;
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.

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.


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.
Who understood
Whatever has been said, sighed, sung,
Howled, miau-d, barked, brayed, belled, yelled, cried, crowed,
Thereon replied: A cockerel
Crew from 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.
For though love has a spider's eye
To find out some appropriate pain
Aye, though all passion's in the glance
For every nerve, and tests a 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.
O! Solomon! let us try again.

A
He. Never until this night have I been stirred.
The elaborate starlight 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.


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.


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, vainglorious 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;
The 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.


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?


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.

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.


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 fantasy 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.








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
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.


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?

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 wisc.
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.
O 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 bridegroom 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.


Forone 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 fantasy'.

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.





That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
Those dying generations at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out Of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.


What shall I do with this absurdity
O heart, O troubled heart this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible
No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,
Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben's back
And had the livelong summer day to spend.
It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,





Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend
Until imagination, ear and eye,
Can be content with argument and deal
In abstract things; or be derided by
A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

I pace upon the battlements and stare
On the foundations of a house, or where
Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;
And send imagination forth
Under the day's declining beam, and call
Images and memories
From ruin or from ancient trees,
For I would ask a question of them all.
Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and once
When every silver candlestick or sconce
Lit up the dark mahogany and the wine.
A serving-man, that could divine
That most respected lady's every wish,
Ran and with the garden shears
Clipped an insolent farmer's ears
And brought them in a little covered dish.
Some few remembered still when I was young
A peasant girl commended by a Song,
Who'd lived somewhere upon that rocky place,
And praised the colour of her face,
And had the greater joy in praising her,
Remembering that, if walked she there,
Farmers jostled at the fair
So great a glory did the song confer.
And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,

Or else by toasting her a score of times,
Rose from the table and declared it right
To test their fancy by their sight;
But they mistook the brightness of the moon
For the prosaic light of day
Music had driven their wits astray
And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.
Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;
Yet, now I have considered it, I find
That nothing strange; the tragedy began
O may the moon and sunlight seem
One inextricable beam,
For if I triumph I must make men mad.
And I myself created Hanrahan
And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn
From somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.
Caught by an old man's juggleries
He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro
And had but broken knees for hire
And horrible splendour of desire;
I thought it all out twenty years ago:
Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;
And when that ancient ruffian's turn was on
He so bewitched the cards under his thumb
That all but the one card became
A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,
And that he changed into a hare.
Hanrahan rose in frenzy there
And followed up those baying creatures towards
O towards I have forgotten what enough!
I must recall a man that neither love
Nor music nor an enemy's clipped ear
Could, he was so harried, cheer;


A figure that has grown so fabulous
There's not a neighbour left to say
When he finished his dog's day:
An ancient bankrupt master of this house.
Before that ruin came, for centuries,
Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the knees
Or shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs,
And certain men-at-arms there were
Whose images, in the Great Memory stored,
Come with loud cry and panting breast
To break upon a sleeper's rest
While their great wooden dice beat on the board.
As I would question all, come all who can;
Come old, necessitous. half-mounted man;
And bring beauty's blind rambling celebrant;
The red man the juggler sent

Gifted with so fine an ear;
Did all old men and women, rich and poor,
Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,
Whether in public or in secret rage
As I do now against old age?
But I have found an answer in those eyes
That are impatient to be gone;
Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan,
For I need all his mighty memories.
Old lecher with a love on every wind,
Bring up out of that deep considering mind
All that you have discovered in the grave,
For it is certain that you have
Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing
Plunge, lured by a softening eye,
Or by a touch or a sigh,
Into the labyrinth of another's being;

Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or woman lost?
If on the lost, admit you turned aside
From a great labyrinth out of pride,
Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought
Or anything called conscience once;
And that if memory recur, the sun's
Under eclipse and the day blotted out.

It is time that I wrote my will;
I choose upstanding men
That climb the streams until
The fountain leap, and at dawn
Drop their cast at the side
Of dripping stone; I declare
They shall inherit my pride,
The pride of people that were
Bound neither to Cause nor to State.
Neither to slaves that were spat on,
Nor to the tyrants that spat,
The people of Burke and of Grattan
That gave, though free to refuse
Pride, like that of the morn,
When the headlong light is loose,
Or that of the fabulous horn,
Or that of the sudden shower
When all streams are dry,
Or that of the hour
When the swan must fix his eye
Upon a fading gleam,
Float out upon a long
Last reach of glittering stream
And there sing his last song.
And I declare my faith:


I mock Plotinus thought
And cry in Plato's teeth,
Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,
Aye, sun and moon and star, all,
And further add to that
That, being dead, we rise,
Dream and so create
Translunar paradise.
I have prepared my peace
With learned Italian things
And the proud stones of Greece,
Poet's imaginings
And memories of love,
Memories of the words of women,
All those things whereof
Man makes a superhuman,
Mirror-resembling dream.
As at the loophole there
The daws chatter and scream,
And drop twigs layer upon layer.
When they have mounted up,
The mother bird will rest
On their hollow top,
And so warm her wild nest.
I leave both faith and pride
To young upstanding men
Climbing the mountain-side,
That under bursting dawn
They may drop a fly;
Being of that metal made
Till it was broken by
This sedentary trade.
Now shall I make my soul,

Compelling it to study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath .
Seem but the clouds of the sky
When the horizon fades;
Or a bird's sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.



Ancestral Houses
Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical
Or servile shape, at others beck and call.
Had he not found it certain beyond dreams
That out of life's own self-delight had sprung
The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems
As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung



Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,
And not a fountain, were the symbol which
Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.
Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
Called architect and artist in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The gentleness none there had ever known;
But when the master's buried mice can play.
And maybe the great-grandson of that house,
For all its bronze and marble, s but a mouse.
O what if gardens where the peacock strays
With delicate feet upon old terraces,
Or else all Juno from an urn displays
Before the indifferent garden deities;
O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways
Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease
And Childhood a delight for every sense,
But take our greatness with our violence?
What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,
And buildings that a haughtier age designed,
The pacing to and fro on polished floors
Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined
With famous portraits of our ancestors;
What if those things the greatest of mankind
Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
But take our greatness with our bitterness?

My House
An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,

An acre of stony ground,
Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,
The sound of the rain or sound
Of every wind that blows;
The stilted water-hen
Crossing Stream again
Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;
A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,
A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,
A candle and written page.
In some like chamber, shadowing forth
How the daemonic rage
Imagined everything.
Benighted travellers
From markets and from fairs
Have seen his midnight candle glimmering.
Two men have founded here. A man-at-arms
Gathered a score of horse and spent his days
In this tumultuous spot,
Where through long wars and sudden night alarms
His dwindling score and he seemed castaways
Forgetting and forgot;
And I, that after me
My bodily heirs may find,
To exalt a lonely mind,
Befitting emblems of adversity.

By pen and paper lies,
That it may moralise
My days out of their aimlessness.
A bit of an embroidered dress
Covers its wooden sheath.
Curved like new moon, moon-luminous
It lay five hundred years.
Yet if no change appears
No moon; only an aching heart
Conceives a changeless work of art.
Our learned men have urged
That when and where twas forged
A marvellous accomplishment,
In painting or in pottery, went
From father unto son
And through the centuries ran
And seemed unchanging like the sword.
Soul's beauty being most adored,
Men and their business took
Me soul's unchanging look;
For the most rich inheritor,
Knowing that none could pass Heaven's door,
That loved inferior art,
Had such an aching heart
That he, although a country's talk
For silken clothes and stately walk.
Had waking wits; it seemed
Juno's peacock screamed.

My Descendants
Having inherited a vigorous mind
From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams
And leave a woman and a man behind
As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems
Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
And there's but common greenness after that.
And what if my descendants lose the flower
Through natural declension of the soul,
Through too much business with the passing hour,
Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?
May this laborious stair and this stark tower
Become a roofless min that the owl
May build in the cracked masonry and cry
Her desolation to the desolate sky.
The Primum Mobile that fashioned us
Has made the very owls in circles move;
And I, that count myself most prosperous,
Seeing that love and friendship are enough,
For an old neighbour's friendship chose the house
And decked and altered it for a girl's love,
And know whatever flourish and decline
These stones remain their monument and mine.

The Road at My Door
An affable Irregular,
A heavily-built Falstaffian man,
Comes cracking jokes of civil war
As though to die by gunshot were
The finest play under the sun.
A brown Lieutenant and his men,
Half dressed in national uniform,



Stand at my door, and I complain
Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
A pear-tree broken by the storm.
I count those feathered balls of soot
The moor-hen guides upon the stream.
To silence the envy in my thought;
And turn towards my chamber, caught
In the cold snows of a dream.

The Stare's Nest by My Window
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the state.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no cleat fact to be discerned:
Come build in he empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming
Emptiness
I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,
A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep
by.
Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind's eye.
In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,
The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop,
Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,
Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide
For the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astray
Because of all that senseless tumult, all but cried
Their legs long, delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,
Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs.
The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,
Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,
Have closed the ladies eyes, their minds are but a pool
Where even longing drowns under its own excess;
Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full
Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.
The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,
The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of
lace,


Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,
Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place
To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,
Nor hate of what's to come, nor pity for what's gone,
Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye's complacency,
The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.
I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
In something that all others understand or share;
But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth
A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,
The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,
Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.



ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
Protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about. There stood
Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
An ancient image made of olive wood
And gone are Phidias famous ivories
And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long

We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned
Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant
From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,
Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent
On master-work of intellect or hand,
No honour leave its mighty monument,
Has but one comfort left: all triumph would
But break upon his ghostly solitude.
But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say? That country round
None dared admit, if Such a thought were his,
Incendiary or bigot could be found
To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
Or break in bits the famous ivories
Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees.






When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
So the Platonic Year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.

Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,
An image of its state;
The wings half spread for flight,
The breast thrust out in pride
Whether to play, or to ride
Those winds that clamour of approaching night.
A man in his own secret meditation
Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made
In art or politics;
Some Platonist affirms that in the station
Where we should cast off body and trade
The ancient habit sticks,
And that if our works could
But vanish with our breath
That were a lucky death,

For triumph can but mar our solitude.
The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things, to end
What my laborious life imagined, even
The half-imagined, the half-written page;
O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

We, who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.

Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.



Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.

Violence upon the roads: violence of horses;
Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,
But wearied running round and round in their courses
All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:
Herodias daughters have returned again,
A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;
And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
According to the wind, for all are blind.
But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.


Through winter-time we call on spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter's best of all;
And after that there's nothing good
Because the spring-time has not come
Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb.


Much did I rage when young,
Being by the world oppressed,
But now with flattering tongue
It speeds the parting guest.


If you, that have grown old, were the first dead,
Neither catalpa tree nor scented lime
Should hear my living feet, nor would I tread
Where we wrought that shall break the teeth of Time.
Let the new faces play what tricks they will
In the old rooms; night can outbalance day,
Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,
The living seem more shadowy than they.



a strong ghost stand at the head
That my Michael may sleep sound,
Nor cry, nor turn in the bed
Till his morning meal come round;
And may departing twilight keep
All dread afar till morning's back.
That his mother may not lack
Her fill of sleep.
Bid the ghost have sword in fist:
Some there are, for I avow
Such devilish things exist,
Who have planned his murder, for they know
Of some most haughty deed or thought
That waits upon his future days,
And would through hatred of the bays
Bring that to nought.
Though You can fashion everything
From nothing every day, and teach
The morning stats to sing,
You have lacked articulate speech
To tell Your simplest want, and known,
Wailing upon a woman's knee,
All of that worst ignominy
Of flesh and bone;
And when through all the town there ran
The servants of Your enemy,
A woman and a man,
Unless the Holy Writings lie,
Hurried through the smooth and rough
And through the fertile and waste,
Protecting, till the danger past,
With human love.







A

I saw a staring virgin stand
Where holy Dionysus died,
And tear the heart out of his side.
And lay the heart upon her hand
And bear that beating heart away;
Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
As though God's death were but a play.
Another Troy must rise and set,
Another lineage feed the crow,
Another Argo's painted prow
Drive to a flashier bauble yet.
The Roman Empire stood appalled:
It dropped the reins of peace and war
When that fierce virgin and her Star
Out of the fabulous darkness called.

In pity for man's darkening thought
He walked that room and issued thence
In Galilean turbulence;
The Babylonian starlight brought
A fabulous, formless darkness in;
Odour of blood when Christ was slain
Made all Platonic tolerance vain
And vain all Doric discipline.





Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love's pleasure drives his love away,
The painter's brush consumes his dreams;
The herald's cry, the soldier's tread
Exhaust his glory and his might:
Whatever flames upon the night
Man's own resinous heart has fed.


Locke sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny
Out of his side.


Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium's mouth.
Out of nothing it came,
Out of the forest loam,
Out of dark night where lay
The crowns of Nineveh.


A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,
Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.
My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.
I knew that horse-play, knew it for a murderous thing.
What wholesome sun has ripened is wholesome food to eat,
And that alone; yet I, being driven half insane
Because of some green wing, gathered old mummy wheat
In the mad abstract dark and ground it grain by grain
And after baked it slowly in an oven; but now
I bring full-flavoured wine out of a barrel found



Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew
When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.
Stretch out your limbs and sleep a long Saturnian sleep;
I have loved you better than my soul for all my words,
And there is none so fit to keep a watch and keep
Unwearied eyes upon those horrible green birds.


I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire. a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

Her present image floats into the mind
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?



Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts O presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?


Chorus. Come praise Colonus horses, and come praise
The wine-dark of the wood's intricacies,
The nightingale that deafens daylight there,
If daylight ever visit where,
Unvisited by tempest or by sun,
Immortal ladies tread the ground
Dizzy with harmonious sound,
Semele's lad a gay companion.
And yonder in the gymnasts garden thrives
The self-sown, self-begotten shape that gives
Athenian intellect its mastery,
Even the grey-leaved olive-tree
Miracle-bred out of the living stone;
Nor accident of peace nor war
Shall wither that old marvel, for
The great grey-eyed Athene stares thereon.
Who comes into this country, and has come
Where golden crocus and narcissus bloom,
Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughter
And beauty-drunken by the water
Glittering among grey-leaved olive-trees,
Has plucked a flower and sung her loss;
Who finds abounding Cephisus
Has found the loveliest spectacle there is.
Because this country has a pious mind
And so remembers that when all mankind
But trod the road, or splashed about the shore,
Poseidon gave it bit and oar,
Every Colonus lad or lass discourses
Of that oar and of that bit;
Summer and winter, day and night,
Of horses and horses of the sea, white horses.




The true faith discovered was
When painted panel, statuary.
Glass-mosaic, window-glass,
Amended what was told awry
By some peasant gospeller;
Swept the Sawdust from the floor
Of that working-carpenter.
Miracle had its playtime where
In damask clothed and on a seat
Chryselephantine, cedar-boarded,
His majestic Mother sat
Stitching at a purple hoarded
That He might be nobly breeched
In starry towers of Babylon
Noah's freshet never reached.
King Abundance got Him on
Innocence; and Wisdom He.
That cognomen sounded best
Considering what wild infancy
Drove horror from His Mother's breast.
The Girl. I rage at my own image in the glass
That's so unlike myself that when you praise it
It is as though you praised another, or even
Mocked me with praise of my mere opposite;
And when I wake towards morn I dread myself,
For the heart cries that what deception wins
Cruelty must keep; therefore he warned and go
If you have seen that image and not the woman.
The Hero. I have raged at my own strength because
you have loved it.
The Girl. If you are no more strength than I am beauty

I had better find a convent and turn nun;
A man at least has all men's reverence
And needs no cruelty.
The Hero. I have heard one say
That men have reverence for th eir holiness
And not themselves.
The Girl. Say on and say
That only God has loved us for ourselves,
But what care I that long for a man's love?
The Fool by the Roadside When all works that have
From cradle run to grave
From grave to cradle run instead;
When thoughts that a fool
Has wound upon a spool
Are but loose thread, are but loose thread;
When cradle and spool are past
And I mere shade at last
Coagulate of stuff
Transparent like the wind,
I think that I may find
A faithful love, a faithful love.



A thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought
Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,
Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.
It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.




The south wind brought it longing, and the east wind despair,
The west wind made it pitiful, and the north wind afraid.
It feared to give its love a hurt with all the tempest there;
It feared the hurt that she could give and therefore it went mad.
I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,
I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer's had,
But O! my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the
wind;
I ran, I ran, from my love's side because my Heart went mad.


The Heart behind its rib laughed out. You have called me mad, it
said,
Because I made you turn away and run from that young child;
How could she mate with fifty years that was so wildly bred?
Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the
wild.
You but imagine lies all day, O murderer, I replied.
And all those lies have but one end, poor wretches to betray;
I did not find in any cage the woman at my side.
O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.
Speak all your mind, my Heart sang out, speak all your mind; who
cares,
Now that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she mistake
Her childish gratitude for love and match your fifty years?
O let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.

A

First Love
Though nurtured like the sailing moon
In beauty's murderous brood,
She walked awhile and blushed awhile
And on my pathway stood
Until I thought her body bore
A heart of flesh and blood.
But since I laid a hand thereon
And found a heart of stone
I have attempted many things
And not a thing is done,
For every hand is lunatic
That travels on the moon.
She smiled and that transfigured me
And left me but a lout,
Maundering here, and maundering there,
Emptier of thought
Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
When the moon sails out.

Human Dignity
Like the moon her kindness is,
If kindness I may call
What has no comprehension in't,
But is the same for all
As though my sorrow were a scene
Upon a painted wall.



So like a bit of stone I lie
Under a broken tree.
I could recover if I shrieked
My heart's agony
To passing bird, but I am dumb
From human dignity.

The Mermaid
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.

The Death of the Hare
I have pointed out the yelling pack,
The hare leap to the wood,
And when I pass a compliment
Rejoice as lover should
At the drooping of an eye,
At the mantling of the blood.
Then suddenly my heart is wrung
By her distracted air
And I remember wildness lost
And after, swept from there,
Am set down standing in the wood
At the death of the hare.

The Empty Cup
A crazy man that found a cup,
When all but dead of thirst,
Hardly dared to wet his mouth
Imagining, moon-accursed ,
That another mouthful
And his beating heart would burst.
October last I found it too
But found it dry as bone,
And for that reason am I crazed
And my sleep is gone.


His Memories
We should be hidden from their eyes,
Being but holy shows
And bodies broken like a thorn
Whereon the bleak north blows,
To think of buried Hector
And that none living knows.
The women take so little stock
In what I do or say
They'd sooner leave their cosseting
To hear a jackass bray;
My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay there
And did such pleasure take
She who had brought great Hector down





And put all Troy to wreck
That she cried into this ear,
Strike me if I shriek.

The Friends of his Youth
Laughter not time destroyed my voice
And put that crack in it,
And when the moon's pot-bellied
I get a laughing fit,
For that old woman comes down the lane,
A stone upon her breast,
And a cloak wrapped about the stone,
And she can get no rest
With singing hush and hush-a-bye;
She that has been wild
And barren as a breaking wave
Thinks that the stone's a child.
And Peter that had great affairs
And was a pushing man
Shrieks, I am King of the Peacocks,
And perches on a stone;
And then I laugh till tears run down
And the heart thumps at my side,
Remembering that her shriek was love
And that he shrieks from pride.


Summer and Spring
We sat under an old thorn-tree
And talked away the night,

Told all that had been said or done
Since first we saw the light,
And when we talked of growing up
Knew that we'd halved a soul
And fell the one in t'other's arms
That we might make it whole;
Then peter had a murdering look,
For it seemed that he and she
Had spoken of their childish days
Under that very tree.
O what a bursting out there was,
And what a blossoming,
When we had all the summer-time

The Secrets of the Old
I have old women's secrets now
That had those of the young;
She tells me what I dared not think
When my blood was strong,
And what had drowned a lover once
Sounds like an old song.
Though Margery is stricken dumb
If thrown in a woman's way,
We three make up a solitude;
For none alive to-day
Can know the stories that we know
Or say the things we say:
How such a man pleased women most
Of all that are gone,
How such a pair loved many years
And such a pair but one,
Stories of the bed of straw
Or the bed of down.






His Wildness
O bid me mount and sail up there
Amid the cloudy wrack,
For peg and Meg and Paris love
That had so straight a back,
Are gone away, and some that stay
Have changed their silk for sack.
Were I but there and none to hear
I'd have a peacock cry,
For that is natural to a man
That lives in memory,
Being all alone I'd nurse a stone
And sing it lullaby.

From Oedipus at Colonus
Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.
Even from that delight memory treasures so,
Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind
grow,
As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.
In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,
The bride is carried to the bridegroom's chamber
Through torchlight and tumultuous song;
I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the
eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.



They hold their public meetings where
Our most renowned patriots stand,
One among the birds of the air,
A stumpier on either hand;
And all the popular statesmen say
That purity built up the State
And after kept it from decay;
And let all base ambition be,
For intellect would make us proud
And pride bring in impurity:
The three old rascals laugh aloud.


Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell
And may a lesser bell sound through the room;
And it is All Souls Night,
And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel
Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;
For it is a ghost's right,
His element is so fine
Being sharpened by his death,
To drink from the wine-breath
While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
I need some mind that, if the cannon sound
From every quarter of the world, can stay
Wound in mind's pondering
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;
Because I have a marvellous thing to say,


A certain marvellous thing
None but the living mock,
Though not for sober ear;
It may be all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.
Horton's the first I call. He loved strange thought
And knew that sweet extremity of pride
That's called Platonic love,
And that to such a pitch of passion wrought
Nothing could bring him, when his lady died,
Anodyne for his love.
Words were but wasted breath;
One dear hope had he:
The inclemency
Of that or the next winter would be death.
Two thoughts were so mixed up I could not tell
Whether of her or God he thought the most,
But think that his mind's eye,
When upward turned, on one sole image fell;
And that a slight companionable ghost,
Wild with divinity,
Had so lit up the whole
Immense miraculous house
The Bible promised us,
It seemed a gold-fish swimming in a bowl.
On Florence Emery I call the next,
Who finding the first wrinkles on a face
Admired and beautiful,
And knowing that the future would be vexed
With minished beauty, multiplied commonplace,
Preferred to teach a school
Away from neighbour or friend,
Among dark skins, and there
Permit foul years to wear
Hidden from eyesight to the unnoticed end.






Before that end much had she ravelled out
From a discourse in figurative speech
By some learned Indian
On the soul's journey. How it is whirled about,
Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,
Until it plunge into the sun;
And there, free and yet fast,
Being both Chance and Choice,
Forget its broken toys
And sink into its own delight at last.
And I call up MacGregor from the grave,
For in my first hard springtime we were friends.
Although of late estranged.
I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,
And told him so, but friendship never ends;
And what if mind seem changed,
And it seem changed with the mind,
When thoughts rise up unbid
On generous things that he did
And I grow half contented to be blind!
He had much industry at setting out,
Much boisterous courage, before loneliness
Had driven him crazed;
For meditations upon unknown thought
Make human intercourse grow less and less;
They are neither paid nor praised.
But he d object to the host,
The glass because my glass;
A ghost-lover he was
And may have grown more arrogant being a ghost.
But names are nothing. What matter who it be,
So that his elements have grown so fine
The fume of muscatel
Can give his sharpened palate ecstasy
No living man can drink from the whole wine.


I have mummy truths to tell
Whereat the living mock,
Though not for sober ear,
For maybe all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.
Such thought such thought have I that hold it tight
Till meditation master all its parts,
Nothing can stay my glance
Until that glance run in the world's despite
To where the damned have howled away their hearts,
And where the blessed dance;
Such thought, that in it bound
I need no other thing,
Wound in mind's wandering
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.





The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams
Some vague Utopia and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.


Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful.


Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.


Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath;
He knows death to the bone
Man has created death.


My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,

Upon the breathless starlit air,
Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul
My Self. The consecretes blade upon my knees
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
From some court-lady's dress and round
The wodden scabbard bound and wound
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.
My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And interllect is wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.
My self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery
Heart's purple and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier's right
A charter to commit the crime once more.
My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;

Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.
I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong
That it can follow the flight of song?
Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

The Babie
Nae shoon to hide her tiny taes,
Nae stockin on her feet;
Her supple ankles white as snaw,
Or early blossoms sweet.
Her simple dress o sprinkled pink,
Her double, dimplit chin,
Her puckered lips, and baumy mou',
With na ane tooth within.
Her een sae like her mither's een,
Twa gentle, liquid things;
Her face is like an angel's face:
We're glad she has nae wings.

Let Dogs Delight to
Bark and Bite
Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
For God hath made them so;
Let bears and lions growl and fight,
For tis their nature too.

But, children, you should never let
Such angry passions rise;
Your little hands were never made
To tear each other's eyes.

Little Things
Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean
And the pleasant land.
Thus the little minutes,
Humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages
Of eternity.

He Prayeth Best
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.


He prayeth best who loveth best
All things, both great and small:
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
Twinkle, twinkle, little star!
How I wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
When the glorious sun is set,
When the grass with dew is wet,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle all the night.
In the dark-blue sky you keep,
And often through my curtains peep,
For you never shut your eye,
Till the sun is in the sky.
As your bright and tiny spark
Guides the traveller in the dark,
Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star!

Pippa
The year's at the spring,
The day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hillside's dew pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven
All's right with the world!

The Days of the Month
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
February has twenty-eight alone.
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting leap-yearthat's the time
When February's days are twenty-nine.



True Royalty
There was never a Queen like Balkis,
From here to the wide world's end;
But Balkis talked to a butterfly
As you would talk to a friend.
There was never a King like Solomon,
Not since the world began;
But Solomon talked to a butterfly
As a man would talk to a man.
She was Queen of Sabaea
And he was Asia's Lord
But they both of em talked to butterflies
When they took their walks abroad.

The cat can sit by the fire and sing,
The cat can climb a tree,
Or play with a silly old cork and string
To amuse herself, not me.
But I like Binkie, my dog, because
He knows how to behave;


So, Binkie's the same as the First Friend was,
And I am the Man in the Cave.
Pussy will play Man-Friday till
It's time to wet her paw
And make her walk on the window-sill
For the footprint Crusoe saw;
Then she fluffles her tail and mews,
And scratches and won't attend.
But Binkie will play whatever I choose,
And he is my true First Friend.
Pussy will rub my knees with her head,
Pretending she loves me hard;
But the very minute I go to my bed
Pussy runs out in the yard.
And there she stays till the morning-light;
So I know it is only pretend;
But Binkie, he snores at my feet all night,
And he is my Firstest Friend!

In “The Just So Stories.”
My Shadow
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.


The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there's none of him at
all.
He hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close beside me, he's a coward, you can see;
I'd think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to
me!
One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.


Thanks to the sunshine,
Thanks to the rain,
Little White Lily
Is happy again.


How the Leaves Came Down
I'll tell you how the leaves came down,
The great Tree to his children said:
You're getting sleepy, Yellow and Brown,
Yes, very sleepy, little Red.
It is quite time to go to bed.
Ah! begged each silly, pouting leaf,
“Let us a little longer stay;
Dear Father Tree, behold our grief!
Tis such a very pleasant day,
We do not want to go away.”
So, for just one more merry day
To the great Tree the leaflets clung,
Frolicked and danced, and had their way,
Upon the autumn breezes swung,
Whispering all their sports among
“Perhaps the great Tree will forget,
And let us stay until the spring,
If we all beg, and coax, and fret.”


But the great Tree did no such thing;
He smiled to hear their whispering.
“Come, children, all to bed,” he cried;
And ere the leaves could urge their prayer,
He shook his head, and far and wide,
Fluttering and rustling everywhere,
Down sped the leaflets through the air.
I saw them; on the ground they lay,
Golden and red, a huddled swarm,
Waiting till one from far away,
White bedclothes heaped upon her arm,
Should come to wrap them safe and warm.
The great bare Tree looked down and smiled.
“Good-night, dear little leaves,” he said.
And from below each sleepy child
Replied, “Good-night,” and murmured,
It is so nice to go to bed!



The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat;
They took some honey, and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the moon above,
And sang to a small guitar,

Pussy said to the Owl, You elegant fowl!
How wonderful sweet you sing!
Oh, let us be married,too long we have tarried,
But what shall we do for a ring?
They sailed away for a year and a day
To the land where the Bong-tree grows,
And there in a wood a piggy-wig stood
With a ring in the end of his nose,
His nose,
With a ring in the end of his nose.
Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring? Said the piggy, I will.
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined upon mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon,
And hand in hand on the edge of the sand
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.



Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,
Sailed on a river of crystal light
Into a sea of dew.
“Where are you going, and what do you wish?”
The old moon asked the three.
“We have come to fish for the herring-fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we,”
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
The old moon laughed and sang a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe;
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew;
The little stars were the herring-fish
That lived in the beautiful sea.
“Now cast your nets wherever you wish,
Never afeard are we!”
So cried the stars to the fishermen three,
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam,
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home:


Twas all so pretty a sail, it seemed
As if it could not be;
And some folk thought twas a dream they'd dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea;
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
So shut your eyes while Mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock on the misty sea

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
Twas half-past twelve, and what do you think!
Nor one nor t'other had slept a wink!


The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
I wasn't there; I simply state
What was told to me by the Chinese plate!
The gingham dog went “bow-wow-wow!”
And the calico cat replied “mee-ow!”
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico,
While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place
Up with its hands before its face,
For it always dreaded a family row!
Now mind: I'm only telling you
What the old Dutch clock declares is true!
The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed, “Oh, dear! what shall we do!”
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
Employing every tooth and claw
In the awfullest way you ever saw
And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!
Don't fancy I exaggerate!
I got my views from the Chinese plate!
Next morning where the two had sat
They found no trace of the dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole the pair away!
But the truth about the cat and the pup
Is this: They ate each other up!


Now what do you really think of that!
The old Dutch clock it told me so,
And that is how I came to know.

The Boy Who Never Told a Lie
Once there was a little boy,
With curly hair and pleasant eye
A boy who always told the truth,
And never, never told a lie.
And when he trotted off to school,
The children all about would cry,
“There goes the curly-headed boy
The boy that never tells a lie.”
And everybody loved him so,
Because he always told the truth,
That every day, as he grew up,
Twas said, “There goes the honest youth.”
And when the people that stood near
Would turn to ask the reason why,
The answer would be always this:
“Because he never tells a lie.”


Love Between
Brothers and Sisters
Whatever brawls disturb the street,
There should be peace at home;
Where sisters dwell and brothers meet,
Quarrels should never come.
Birds in their little nests agree;
And tis a shameful sight,
When children of one family
Fall out and chide and fight.
If I had but two little wings
And were a little feathery bird,
To you I'd fly, my dear!
But thoughts like these are idle things
And I stay here.
But in my sleep to you I fly:
I'm always with you in my sleep!
The world is all one's own.
And then one wakes, and where am I?
All, all alone.

A Farewell
My fairest child, I have no song to give you;
No lark could pipe to skies so dull and gray;
Yet, ere we part, one lesson I can leave you
For every day.
Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever;
Do noble things, not dream them all day long:
And so make life, death, and that vast forever
One grand, sweet song.



Casabianca
The boy stood on the burning deck,
Whence all but him had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead.
Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
A proud though childlike form.
The flames rolled onhe would not go
Without his father's word;
That father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.
He called aloud, “Say, father, say
If yet my task is done?”
He knew not that the chieftain lay
Unconscious of his son.
“Speak, father!” once again he cried,
“If I may yet be gone!”
And but the booming shots replied,
And fast the flames rolled on.
Upon his brow he felt their breath,
And in his waving hair;
And looked from that lone post of death
In still, yet brave despair.


And shouted but once more aloud
“My father! must I stay?”
While o'er him fast, through sail and shroud,
The wreathing fires made way.
They wrapt the ship in splendour wild,
They caught the flag on high,
And streamed above the gallant child
Like banners in the sky.
Then came a burst of thunder sound
The boyoh! where was he?
Ask of the winds that far around
With fragments strew the sea;
With mast, and helm, and pennon fair.
That well had borne their part
But the noblest thing that perished there
Was that young, faithful heart.

The Captain's Daughter
We were crowded in the cabin,
Not a soul would dare to sleep,
It was midnight on the waters,
And a storm was on the deep.


Tis a fearful thing in winter
To be shattered by the blast,
And to hear the rattling trumpet
Thunder, “Cut away the mast!”
So we shuddered there in silence,
For the stoutest held his breath,
While the hungry sea was roaring
And the breakers talked with Death.
As thus we sat in darkness,
Each one busy with his prayers,
We are lost! the captain shouted
As he staggered down the stairs.
But his little daughter whispered,
As she took his icy hand,
“Isn't God upon the ocean,
Just the same as on the land?”
Then we kissed the little maiden.
And we spoke in better cheer,
And we anchored safe in harbour
When the morn was shining clear.
T.


The Village Blacksmith
Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long;
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate'er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.
Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.
And children coming home from school
Look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge,
And hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing-floor.


He goes on Sunday to the church,
And sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
He hears his daughter's voice
Singing in the village choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.
It sounds to him like her mother's voice,
Singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more,
How in the grave she lies;
And with his hard, rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.
Toiling,rejoicing,sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night's repose.
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought.



Sweet and Low
Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea,
Low, low, breathe and blow,
Wind of the western sea!
Over the rolling waters go,
Come from the dropping moon and blow,
Blow him again to me;
While my little one, while my pretty one sleeps.
Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,
Father will come to thee soon;
Rest, rest, on mother's breast,
Father will come to thee soon;
Father will come to his babe in the nest,
Silver sails all out of the west
Under the silver moon:
Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.

The Violet
Down in a green and shady bed
A modest violet grew;
Its stalk was bent, it hung its head,
As if to hide from view.


And yet it was a lovely flower,
No colours bright and fair;
It might have graced a rosy bower,
Instead of hiding there.
Yet there it was content to bloom,
In modest tints arrayed;
And there diffused its sweet perfume,
Within the silent shade.
Then let me to the valley go,
This pretty flower to see;
That I may also learn to grow
In sweet humility.

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man,
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.


My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies?
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

Blessed be this place,
More blessed still this tower;
A bloody, arrogant power
Rose out of the race
Uttering, mastering it,
Rose like these walls from these
Storm-beaten cottages
In mockery I have set
A powerful emblem up,
And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
In mockery of a time
Half dead at the top.

Alexandria's was a beacon tower, and Babylon's
An image of the moving heavens, a log-book of the sun's journey and
the moon's;
And Shelley had his towers, thought's crowned powers he called them
once.
I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare
This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair;
That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have travelled
there.
Swift beating on his breast in sibylline frenzy blind
Because the heart in his blood-sodden breast had dragged him down
into mankind,
Goldsmith deliberately sipping at the honey-pot of his mind,

OR
And haughtier-headed Burke that proved the State a tree,
That this unconquerable labyrinth of the birds, century after century,
Cast but dead leaves to mathematical equality;
And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream,
That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so
solid seem,
Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme;
The strength that gives our blood and state magnanimity of its own
desire;
Everything that is not God consumed with intellectual fire.

The purity of the unclouded moon
Has flung its atrowy shaft upon the floor.
Seven centuries have passed and it is pure,
The blood of innocence has left no stain.
There, on blood-saturated ground, have stood
Soldier, assassin, executioner.
Whether for daily pittance or in blind fear
Or out of abstract hatred, and shed blood,
But could not cast a single jet thereon.
Odour of blood on the ancestral stair!
And we that have shed none must gather there
And clamour in drunken frenzy for the moon.

Upon the dusty, glittering windows cling,
And seem to cling upon the moonlit skies,
Tortoiseshell butterflies, peacock butterflies,

A couple of night-moths are on the wing.
Is every modern nation like the tower,
Half dead at the top? No matter what I said,
For wisdom is the property of the dead,
A something incompatible with life; and power,
Like everything that has the stain of blood,
A property of the living; but no stain
Can come upon the visage of the moon
When it has looked in glory from a cloud.

In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.
But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.

The Heavenly Circuit; Berenice's Hair;
Tent-pole of Eden; the tent's drapery;
Symbolical glory of thc earth and air!
The Father and His angelic hierarchy
That made the magnitude and glory there
Stood in the circuit of a needle's eye.
Some found a different pole, and where it stood
A pattern on a napkin dipped in blood.

OR


A storm beaten old watch-tower,
A blind hermit rings the hour.
All-destroying sword-blade still
Carried by the wandering fool.
Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade,
Beauty and fool together laid.


We that have done and thought,
That have thought and done,
Must ramble, and thin out
Like milk spilt on a stone.


Though the great song return no more
There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.


Those Platonists are a curse, he said,
God's fire upon the wane,
A diagram hung there instead,
More women born than men.


Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land;
Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand;
What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?

The First. American colonies, Ireland, France and India
Harried, and Burke's great melody against it.
The Second. Oliver Goldsmith sang what he had seen,
Roads full of beggars, cattle in the fields,
But never saw the trefoil stained with blood,
The avenging leaf those fields raised up against it.
The Fourth. The tomb of Swift wears it away.
The Third.
A voice
Soft as the rustle of a reed from Cloyne
That gathers volume; now a thunder-clap.
The Sixth. What schooling had these four?
The Seventh.
They walked the roads
Mimicking what they heard, as children mimic;
They understood that wisdom comes of beggary.


Crazed through much child-bearing
The moon is staggering in the sky;
Moon-struck by the despairing
Glances of her wandering eye
We grope, and grope in vain,
For children born of her pain.
Children dazed or dead!
When she in all her virginal pride
First trod on the mountain's head
What stir ran through the countryside
Where every foot obeyed her glance!
What manhood led the dance!






Fly-catchers of the moon,
Our hands are blenched, our fingers seem
But slender needles of bone;
Blenched by that malicious dream
They are spread wide that each
May rend what comes in reach.

Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand
When all those rooms and passages are gone,
When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound
And saplings root among the broken stone,
And dedicate eyes bent upon the ground,
Back turned upon the brightness of the sun
And all the sensuality of the shade
A moment's memory to that laurelled head.


Under my window-ledge the waters race,
Otters below and moor-hens on the top,
Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven's face
Then darkening through dark Raftery's cellar drop,
Run underground, rise in a rocky place
Spread to a lake and drop into a hole.
What's water but the generated soul?
Upon the border of that lake's a wood
Now all dry sticks under a wintry sun,
And in a copse of beeches there I stood,
For Nature's pulled her tragic buskin on
And all the rant's a mirror of my mood:
At sudden thunder of the mounting swan
I turned about and looked where branches break
The glittering reaches of the flooded lake.
Another emblem there! That stormy white
But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight
And in the morning's gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So atrogantly pure, a child might think

It can be murdered with a spot of ink.
Sound of a stick upon the floor, a sound
From somebody that toils from chair to chair;
Beloved books that famous hands have bound,
Old marble heads, old pictures everywhere;
Great rooms where travelled men and children found
Content or joy; a last inheritor
Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame
Or out of folly into folly came.
A spot whereon the founders lived and died
Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,
Or gardens rich in memory glorified
Marriages, alliances and families,
And every bride's ambition satisfied.
Where fashion or mere fantasy decrees
We shift about all that great glory spent
We were the last romantics chose for theme
Traditional sanctity and loveliness;
Whatever's written in what poets name
The book of the people; whatever most can bless
The mind of man or elevate a rhyme;
But all is changed, that high horse riderless,
Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.


Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.

OR
But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.
I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.


Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

Theheron-billed pale cattle-birds
That feed on some foul parasite
Of the Moroccan flocks and herds
Cross the narrow Straits to light
In the rich midnight of the garden trees
Till the dawn break upon those mingled seas.






Often at evening when a boy
Would I carry to a friend
Hoping more substantial joy
Did an older mind commend
Not such as are in Newton's metaphor,
But actual shells of Rosses level shore.
Greater glory in the Sun,
An evening chill upon the air,
Bid imagination run
Much on the Great Questioner;
What He can question, what if questioned I
Can with a fitting confidence reply.
November


The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.


I asked if I should pray.
But the Brahmin said,
pray for nothing, say
Every night in bed,
“I have been a king,

OR
I have been a slave,
Nor is there anything.
Fool, rascal, knave,
That I have not been,
And yet upon my breast
A myriad heads have lain.”
That he might Set at rest
A boy's turbulent days
Mohini Chatterjee
Spoke these, or words like these,
I add in commentary,
Old lovers yet may have
All that time denied
Grave is heaped on grave
That they be satisfied
Over the blackened earth
The old troops parade,
Birth is heaped on Birth
That such cannonade
May thunder time away,
Birth-hour and death-hour meet,
Or, as great sages say,
Men dance on deathless feet.



The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.






Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miraclc than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the star-lit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.
At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after Spirit! The smithies break the flood.
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.


The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare
Through the hollow of an ear;
Wings beating about the room;
The terror of all terrors that I bore
The Heavens in my womb.
Had I not found content among the shows
Every common woman knows,
Chimney corner, garden walk,
Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes
And gather all the talk?
What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart's blood stop
Or strikes a Sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?

Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath.
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night;
The body calls it death,
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy?








A tree there is that from its topmost bough
Is half all glittering flame and half all green
Abounding foliage moistened with the dew;
And half is half and yet is all the scene;
And half and half consume what they renew,
And he that Attis image hangs between
That staring fury and the blind lush leaf
May know not what he knows, but knows not grief

Get all the gold and silver that you can,
Satisfy ambition, animate
The trivial days and ram them with the sun,
And yet upon these maxims meditate:
All women dote upon an idle man
Although their children need a rich estate;
No man has ever lived that had enough
Of children's gratitude or woman's love.
No longer in Lethean foliage caught
Begin the preparation for your death
And from the fortieth winter by that thought
Test every work of intellect or faith,
And everything that your own hands have wrought
And call those works extravagance of breath
That are not suited for such men as come
Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.


My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

Although the summer Sunlight gild
Cloudy leafage of the sky,
Or wintry moonlight sink the field
In storm-scattered intricacy,
I cannot look thereon,
Responsibility so weighs me down.
Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.








A rivery field spread out below,
An odour of the new-mown hay
In his nostrils, the great lord
Cried, casting off the mountain snow,
Let all things pass away.
Wheels by milk-white asses drawn
Where Babylon or Nineveh
Rose; some conquer drew rein
And cried to battle-weary men,
Let all things pass away.
From man's blood-sodden heart are sprung
Those branches of the night and day
Where the gaudy moon is hung.
What's the meaning of all song?
Let all things pass away.

The Soul. Seek out reality, leave things that seem.
The Heart. What, be a singer born and lack a theme?
The Soul. Isaiah's coal, what more can man desire?
The Heart. Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!
The Soul. Look on that fire, salvation walks within.


Where had her sweetness gone?
What fanatics invent
In this blind bitter town,
Fantasy or incident
Not worth thinking of,
Put her in a rage.
I had forgiven enough
That had forgiven old age.
All lives that has lived;
So much is certain;
Old sages were not deceived:
Somewhere beyond the curtain
Of distorting days






Lives that lonely thing
That shone before these eyes
Targeted, trod like Spring.


Acquaintance companion;
One dear brilliant woman;
The best-endowed, the elect,
All by their youth undone,
All, all, by that inhuman
Bitter glory wrecked.
But I have straightened out
Ruin, wreck and wrack;
I toiled long years and at length
Came to so deep a thought
I can summon back
All their wholesome strength.
What images are these
That turn dull-eyed away,
Or Shift Time's filthy load,
Straighten aged knees,
Hesitate or stay?
What heads shake or nod?

INSTRUCRS
What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.

OR


I ranted to the knave and fool,
But outgrew that school,
Would transform the part,
Fit audience found, but cannot rule
My fanatic heart.
I sought my betters: though in each
Fine manners, liberal speech,
Turn hatred into sport,
Nothing said or done can reach
My fanatic heart,
Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.


Through intricate motions ran
Stream and gliding sun
And all my heart seemed gay:
Some stupid thing that I had done
Made my attention stray.
Repentance keeps my heart impure;
But what am I that dare
Fancy that I can
Better conduct myself or have more
Sense than a common man?






What motion of the sun or stream
Or eyelid shot the gleam
That pierced my body through?
What made me live like these that seem
Self-born, born anew?





Bring me to the blasted oak
That I, midnight upon the stroke,
All find safety in the tomb.
May call down curses on his head
Because of my dear Jack that's dead.
Coxcomb was the least he said:
The solid man and the coxcomb.
Nor was he Bishop when his ban
Banished Jack the Journeyman,
All find safety in the tomb.
Nor so much as parish priest,
Yet he, an old book in his fist,
Cried that we lived like beast and beast:
The solid man and the coxcomb.
The Bishop has a skin, God knows,
Wrinkled like the foot of a goose,
All find safety in the tomb.
Nor can he hide in holy black
The heron's hunch upon his back,
But a birch-tree stood my Jack:
The solid man and the coxcomb.
Jack had my virginity,
And bids me to the oak, for he
All find safety in the tomb.
Wanders out into the night
And there is shelter under it,
But should that other come, I spit:
The solid man and the coxcomb.


I care not what the sailors say:
All those dreadful thunder-stones,
All that storm that blots the day
Can but show that Heaven yawns;
Great Europa played the fool
That changed a lover for a bull.
Fol de rol, fol de rol.
To round that shell's elaborate whorl,
Adorning every secret track
With the delicate mother-of-pearl,
Made the joints of Heaven crack:
So never hang your heart upon
A roaring, ranting journeyman.
Fol de rol, fol de rol.


Love is all
Unsatisfied
That cannot take the whole
Body and soul';
And that is what Jane said.
Take the sour
If you take me
I can scoff and lour
And scold for an hour.
That's certainly the case, said he.


Naked I lay,
The grass my bed;
Naked and hidden away,
That black day';
And that is what Jane said.
What can be shown?
What true love be?
All could be known or shown
If Time were but gone.
That's certainly the case, said he.


I know, although when looks meet
I tremble to the bone,
The more I leave the door unlatched
The sooner love is gone,
For love is but a skein unwound
Between the dark and dawn.
A lonely ghost the ghost is
That to God shall come;
I love's skein upon the ground,
My body in the tomb
Shall leap into the light lost
In my mother's womb.
But were I left to lie alone
In an empty bed,
The skein so bound us ghost to ghost
When he turned his head
Passing on the road that night,
Mine must walk when dead.




That lover of a night
Came when he would,
Went in the dawning light
Whether I would or no;
Men come, men go;
All things remain in God.
Banners choke the sky;
Men-at-arms tread;
Armoured horses neigh
In the narrow pass:
All things remain in God.
Before their eyes a house
That from childhood stood
Uninhabited, ruinous,
Suddenly lit up
From door to top:
All things remain in God.
I had wild Jack for a lover;
Though like a road
That men pass over
My body makes no moan
But sings on:
All things remain in God.




I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.
Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul, I cried.
My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.
A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.



I found that ivory image there
Dancing with her chosen youth,
But when he wound her coal-black hair
As though to strangle her, no scream
Or bodily movement did I dare,

Eyes under eyelids did so gleam;
Love is like the lion's tooth.
When She, and though some said she played
I said that she had danced heart's truth,
Drew a knife to strike him dead,
I could but leave him to his fate;
For no matter what is said
They had all that had their hate;
Love is like the lion's tooth.
Did he die or did she die?
Seemed to die or died they both?
God be with the times when I
Cared not a thraneen for what chanced
So that I had the limbs to try
Such a dance as there was danced
Love is like the lion's tooth.


I went out alone
To sing a song or two,
My fancy on a man,
And you know who.
Another came in sight
That on a stick relied
To hold himself upright;
I sat and cried.
And that was all my song
When everything is told,
Saw I an old man young
Or young man old?




She will change, I cried.
Into a withered crone.
The heart in my side,
That so still had lain,
In noble rage replied
And beat upon the bone:
Uplift those eyes and throw
Those glances unafraid:
She would as bravely show
Did all the fabric fade;
No withered crone I saw
Before the world was made.
Abashed by that report,
For the heart cannot lie,
I knelt in the dirt.
And all shall bend the knee
To my offended heart
Until it pardon me.


Earth in beauty dressed
Awaits returning spring.
All true love must die,
Alter at the best
Into some lesser thing.
Prove that I lie.






Such body lovers have,
Such exacting breath,
That they touch or sigh.
Every touch they give,
Love is nearer death.
Prove that I lie.


Undying love to buy
I wrote upon
The corners of this eye
All wrongs done.
What payment were enough
For undying love?
I broke my heart in two
So hard I struck.
What matter? for I know
That out of rock,
Out of a desolate source,
Love leaps upon its course.


Old fathers, great-grandfathers,
Rise as kindred should.
If ever lover's loneliness
Came where you stood,
Pray that Heaven protect us
That protect your blood.


The mountain throws a shadow,
Thin is the moon's horn;
What did we remember
Under the ragged thorn?
Dread has followed longing,
And our hearts are torn.


I dreamed as in my bed I lay,
All night's fathomless wisdom come,
That I had shorn my locks away
And laid them on Love's lettered tomb:
But something bore them out of sight
In a great tumult of the air,
And after nailed upon the night
Berenice's burning hair.


Who talks of Plato's spindle;
What set it whirling round?
Eternity may dwindle,
Time is unwound,
Change their loves about.
However they may take it,
Before the thread began
I made, and may not break it
When the last thread has run,






A bargain with that hair
And all the windings there.



O cruel Death, give three things back,
Sang a bone upon the shore
A child found all a child can lack,
Whether of pleasure or of rest,
Upon the abundance of my breast':
A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.
Three dear things that women know,
Sang a bone upon the shore;
A man if I but held him so
When my body was alive
Found all the pleasure that life gave':
A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.
The third thing that I think of yet,
Sang a bone upon the shore,
Is that morning when I met
Face to face my rightful man
And did after stretch and yawn':
A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.



Beloved, may your sleep be sound
That have found it where you fed.


What were all the world's alarms
To mighty paris when he found
Sleep upon a golden bed
That first dawn in Helen's arms?
Sleep, beloved, such a sleep
As did that wild Tristram know
When, the potion's work being done,
Roe could run or doe could leap
Under oak and beechen bough,
Roe could leap or doe could run;
Such a sleep and sound as fell
Upon Eurotas grassy bank
When the holy bird, that there
Accomplished his predestined will,
From the limbs of Leda sank
But not from her protecting care.



Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.




Come, let me sing into your ear;
Those dancing days are gone,
All that silk and satin gear;
Crouch upon a stone,
Wrapping that foul body up
In as foul a rag:
I carry the sun in a golden cup.
The moon in a silver bag.


Curse as you may I sing it through;
What matter if the knave
That the most could pleasure you,
The children that he gave,
Are somewhere sleeping like a top
Under a marble flag?
I carry the sun in a golden cup.
The moon in a silver bag.
I thought it out this very day.
Noon upon the clock,
A man may put pretence away
Who leans upon a stick,
May sing, and sing until he drop,
Whether to maid or hag:
I carry the sun in a golden cup,
The moon in a silver bag.


I
I of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on, cried she.
Come out of charity,
Come dance with me in Ireland.
One man, one man alone
In that outlandish gear,
One solitary man
Of all that rambled there
Had turned his stately head.
That is a long way off,
And time runs on, he said,
And the night grows rough.


I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on, cried she.
Come out of charity
And dance with me in Ireland.
The fiddlers are all thumbs,
Or the fiddle-string accursed,
The drums and the kettledrums
And the trumpets all are burst,
And the trombone, cried he,
The trumpet and trombone,
And cocked a malicious eye,
But time runs on, runs on.
I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on, cried she.
Come out of charity
And dance with me in Ireland.




Sang old Tom the lunatic
That sleeps under the canopy:
What change has put my thoughts astray
And eyes that had s-o keen a sight?
What has turned to smoking wick
Nature's pure unchanging light?
Huddon and Duddon and Daniel O'Leary.
Holy Joe, the beggar-man,
Wenching, drinking, still remain
Or sing a penance on the road;
Something made these eyeballs weary
That blinked and saw them in a shroud.
Whatever stands in field or flood,
Bird, beast, fish or man,
Mare or stallion, cock or hen,
Stands in God's unchanging eye
In all the vigour of its blood;
In that faith I live or die.


Things out of perfection sail,
And all their swelling canvas wear,
Nor shall the self-begotten fail
Though fantastic men suppose
Building-yard and stormy shore,
Winding-sheet and swaddling clothes.


Behold that great Plotinus swim,
Buffeted by such seas;
Bland Rhadamanthus beckons him,
But the Golden Race looks dim,
Salt blood blocks his eyes.
Scattered on the level grass
Or winding through the grove
Plato there and Minos pass,
There stately Pythagoras
And all the choir of Love.

She hears me strike the board and say
That she is under ban
Of all good men and women,
Being mentioned with a man
That has the worst of all bad names;
And thereupon replies
That his hair is beautiful,
Cold as the March wind his eyes.



If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.
What if I look upon a man
As though on my beloved,
And my blood be cold the while
And my heart unmoved?
Why should he think me cruel
Or that he is betrayed?
I'd have him love the thing that was
Before the world was made.

A
I admit the briar
Entangled in my hair
Did not injure me;
My blenching and trembling,
Nothing but dissembling,
Nothing but coquetry.
I long for truth, and yet
I cannot stay from that
My better self disowns,
For a man's attention
Brings such satisfaction
To the craving in my bones.
Brightness that I pull back
From the Zodiac,
Why those questioning eyes
That are fixed upon me?
What can they do but shun me
If empty night replies?



I the dragon's will until you came
Because I had fancied love a casual
Improvisation, or a settled game
That followed if I let the kerchief fall:
Those deeds were best that gave the minute wings
And heavenly music if they gave it wit;
And then you stood among the dragon-rings.

A
I mocked, being crazy, but you mastered it
And broke the chain and set my ankles free,
And now we stare astonished at the sea,
And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us.


O but there is wisdom
In what the sages said;
But stretch that body for a while
And lay down that head
Till I have told the sages
Where man is comforted.
How could passion run so deep
Had I never thought
That the crime of being born
Blackens all our lot?
But where the crime's committed
The crime can be forgot.


Thelot of love is chosen. I learnt that much
Struggling for an image on the track
Of the whirling Zodiac.
Scarce did he my body touch,
Scarce sank he from the west
Or found a subtetranean rest






On the maternal midnight of my breast
Before I had marked him on his northern way,
And seemed to stand although in bed I lay.
I struggled with the horror of daybreak,
I chose it for my lot! If questioned on
My utmost pleasure with a man
By some new-married bride, I take
That stillness for a theme
Where his heart my heart did seem
And both adrift on the miraculous stream
Where wrote a learned astrologer
The Zodiac is changed into a sphere.


He. Dear, I must be gone
While night Shuts the eyes
Of the household spies;
That song announces dawn.
She. No, night's bird and love's
Bids all true lovers rest,
While his loud song reproves
The murderous stealth of day.
He. Daylight already flies
From mountain crest to crest
She. That light is from the moom.
He. That bird ...
She. Let him sing on,
I offer to love's play
My dark declivities.

A


Dry timber under that rich foliage,
At wine-dark midnight in the sacred wood,
Too old for a man's love I stood in rage
Imagining men. Imagining that I could
A greater with a lesser pang assuage
Or but to find if withered vein ran blood,
I tore my body that its wine might cover
Whatever could rccall the lip of lover.
And after that I held my fingers up,
Stared at the wine-dark nail, or dark that ran
Down every withered finger from the top;
But the dark changed to red, and torches shone,
And deafening music shook the leaves ; a troop
Shouldered a litter with a wounded man,
Or smote upon the string and to the sound
Sang of the beast that gave the fatal wound.
All stately women moving to a song
With loosened hair or foreheads grief-distraught,
It seemed a Quattrocento painter's throng,
A thoughtless image of Mantegna's thought
Why should they think that are for ever young?
Till suddenly in grief's contagion caught,
I stared upon his blood-bedabbled breast
And sang my malediction with the rest.
That thing all blood and mire, that beast-torn wreck,
Half turned and fixed a glazing eye on mine,
And, though love's bitter-sweet had all come back,
Those bodies from a picture or a coin
Nor saw my body fall nor heard it shriek,
Nor knew, drunken with singing as with wine,
That they had brought no fabulous symbol there
But my heart's victim and its torturer.

A
What lively lad most pleasured me
Of all that with me lay?
I answer that I gave my soul
And loved in misery,
But had great pleasure with a lad
That I loved bodily.
Flinging from his arms I laughed
To think his passion such
He fancied that I gave a soul
Did but our bodies touch,
And laughed upon his breast to think
Beast gave beast as much.
I gave what other women gave
That stepped out of their clothes.
But when this soul, its body off,
Naked to naked goes,
He it has found shall find therein
What none other knows,
And give his own and take his own
And rule in his own right;
And though it loved in misery
Close and cling so tight,
There's not a bird of day that dare
Extinguish that delight.

A


Hidden by old age awhile
In masker's cloak and hood,
Each hating what the other loved,
Face to face we stood:
That I have met with such, said he,
Bodes me little good.
Let others boast their fill, said I,
But never dare to boast
That such as I had such a man
For lover in the past;
Say that of living men I hate
Such a man the most.
A loony'd boast of such a love,
He in his rage declared:
But such as he for such as me
Could we both discard
This beggarly habiliment
Had found a sweeter word.

Who'd care to dig em, said the old, old man,
Those six feet marked in chalk?
Much I talk, more I walk;
Time I were buried, said the old, old man.
When nations are empty up there at the top,
When order has weakened or faction is strong,
Time for us all to pick out a good tune,
Take to the roads and go marching along.
March, march How does it run?
O any old words to a tune.
Who'd care to dig em, said the old, old man,
Those six feet marked in chalk?
Much I talk, more I walk;
Time I were buried, said the old, old man.
Soldiers take pride in saluting their Captain,
Where are the captains that govern mankind?
What happens a tree that has nothing within it?
O marching wind, O a blast of the wind.
Marching, marching along.
March, march, lift up the song:
Who'd care to dig em, said the old, old man.
Those six feet marked in chalk?
Much I talk, more I walk;
Time I were buried, said the old, old man.

Saddle and ride, I heard a man say,
Out of Ben Bulben and Knocknarea,

What says the Clock in the Great Clock Tower?
All those tragic characters ride
But turn from Rosses crawling tide,
The meet's upon the mountain-side.
A slow low note and an iron bell.
What brought them there so far from their home.
Man that fought night long with the foam,
What says the Clock in the Great Clock Tower?
Niamh that rode on it; lad and lass
That sat so still and played at the chess?
What but heroic wantonness?
A slow low note and an iron bell.
That seemed but a wild wenching man;
What says the Clock in the Great Clock Tower?
And all alone comes riding there
The King that could make his people stare,
Because he had feathers instead of hair.
A slow low note and an iron bell.

And I am shrunken to skin and bone,
For all my heart has had for its hire
Is what I can whistle alone and alone.
Tomorrow night I will break down the door.

What is the good of a man and he
Alone and alone, with a speckled shin?
I would that I drank with my love on my knee
Between two barrels at the inn.
Oro, oro.!
To-morrow night I will break down the door.
Alone and alone nine nights I lay
Between two bushes under the rain;
I thought to have whistled her down that
I whistled and whistled and whistled in vain.
Oro, oro!
To-morrow night I will break down the door.


I would that I were an old beggar
Rolling a blind pearl eye,
For he cannot see my lady
Go gallivanting by;
A dreary, dreepy beggar
Without a friend on the earth
But a thieving rascally cur
O a beggar blind from his birth;
Or anything else but a rhymer
Without a thing in his head
But rhymes for a beautiful lady,
He rhyming alone in his bed.

God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone ;
From all that makes a wise old man
That can be praised of all;
O what am I that I should not seem
For the song's sake a fool?
I pray for word is out
And prayer comes round again
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.


Here is fresh matter, poet,
Matter for old age meet;
Might of the Church and the State,
Their mobs put under their feet.
O but heart's wine shall run pure,
Mind's bread grow sweet.
That were a cowardly song,
Wander in dreams no more;
What if the Church and the State
Are the mob that howls at the door!
Wine shall run thick to the end,
Bread taste sour.


Because you have found me in the pitch-dark night
With open book you ask me what I do.
Mark and digest my tale, carry it afar
To those that never saw this tonsured head
Nor heard this voice that ninety years have cracked.
All know their tale, all know what leaf and twig,
What juncture of the apple and the yew,
Surmount their bones; but speak what none have heard.
The miracle that gave them such a death
Transfigured to pure substance what had once
Been bone and sinew; when such bodies join
There is no touching here, nor touching there,
Nor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole;
For the intercourse of angels is a light
Where for its moment both seem lost, consumed.
Here in the pitch-dark atmosphere above
The trembling of the apple and the yew,
Here on the anniversary of their death,
The anniversary of their first embrace,
Those lovers, purified by tragedy,
Hurry into each other's arms; these eyes,
By water, herb and solitary prayer
Made aquiline, are open to that light.
Though somewhat broken by the leaves, that light
Lies in a circle on the grass; therein
I turn the pages of my holy book.

That's how all natural or supernatural stories run.
Natural and supernatural with the self-same ring are wed.
As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead begets Godhead,
For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.
Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind;
When the conflagration of their passion sinks,
Damped by the body or the mind,
That juggling nature mounts, her coil in their embraces twined.
The mirror-scaled serpent is multiplicity,
But all that run in couples, on earth, in flood or air,
Share God that is but three,
And could beget or bear themselves could they but love as He.

What matter that you understood no word!
Doubtless I spoke or sang what I had heard
In broken sentences. My soul had found
All happiness in its own cause or ground.
Godhead on Godhead in sexual spasm begot
Godhead. Some shadow fell. My soul forgot
Those amorous cries that out of quiet come
And must the common round of day resume.

From a full moon in March,
There all the serpent-tails are bit,
There all the planets drop in the Sun.

Why should I seek for love or study it?
It is of God and passes human wit.
I study hatred with great diligence,
For that's a passion in my own control,
A sort of besom that can clear the soul
Of everything that is not mind or sense.
Why do I hate man, woman Or event?
That is a light my jealous soul has sent.
From terror and deception freed it can
Discover impurities, can show at last
How soul may walk when all such things are past,
How soul could walk before such things began.
Then my delivered soul herself shall learn
A darker knowledge and in hatred turn
From every thought of God mankind has had.
Thought is a garment and the soul's a bride
That cannot in that trash and tinsel hide:
Hatred of God may bring the soul to God.
At stroke of midnight soul cannot endure
A bodily or mental furniture.

What can she take until her Master give!
Where can she look until He make the show!
What can she know until He bid her know!
How can she live till in her blood He live!

He and She
As the moon sidles up
Must she sidle up,
As trips the scared moon
Away must she trip:
His light had struck me blind
Dared I stop'.
She sings as the moon sings:
I am I, am I;
The greater grows my light
The further that I fly'.
All creation shivers
With that sweet cry

What Magic Drum?
He holds him from desire, all but stops his breathing lest
Primordial Motherhood forsake his limbs, the child no longer rest,
Drinking joy as it were milk upon his breast.
Through light-obliterating garden foliage what magic drum?
Down limb and breast or down that glimmering belly move his mouth
and sinewy tongue.
What from the forest came? What beast has licked its young?

Eternity is passion, girl or boy
Cry at the onset of their sexual joy
For ever and for ever'; then awake
Ignorant what Dramatis personae spake;
A passion-driven exultant man sings out
Sentences that he has never thought;
The Flagellant lashes those submissive loins
Ignorant what that dramatist enjoins,
What master made the lash. Whence had they come,
The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?
What sacred drama through her body heaved
When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?

The Four Ages of Man
He with body waged a fight,
But body won; it walks upright.
Then he struggled with the heart;
Innocence and peace depart.
Then he struggled with the mind;
His proud heart he left behind.
Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.

Conjunctions
If Jupiter and Saturn meet,
What a cop of mummy wheat!
The sword's a cross; thereon He died:
On breast of Mars the goddess sighed.

A Needle's Eye
All the stream that's roaring by
Came out of a needle's eye;
Things unborn, things that are gone,
From needle's eye still goad it on.

Meru
Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion ; but man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!
Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,
Caverned in night under the drifted snow,
Or where that snow and winter's dreadful blast
Beat down upon their naked bodies, know
That day brings round the night, that before dawn
His glory and his monuments are gone.

The girl goes dancing there
On the leaf-sown, new-mown, smooth
Grass plot of the garden;
Escaped from bitter youth,
Escaped out of her crowd,
Or out of her black cloud.
Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer!
If strange men come from the house
To lead her away, do not say
That she is happy being crazy;
Lead them gently astray;
Let her finish her dance,
Let her finish her dance.
Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer.!


Said lady once to lover,
None can rely upon
A love that lacks its proper food;
And if your love were gone
How could you sing those songs of love?
I should be blamed, young man.
O my dear, O my dear.


Have no lit candles in your room,
That lovely lady said,
That I at midnight by the clock
May creep into your bed,
For if I saw myself creep in
I think I should drop dead.
O my dear, O my dear.
I love a man in secret,
Dear chambermaid, said she.
I know that I must drop down dead
If he stop loving me,
Yet what could I but drop down dead
If I lost my chastity?
O my dear, O my dear.
So you must lie beside him
And let him think me there.
And maybe we are all the same
Where no candles are,
And maybe we are all the same
That stip the body bare.
O my dear, O my dear.
But no dogs barked, and midnights chimed,
And through the chime she'd say,
That was a lucky thought of mine,
My lover. looked so gay';
But heaved a sigh if the chambermaid
Looked half asleep all day.
O my dear, O my dear.
No, not another song, siid he,
Because my lady came
A year ago for the first time
At midnight to my room,
And I must lie between the sheets
When the clock begins to chime.
O my dear, O my d-ear.

A laughing, crying, sacred song,
A leching song, they said.
Did ever men hear such a song?
No, but that day they did.
Did ever man ride such a race?
No, not until he rode.
O my dear, O my dear.
But when his horse had put its hoof
Into a rabbit-hole
He dropped upon his head and died.
His lady saw it all
And dropped and died thereon, for she
Loved him with her soul.
O my dear, O my dear.
The chambermaid lived long, and took
Their graves into her charge,
And there two bushes planted
That when they had grown large
Seemed sprung from but a single root
So did their roses merge.
O my dear, O my dear.
When she was old and dying,
The priest came where she was;
She made a full confession.
Long looked he in her face,
And O he was a good man
And understood her case.
O my dear, O my dear.
He bade them take and bury her
Beside her lady's man,
And set a rose-tree on her grave,
And now none living can,
When they have plucked a rose there,
Know where its roots began.
O my dear, O my dear.



I turn round
Like a dumb beast in a show.
Neither know what I am
Nor where I go,
My language beaten
Into one name;
I am in love
And that is my shame.
What hurts the soul
My soul adores,
No better than a beast
Upon all fours.


What sort of man is coming
To lie between your feet?
What matter, we are but women.
Wash; make your body sweet;
I have cupboards of dried fragrance.
I can strew the sheet.
The Lord have mercy upon us.
He shall love my soul as though
Body were not at all,
He shall love your body
Untroubled by the soul,
Love cram love's two divisions
Yet keep his substance whole.
The Lord have mercy upon us.

Soul must learn a love that is
Proper to my breast,
Limbs a Love in common
With every noble beast.
If soul may look and body touch,
Which is the more blest?
The Lord have mercy upon us.


When you and my true lover meet
And he plays tunes between your feet.
Speak no evil of the soul,
Nor think that body is the whole,
For I that am his daylight lady
Know worse evil of the body;
But in honour split his love
Till either neither have enough,
That I may hear if we should kiss
A contrapuntal serpent hiss,
You, should hand explore a thigh,
All the labouring heavens sigh.


B sighs for the air,
Thought for I know not where,
For the womb the seed sighs.
Now sinks the same rest
On mind, on nest,
On straining thighs.




How came this ranger
Now sunk in rest,
Stranger with stranger.
On my cold breast?
What's left to Sigh for?
Strange night has come;
God's love has hidden him
Out of all harm,
Pleasure has made him
Weak as a worm.


From pleasure of the bed,
Dull as a worm,
His rod and its butting head
Limp as a worm,
His spirit that has fled
Blind as a worm.


Picture and book remain,
An acre of green grass
For air and exercise,
Now strength of body goes;
Midnight, an old house
Where nothing stirs but a mouse.






My temptation is quiet.
Here at life's end
Neither loose imagination,
Nor the mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bonc,
Can make the truth known.
Grant me an old man's frenzy,
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call;
A mind knew
That can pierce the clouds,
Or inspired by frenzy
Shake the dead in their shrouds;
Forgotten else by mankind,
An old man's eagle mind.


His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
What then? sang Plato's ghost. What then?
Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
What then? sang Plato's ghost. What then?


All his happier dreams came true
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
What then.? sang Plato's ghost. What then?
The work is done, grown old he thought,
According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought';
But louder sang that ghost, What then?


That crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,

Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, O sea-starved, hungry sea.


Stretch towards the moonless midnight of the trees,
As though that hand could reach to where they stand,
And they but famous old upholsteries
Delightful to the touch; tighten that hand
As though to draw them closer yet.
Rammed full
Of that most sensuous silence of the night
For since the horizon's bought strange dogs are still
Climb to your chamber full of books and wait,
No books upon the knee, and no one there
But a Great Dane that cannot bay the moon
And now lies sunk in sleep.
What climbs the stair?
Nothing that common women ponder on
If you are worth my hope! Neither Content
Nor satisfied Conscience, but that great family
Some ancient famous authors mistepresent,
The proud Furies each with her torch on high.




You ask what I have found, and far and wide I go:
Nothing but Cromwell's house and Cromwell's murderous crew,
The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay,
And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen, where are
they?
And there is an old beggar wandering in his pride
His fathers served their fathers before Christ was crucified.
O what of that, O what of that,
What is there left to say?
All neighbourly content and easy talk are gone,
But there's no good complaining, for money's rant is on.
He that's mounting up must on his neighbour mount,
And we and all the Muses are things of no account.
They have schooling of their own, but I pass their schooling by,
What can they know that we know that know the time to die?
O what of that, O what of that,
What is there left to say?
But there's another knowledge that my heart destroys,
As the fox in the old fable destroyed the Spartan boy's
Because it proves that things both can and cannot be;
That the swordsmen and the ladies can still keep company,
Can pay the poet for a verse and hear the fiddle sound,
That I am still their setvant though all are underground.
O what of that, O what of that,
What is there left to say?
I came on a great house in the middle of the night,
Its open lighted doorway and its windows all alight,
And all my friends were there and made me welcome too;
But I woke in an old ruin that the winds. howled through;
And when I pay attention I must out and walk
Among the dogs and horses that understand my talk.
O what of that, O what of that,
What is there left to say?



Because I am mad about women
I am mad about the hills,
Said that wild old wicked man
Who travels where God wills.
Not to die on the straw at home.
Those hands to close these eyes,
That is all I ask, my dear,
From the old man in the skies.
Daybreak and a candle-end.
Kind are all your words, my dear,
Do not the rest withhold.
Who can know the year, my dear,
When an old mans blood grows cold?
I have what no young man can have
Because he loves too much.


Words I have that can pierce the heart,
But what can he do but touch?
Daybreak and a candle-end.
Then Said she to that wild old man,
His stout stick under his hand,
Love to give or to withhold
Is not at my command.
I gave it all to an older man:
That old man in the skies.
Hands that are busy with His beads
Can never close those eyes.
Daybreak and a candle-end.
Go your ways, O go your ways,
I choose another mark,
Girls down on the seashore
Who understand the dark;
Bawdy talk for the fishermen;
A dance for the fisher-lads;
When dark hangs upon the water
They turn down their beds.
Daybreak and a candle-end.
A young man in the dark am I,
But a wild old man in the light,
That can make a cat laugh, or
Can touch by mother wit
Things hid in their marrow-bones
From time long passed away,
Hid from all those warty lads
That by their bodies lay.
Daybreak and a candle-end.
All men live in suffering,
I know as few can know,
Whether they take the upper road
Or stay content on the low,
Rower bent in his row-boat






Or weaver bent at his loom,
Horseman erect upon horseback
Or child hid in the womb.
Daybreak and a candle-end.
That some stream of lightning
From the old man in the skies
Can burn out that suffering
No right-taught man denies.
But a coarse old man am I,
I choose the second-best,
I forget it all awhile
Upon a woman's breast.
Daybreak and a candle-end.


Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again !
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.




I sing what was lost and dread what was won,
I walk in a battle fought over again,
My king a lost king, and lost soldiers my men;
Feet to the Rising and Setting may run,
They always beat on the same small stone.


You think it horrible that lust and rage
Should dance attention upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young;
What else have I to spur me into song?

Come swish around, my pretty punk,
And keep me dancing still
That I may stay a sober man
Although I drink my fill.
Sobriety is a jewel
That I do much adore;
And therefore keep me dancing
Though drunkards lie and snore.
O mind your feet, O mind your feet,
Keep dancing like a wave,
And under every dancer
A dead man in his grave.
No ups and downs, my pretty,
A mermaid, not a punk;
A drunkard is a dead man,
And all dead men are drunk.








The Colonel went out sailing,
He spoke with Turk and Jew,
With Christian and with Infidel,
For all tongues he knew.
O what's a wifeless man? said he,
And he came sailing home.
He rose the latch and went upstairs
And found an empty room.
The Colonel went out sailing.


I kept her much in the country
And she was much alone,
And though she may be there, he said,
She may be in the town.
She may be all alone there,
For who can say? he said.
I think that I shall find her
In a young man's bed.
The Colonel went out sailing.

The Colonel met a pedlar,
Agreed their clothes to swop,




And bought the grandest jewelry
In a Galway shop,
Instead of thread and needle
Put jewelry in the pack,
Bound a thong about his hand,
Hitched it on his back.
The Colonel went out sailing.


The Colonel knocked on the rich man's door,
I am sorry, said the maid,
My mistress cannot see these things,
But she is still abed,
And never have I looked upon
Jewelry so grand.
Take all to your mistress,
And he laid them on her hand.
The Colonel went out sailing.

And he went in and she went on
And both climbed up the stair,
And O he was a clever man,
For he his slippers wore.
And when they came to the top stair
He ran on ahead,
His wife he found and the rich man
In the comfort of a bed.
The Colonel went out sailing.



The Judge at the Assize Court,
When he heard that story told,
Awarded him for damages
Three kegs of gold.
The Colonel said to Tom his man,
Harness an ass and cart,
Carry the gold about the town,
Throw it in every patt.
The Colonel went out sailing.

And there at all street-corners
A man with a pistol stood,
And the rich man had paid them well
To shoot the Colonel dead;
But they threw down their pistols
And all men heard them swear
That they could never shoot a man
Did all that for the poor.
The Colonel went out sailing.

And did you keep no gold, Tom?
You had three kegs, said he.
I never thought of that, Sir.
Then want before you die.
And want he did; for my own grand-dad
Saw the story's end,


And Tom make out a living
From the seaweed on the strand.
The Colonel went out sailing.

A

Should keep their lovers waiting,
Keep their lovers waiting?
That rule because a strong right arm
Puts all men in a fright,
Would keep his lover waiting,
Keep his lover waiting?




A statesman is an easy man,
He tells his lies by rote;
A journalist makes up his lies
And takes you by the throat;
So stay at home and drink your beer
And let the neighbours vote,
Said the man in the golden breastplate
Under the old stone Cross.
Because this age and the next age
Engender in the ditch,
No man can know a happy man
From any passing wretch;
If Folly link with Elegance
No man knows which is which,
Said the man in the golden breastplate
Under the old stone Cross.
But actors lacking music
Do most excite my spleen,
They say it is more human
To shuffle, grunt and groan,
Not knowing what unearthly stuff
Rounds a mighty scene,
Said the man in the golden breastplate
Under the old stone Cross.


Poetry, music, I have loved, and yet
Because of those new dead

That come into my soul and escape
Confusion of the bed,
Or those begotten or unbegotten
Perning in a band,
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.
Or those begotten or unbegotten,
For I would not recall
Some that being unbegotten
Are not individual,
But copy some one action,
Moulding it of dust or sand,
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.
An old ghost's thoughts are lightning,
To follow is to die;
Poetry and music I have banished,
But the stupidity
Of root, shoot, blossom or clay
Makes no demand.
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.


What if I bade you leave
The cavern of the mind?
There's better exercise
In the sunlight and wind.
I never bade you go
To Moscow or to Rome.
Renounce that drudgery,
Call the Muses home.



Seek those images
That constitute the wild,
The lion and the virgin,
The harlot and the child
Find in middle air
An eagle on the wing,
Recognise the five
That make the Muses sing.


A man I praise that once in Tara's Hals
Said to the woman on his knees, Lie still.
My hundredth year is at an end. I think
That something is about to happen, I think
That the adventure of old age begins.
To many women I have said, Lie still,
And given everything a woman needs,
A roof, good clothes, passion, love perhaps,
But never asked for love; should I ask that,
I shall be old indeed.
Thereon the man
Went to the Sacred House and stood between
The golden plough and harrow and spoke aloud
That all attendants and the casual crowd might hear.
God I have loved, but should I ask return
Of God or woman, the time were come to die.
He bade, his hundred and first year at end,
Diggers and carpenters make grave and coffin;
Saw that the grave was deep, the coffin sound,
Summoned the generations of his house,
Lay in the coffin, stopped his breath and died.




Pythagoras planned it. Why did the people stare?
His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move
In marble or in bronze, lacked character.
But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
Of solitary beds, knew what they were,
That passion could bring character enough,
And pressed at midnight in some public place
Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.
No! Greater than Pythagoras, for the men
That with a mallet or a chisel modelled these
Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down
All Asiatic vague immensities,
And not the banks of oars that swam upon
The many-headed foam at Salamis.
Europe put off that foam when Phidias
Gave women dreams and dreams their looking-glass.
One image crossed the many-headed, sat
Under the tropic shade, grew round and slow,
No Hamlet thin from eating flies, a fat
Dreamer of the Middle Ages. Empty eyeballs knew
That knowledge increases unreality, that
Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.
When gong and conch declare the hour to bless
Grimalkin crawls to Buddha's emptiness.
When Pearse summoned him to his side.
What stalked through the post Office? What intellect,
What calculation, number, measurement, replied?
We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,
Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.
April ,







There all the golden codgers lay,
There the silver dew,
And the great water sighed for love,
And the wind sighed too.
Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed
By Oisin on the grass;
There sighed amid his choir of love
Tall pythagoras.
Plotinus came and looked about,
The salt-flakes on his breast,
And having stretched and yawned awhile
Lay sighing like the rest.


Straddling each a dolphin's back
And steadied by a fin,
Those Innocents re-live their death,
Their wounds open again.
The ecstatic waters laugh because
Their cries are sweet and strange,
Through their ancestral patterns dance,
And the brute dolphins plunge
Until, in some cliff-sheltered bay
Where wades the choir of love
Proffering its sacred laurel crowns,
They pitch their burdens off.






Slim adolescence that a nymph has stripped,
Peleus on Thetis stares.
Her limbs are delicate as an eyelid,
Love has blinded him with tears;
But Thetis belly listens.
Down the mountain walls
From where pan's cavern is
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.



Remember all those renowned generations,
They left their bodies to fatten the wolves,
They left their homesteads to fatten the foxes,
Fled to far countries, or sheltered themselves
In cavern, crevice, or hole,
Defending Ireland's soul.
Be still, be still, what can be said?
My father sang that song,
But time amends old wrong,
All that is finished, let it fade.


Remember all those renowned generations,
Remember all that have sunk in their blood,
Remember all that have died on the scaffold,
Remember all that have fled, that have stood,
Stood, took death like a tune
On an old ,tambourine.
Be still, be still, what can be said?
My father sang that song,
But time amends old wrong,
And all that's finished, let it fade.
Fail, and that history turns into rubbish,
All that great past to a trouble of fools;

All the renown that fell.
Be still, be still, what can be said?
My father sang that song,
But time amends old wrong,
And all that's finished, let it fade.

The soldier takes pride in saluting his Captain,
The devotee proffers a knee to his Lord,
Some back a mare thrown from a thoroughbred,,
Troy backed its Helen; Troy died and adored;
Great nations blossom above;
A slave bows down to a slave.
What marches through the mountain pass?
No, no, my son, not yet;
That is an airy spot,
And no man knows what treads the grass.

We know what rascal might has defiled,
The lofty innocence that it has slain,
Were we not born in the peasant's cot
Where men forgive if the belly gain?
More dread the life that we live,
How can the mind forgive?
What marches down the mountain pass?
No, no, my son, not yet;
That is an airy spot,
And no man knows what treads the grass.
What if there's nothing up there at the top?
Where are the captains that govern mankind?
What tears down a tree that has nothing within it?
A blast of the wind, O a marching wind,
March wind, and any old tune.
March, march, and how does it run?
What marches down the mountain pass?
No, no, my son, not yet;
That is an airy spot,
And no man knows what treads the grass.

Grandfather sang it under the gallows:
Hear, gentlemen, ladies, and all mankind:
Money is good and a girl might be better,
But good strong blows are delights to the mind.
There, standing on the cart,
He sang it from his heart.
Robbers had taken his old tambourine,
But he took down the moon
And rattled out a tune;
Robbers had taken his old tambourine.


A girl I had, but she followed another,
Money I had, and it went in the night,
Strong drink I had, and it brought me to sorrow,
But a good strong cause and blows are delight.
All there caught up the tune:
Oh, on, my darling man.
Robbers had taken his old tambourine,
But he took down the moon
And rattled out a tune;
Robbers had taken his old tambourine.
Money is good and a girl might be better,
No matter what happens and who takes the fall,
But a good strong cause the rope gave a jerk there,
No more sang he, for his throat was too small;
But he kicked before he died,
He did it out of pride.
Robbers had taken his old tambourine,
But he took down the moon
And rattled out a tune;
Robbers had taken his old tambourine.


That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps ate spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.
That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-leggedfly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

Here at right of the entrance this bronze head,
Human, superhuman, a bird's round eye,
Everything else withered and mummy-dead.
What great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky
Something may linger there though all else die;
And finds there nothing to make its tetror less
Hysterica passio of its own emptiness?
No dark tomb-haunter once; her form all full
As though with magnanimity of light,
Yet a most gentle woman; who can tell
Which of her forms has shown her substance right?


Or maybe substance can be composite,
Profound McTaggart thought so, and in a breath
A mouthful held the extreme of life and death.
But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,
I saw the wildness in her and I thought
A vision of terror that it must live through
Had shattered her soul. Propinquity had brought
Imagination to that pitch where it casts out
All that is not itself: I had grown wild
And wandered murmuring everywhere, My child, my child!

Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall;
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave,
And wondered what was left for massacre to save.



A bloody and a sudden end,
Gunshot or a noose,






For Death who takes what man would keep,
Leaves what man would lose.
He might have had my sister,
My cousins by the score,
But nothing satisfied the fool
But my dear Mary Moore,
None other knows what pleasures man
At table or in bed.
What shall I do for pretty girls
Now my old bawd is dead?
Though stiff to strike a bargain,
Like an old Jew man,
Her bargain struck we laughed and talked
And emptied many a can;
And O! but she had stories,
Though not for the priest's ear,
To keep the soul of man alive,
Banish age and care,
And being old she put a skin
On everything she said.
What shall I do for pretty girls
Now my old bawd is dead?
The priests have got a book that says
But for Adam's sin
Eden's Garden would be there
And I there within.
No expectation fails there,
No pleasing habit ends,
No man grows old, no girl grows cold
But friends walk by friends.
Who quarrels over halfpennies
That plucks the trees for bread?
What shall I do for pretty girls
Now my old bawd is dead?




Because we love bare hills and stunted trees
And were the last to choose the settled ground,
Its boredom of the desk or of the spade, because
So many years companioned by a hound,
Our voices carry; and though slumber-bound,
Some few half wake and half renew their choice,
Give tongue, proclaim their hidden name Hound Voice.
The women that I picked spoke sweet and low
And yet gave tongue. Hound Voices were they all.
We picked each other from afar and knew
What hour of terror comes to test the soul,
And in that terror's name obeyed the call,
And understood, what none have understood,
Those images that waken in the blood.
Some day we shall get up before the dawn
And find our ancient hounds before the door,
And wide awake know that the hunt is on;
Stumbling upon the blood-dark track once more,
Then stumbling to the kill beside the shore;
Then cleaning out and bandaging of wounds,
And chants of victory amid the encircling hounds.


Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.
What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,
And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern Stalks upon higher,
Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.
Because piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, ake but poor shows,
Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon This timber toes,
Because women in the upper storeys demand a face at the pane,
That patching old heels they may shriek, I take to chisel and plane.






Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.
All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.


Because there is safety in derision
I talked about an apparition,
I took no trouble to convince,
Or seem plausible to a man of sense.
Distrustful of the popular eye
Whether it be bold or sly.
Fifteen apparitions have I seen;
The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.
I have found nothing half so good
As my long-planned half solitude,
Where I can sit up half the night
With some friend that has the wit
Not to allow his looks to tell
When I am unintelligible.
Fifteen apparitions have I seen;
The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.
When a man grows old his joy
Grows more deep day after day,
His empty heart is full at length,
But he has need of all that strength
Because of the increasing Night
That opens her mystery and fright.
Fifteen apparitions have I seen;
The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.

What woman hugs her infant there?
star has shot an ear.
What made the drapery glisten so?
Not a man but Delacroix.
What made the ceiling waterproof?
Landor's tarpaulin on the roof
What brushes fly and moth aside?
Irving and his plume of pride.
What hurries out the knaye and dolt?
Talma and his thunderbolt.
Why is the woman terror-struck?
Can there be mercy in that look?


Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,






No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.


I led among great houses,
Riches drove out rank,
Base drove out the better blood,
And mind and body shrank.
No man ruled the table,
But I'd a troop of friends
That knowing better talk had gone
Talked of odds and ends.
Some knew what ailed the world
But never said a thing,
So I have picked a better trade
And night and morning sing:


Makes me sweet music
And I delight to sing:
Tall dames go walking in grass-green Avalon.
With boys and girls about him.
With any sort of clothes,
With a hat out of fashion,
With Old patched shoes,
With a ragged bandit cloak,
With an eye like a hawk,
With a stiff straight back,
With a strutting turkey walk.
With a bag full of pennies,
With a monkey on a chain,
With a great cock's feather,
With an old foul tune.
Tall dames go walking in grass-green Avalon.


I am tired of cursing the Bishop,
Said Crazy Jane
Nine books or nine hats
Would not make him a man.
I have found something worse
To meditate on.
A King had some beautiful cousins.
But where are they gone?
Battered to death in a cellar,
And he stuck to his throne.
Last night I lay on the mountain.
Said Crazy Jane
There in a two-horsed carriage
That on two wheels ran
Great-bladdered Emer sat.






Her violent man
Man sat at her side;
Thereupon
Propped upon my two knees,
I kissed a stone
I lay stretched out in the dirt
And I cried tears down.



I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.


What can I but enumerate old themes?
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride?





And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
The Countess Cathleen was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intetvened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.
And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Man fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.


Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.


Man
In a cleft that's christened Alt
Under broken stone I halt
At the bottom of a pit
That broad noon has never lit,
And shout a secret to the stone.
All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
Did words of mine put too great strain
On that woman's reeling brain?
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?
And all seems evil until I
Sleepless would lie down and die.




Echo

Lie down and die.
Man
That were to shirk
The spiritual intellect's great work,
And shirk it in vain. There is no release
In a bodkin or disease,
Nor can there be work so great
As that which cleans man's dirty slate.
While man can still his body keep
Wine or love drug him to sleep,
Waking he thanks the Lord that he
Has body and its stupidity,
But body gone he sleeps no more,
And till his intellect grows sure
That all's arranged in one clear view,
Pursues the thoughts that I pursue,
Then stands in judgment on his soul,
And, all work done, dismisses all
Out of intellect and sight
And sinks at last into the night.
Echo
Into the night.
Man
O Rocky Voice,
Shall we in that great night rejoice?
What do we know but that we face
One another in this place?
But hush, for I have lost the theme,
Its joy or night-seem but a dream;
Up there some hawk or owl has struck,
Dropping out of sky or rock,
A stricken rabbit is crying out,
And its cry distracts my thought.






A man that had six mortal wounds, a man
Violent and famous, strode among the dead;
Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.
Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head
Came and were gone. He leant upon a tree
As though to meditate on wounds and blood.
A Shroud that seemed to have authority
Among those bird-like things came, and let fall
A bundle of linen. Shrouds by two and three
Came creeping up because the man was still.
And thereupon that linen-carrier said:
Your life can grow much sweeter if you will
Obey our ancient rule and make a shroud;
Mainly because of what we only know
The rattle of those arms makes us afraid.
We thread the needles eyes, and all we do
All must together do. That done, the man
Took up the nearest and began to sew.
Now must we sing and sing the best we can,
But first you must be told our character:
Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain
Or driven from home and left to dic in fear.
They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before;
They had changed their thtoats and had the throats of birds.




S that the men of the old black tower,
Though they but feed as the goatherd feeds,
Their money spent, their wine gone sour,
Lack nothing that a soldier needs,
That all are oath-bound men:
Those banners come not in.
There in the tomb stand the dead upright,
But winds come up from the shore:
They shake when the winds roar,
Old bones upon the mountain shake.
Those banners come to bribe or threaten,
Or whisper that a man's a fool
Who, when his own right king's forgotten,
Cares what king sets up his rule.
If he died long ago
Why do yopu dread us so?
There in the tomb drops the faint moonlight,
But wind comes up from the shore:
They shake when the winds roar,
Old bones upon the mountain shake.
The tower's old cook that must climb and clamber
Catching small birds in the dew of the morn
When we hale men lie stretched in slumber
Swears that he hears the king's great horn.
But he's a lying hound:
Stand we on guard oath-bound!
There in the tomb the dark grows blacker,
But wind comes up from the shore:
They shake when the winds roar,
Old bones upon the mountain shake.








by what the sages spoke
Round the Mareotic Lake
That the Witch of Atlas knew,
Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.
Swear by those horsemen, by those women
Complexion and form prove superhuman,
That pale, long-visaged company
That air in immortality
Completeness of their passions won;
Now they ride the wintry dawn
Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.
Here's the gist of what they mean.


Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-diggers toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong.
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.


You that Mitchel's prayer have heard,
Send war in our time, O Lord!
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.


Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did.
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right.
Measurement began our might:
Till her bowels are in heat,
Proof that there's a purpose set
Before the secret working mind:
Profane perfection of mankind.

On backgrounds for a God or Saint
Gardens where a soul's at ease;
Where everything that meets the eye,
Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,
Resemble forms that are or seem
When sleepers wake and yet still dream.
And when it's vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That heavens had opened.
When that greater dream had gone
Prepared a rest for the people of God,
Palmer's phrase, but after that
Confusion fell upon our thought.

Poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be

You who are bent, and bald, and blind,
With a heavy heart and a wandering mind,
Have known three centuries, poets sing,
Of dalliance with a demon thing.
Sad to remember, sick with years,
The swift innumerable spears,
The horsemen with their floating hair,
And bowls of barley, honey, and wine,
Those merry couples dancing in tune,
And the white body that lay by mine;
But the tale, though words be lighter than air.
Must live to be old like the wandering moon.
When we followed a deer with our baying hounds.

Came to the cairn-heaped grassy hill
Where passionate Maeve is stony-still;
And found On the dove-grey edge of the sea
A pearl-pale, high-born lady, who rode
On a horse with bridle of findrinny;
And like a sunset were her lips,
A stormy sunset on doomed ships;
A citron colour gloomed in her hair,
But down to her feet white vesture flowed,
And with the glimmering crimson glowed
Of many a figured embroidery;
And it was bound with a pearl-pale shell
That wavered like the summer streams,
As her soft bosom rose and fell.

And now I am dizzy with the thought
Of all that wisdom and the fame
Of battles broken by his hands,
Of stories builded by his words
That are like coloured Asian birds
At evening in their rainless lands.
O Patrick, by your brazen bell,
There was no limb of mine but fell
Into a desperate gulph of love!
You only will I wed, I cried,
And I will make a thousand songs,
And set your name all names above,
And captives bound with leathern thongs
Shall kneel and praise you, one by one,
At evening in my western dun.
O Oisin, mount by me and ride
To shores by the wash of the tremulous tide,
Where men have heaped no burial-mounds,
And the days pass by like a wayward tune,
Where broken faith has never been known
And the blushes of first love never have flown;
And there I will give you a hundred hounds;
No mightier creatures bay at the moon;
And a hundred robes of murmuring silk,
And a hundred calves and a hundred sheep
Whose long wool whiter than sea-froth flows,
And a hundred spears and a hundred bows,
And oil and wine and honey and milk,
And always never-anxious sleep;
While a hundred youths, mighty of limb,
But knowing nor tumult nor hate nor strife,
And a hundred ladies, merry as birds,
Who when they dance to a fitful measure
Have a speed like the speed of the salmon herds,
Shall follow your horn and obey your whim,
And you shall know the leisure;


Lulled weariness, and softly round
My human sorrow her white arms wound.
We galloped; now a hornless deer
Passed by us, chased by a phantom hound
All pearly white, save one red ear;
And now a lady rode like the wind
With an apple of gold in her tossing hand;
And a beautiful young man followed behind
With quenchless gaze and fluttering hair.
Were these two born in the land,
Or have they breathed the mortal air?
Vex them no longer, Niamh said,
And sighing bowed her gentle head,
And sighing laid the pearly tip
Of one long finger on my lip.
But now the moon like a white rose shone
In the pale west, and the sun rim sank,
And clouds atrayed their rank on rank
About his fading crimson ball:
The floor of Almhuin's hosting hall
Was not more level than the sea,
As, full of loving fantasy,
And with low murmurs, we rode on,
Where many a trumpet-twisted shell
That in immortal silence sleeps
Dreaming of her own melting hues,
Her golds, her ambers, and her blues,
Pierced with soft light the shallowing deeps.
But now a wandering land breeze came
And a far sound of feathery quires;
It seemed to blow from the dying flame,
They seemed to sing in the smouldering fires.
The horse towards the music raced,
Neighing along the lifeless waste;
Like sooty fingers, many a tree


Rose ever out of the warm sea;
And they were trembling ceaselessly,
As though they all were beating time,
Upon the centre of the sun,
To that low laughing woodland rhyme.
And, now our wandering hours were done,
We cantered to the shore, and knew
The reason of the trembling trees:
Round every branch the song-birds flew,
Or clung thereon like swarming bees;
While round the shore a million stood
Like drops of frozen rainbow light,
And pondered in a soft vain mood
Upon their shadows in the tide,
And told the purple deeps their pride,
And murmured snatches of delight;
And on the shores were many boats
With bending sterns and bending bows,
And carven figures on their prows
Of bitterns, and fish-eating stoats,
And swans with their exultant throats:
And where the wood and waters meet
We tied the horse in a leafy clump,
And Niamh blew three merry notes
Out of a little silver trump;
And then an answering whispering flew
Over the bare and woody land,
A whisper of impetuous feet,
And ever nearer, nearer grew;
And from the woods rushed out a band
Of men and ladies, hand in hand,
And singing, singing all together;
Their brows were white as fragrant milk,
Their cloaks made out of yellow silk,
And trimmed with many a crimson feather;
And when they saw the cloak I wore
Was dim with mire of a mortal shore,
They fingered it and gazed on me






And laughed like murmurs of the sea;
But Niamh with a swift distress
Bid them away and hold their peace;
And when they heard her voice they ran
And knelt there, every girl and man,
And kissed, as they would never cease,
Her pearl-pale hand and the hem of her dress.
She bade them bring us to the hall
Where he dreams, from sun to sun,
A Druid dream of the end of days
When the stars are to wane and the world be done.
They led us by long and shadowy ways
Where drops of dew in myriads fall,
And tangled creepers every hour
Blossom in some new crimson flower,
And once a sudden laughter sprang
From all their lips, and once they sang
Together, while the dark woods rang,
And made in all their distant parts,
With boom of bees in honey-marts,
A rumour of delighted hearts.
And once a lady by my side
Gave me a harp, and bid me sing,
And touch the laughing silver string;
But when I sang of human joy
A sorrow wrapped each merry face,
And, patrick! by your beard, they wept,
Until one came, a tearful boy;
A sadder creature never stept
Than this strange human bard, he cried;
And caught the silver harp away,
And, weeping over the white strings, hurled
It down in a leaf-hid, hollow place
That kept dim waters from the sky;
And each one said, with a long, long sigh,
O saddest harp in all the world,
Sleep there till the moon and the stars die!


And now, still sad, we came to where
A beautiful young man dreamed within
A house of wattles, clay, and skin;
One hand upheld his beardless chin,
And one a sceptre flashing out
Wild flames of red and gold and blue,
Like to a merry wandering rout
Of dancers leaping in the air;
And men and ladies knelt them there
And showed their eyes with teardrops dim,
And with low murmurs prayed to him,
And kissed the sceptre with red lips,
And touched it with their finger-tips.
He held that flashing sceptre up.
Joy drowns the twilight in the dew,
And fills with stars night's purple cup,
And wakes the sluggard seeds of corn,
And stirs the young kid's budding horn,
And makes the infant ferns unwrap,
And for the peewit paints his cap,
And rolls along the unwieldy sun,
And makes the little planets run:
And if joy were not on the earth,
There were an end of change and birth,
And Earth and Heaven and Hell would die,
And in some gloomy barrow lie
Folded like a frozen fly;
Then mock at Death and Time with glances
And wavering arms and wandering dances.
Men's hearts of old were drops of flame
That from the saffron morning came,
Or drops of silver joy that fell
Out of the moon's pale twisted shell;
But now hearts cry that hearts are slaves,
And toss and turn in narrow caves;
But here there is nor law nor rule,






Nor have hands held a weary tool;
And here there is nor Change nor Death,
But only kind and merry breath,
For joy is God and God is joy.
With one long glance for girl and boy
And the pale blossom of the moon,
He fell into a Druid swoon.
And in a wild and sudden dance
We mocked at Time and Fate and Chance
And swept out of the wattled hall
And came to where the dewdrops fall
Among the foamdrops of the sea,
And there we hushed the revelry;
And, gathering on our brows a frown,
Bent all our swaying bodies down,
Sang, God is joy and joy is God,
And things that have grown sad are wicked,
And things that fear the dawn of the morrow
Or the grey wandering osprey Sorrow.
We danced to where in the winding thicket
The damask roses, bloom on bloom,
Like crimson meteors hang in the gloom.
And bending over them softly said,
Bending over them in the dance,
With a swift and friendly glance
From dewy eyes: Upon the dead
Fall the leaves of other roses,
On the dead dim earth encloses:
But never, never on our graves,
Heaped beside the glimmering waves,
Shall fall the leaves of damask roses.
For neither Death nor Change comes near us,
And all listless hours fear us,
And we fear no dawning morrow,


A certain poet in outlandish clothes
Gathered a crowd in some Byzantine lane,
Talked of his country and its people, sang
To some stringed instrument none there had seen,
A wall behind his back, over his head
A latticed window. His glance went up at time
As though one listened there, and his voice sank
Or let its meaning mix into the strings.
M 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 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 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,
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,


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-stricken 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,
O when will you grow weary?
They had vanished,
But our of the dark air over her head there came
A murmur of soft words and meeting lips.


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 hirds 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 hut know
That all this life can give us is
A child's laughter, a woman's kiss.
Who was it put so great a scorn
In thegrey reeds that night and morn
Are trodden and broken hy the herds,
And in the light bodies of birds
The 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
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,
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 Uladh 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 athough 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
Sofull 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
Rave 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 hearts can Fear 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, mn
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 matriage-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


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
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


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.


Hurrying to his queen
He had outridden 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
Among the African Mountains 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
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


What matter if our souls
Are nearer to the surface of the body
Than souls that start no game and turn no rhyme!
The soul's own youth and not the body's youth
Shows through our lineaments. My candle's bright,
My lantern is too loyal not to show
That it was made in your great father's reign,
And yet the jasmine season warms our blood.
Great prince, forgive the freedom of my speech:
You think that love has seasons, and you think
That if the spring bear off what the spring gave
The heart need suffer no defeat; but I
Who have accepted the Byzantine faith,
That seems unnatural to Arabian minds,
Think when I choose a bride I choose for ever;
And if her eye should not grow bright for mine
Or brighten only for some younger eye,
My heart could never turn from daily ruin,
Nor find a remedy.
But what if I
Have lit upon a woman who so shares
Your thirst for those old crabbed mysteries,
So strains to look beyond Our life, an eye
That never knew that strain would scarce seem bright,
And yet herself can seem youth's very fountain,
Being all brimmed with life?
Were it but true
I would have found the best that life can give,
Companionship in those mysterious things
That make a man's soul or a woman's soul
Itself and not some other soul.
That love
Must needs be in this life and in what follows
Unchanging and at peace, and it is right
Every philosopher should praise that love.
But I being none can praise its opposite.
It makes my passion stronger but to think

Like passion stirs the peacock and his mate,
The wild stag and the doe; that mouth to mouth
Is a man's mockery of the changeless soul.
And thereupon his bounty gave what now
Can shake more blossom from autumnal chill
Than all my bursting springtime knew. A girl
Perched in some window of her mother's house
Had watched my daily passage to and fro;
Had heard impossible history of my past;
Imagined some impossible history
Lived at my side; thought time's disfiguring touch
Gave but more reason for a woman's care.
Yet was it love of me, or was it love
Of the stark mystery that has dazed my sight,
perplexed her fantasy and planned her care?
Or did the torchlight of that mystery
Pick out my features in such light and shade
Two contemplating passions chose one theme
Through sheer bewilderment? She had not paced
The garden paths, nor counted up the rooms,
Before she had spread a book upon her knees
And asked about the pictures or the text;
And often those first days I saw her stare
On old dry writing in a learned tongue,
On old dry faggots that could never please
The extravagance of spring; or move a hand
As if that writing or the figured page
Were some dear cheek.
Upon a moonless night
I sat where I could watch her sleeping form,
And wrote by candle-light; but her form moved.
And fearing that my light disturbed her sleep
I rose that I might screen it with a cloth.
I heard her voice, Turn that I may expound
What's bowed your shoulder and made pale your cheek
And saw her sitting upright on the bed;
Or was it she that spoke or some great Djinn?


I say that a Djinn spoke. A livelong hour
She seemed the learned man and I the child;
Truths without father came, truths that no book
Of all the uncounted books that I have read,
Nor thought out of her mind or mine begot,
Self-born, high-born, and solitary truths,
Those terrible implacable straight lines
Drawn through the wandering vegetative dream,
Even those truths that when my bones are dust
Must drive the Arabian host.
The voice grew still,
And she lay down upon her bed and slept,
But woke at the first gleam of day, rose up
And swept the house and sang about her work
In childish ignorance of all that passed.
A dozen nights of natural sleep, and then
When the full moon swam to its greatest height
She rose, and with her eyes shut fast in sleep
Walked through the house. Unnoticed and unfelt
I wrapped her in a hooded cloak, and she,
Half running, dropped at the first ridge of the desert
And there marked out those emblems on the sand
That day by day I study and marvel at,
With her white finger. I led her home asleep
And once again she rose and swept the house
In childish ignorance of all that passed.
Even to-day, after some seven years
When maybe thrice in every moon her mouth
Murmured the wisdom of the desert Djinns,
She keeps that ignorance, nor has she now
That first unnatural interest in my books.
It seems enough that I am there; and yet,
Old fellow-student, whose most patient ear
Heard all the anxiety of my passionate youth,
It seems I must buy knowledge with my peace.
What if she lose her ignorance and so
Dream that I love her only for the voice,
That every gift and every word of praise






Is but a payment for that midnight voice
That is to age what milk is to a child?
Were she to lose her love, because she had lost
Her confidence in mine, or even lose
Its first simplicity, love, voice and all,
All my fine feathers would be plucked away
And I left shivering. The voice has drawn
A quality of wisdom from her love's
Particular quality. The signs and shapes;
All those abstractions that you fancied were
From the great Treatise of parmenides;
All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things
Are but a new expression of her body
Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.
And now my utmost mystery is out.
A woman's beauty is a storm-tossed banner;
Under it wisdom stands, and I alone
Of all Arabia's lovers I alone
Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost
In the confusion of its night-dark folds,
Can hear the armed man speak.

A thousand suns ago
When I could clearly remember
The raised voices
And aggressive words
That cut like daggers against sensitive ears
Anger trapped in condensation
As two adults scream at each other
Through a mahogany door
While I just sat and listened
Curled up in defeat
On the dark blue suede couch.
Then,
There were two houses
And a cracked blue slide phone
And I was the yeller
But not out loud
Because it's always safer to hide
The hurt and want and need
And you'll always have time to think,
To not give in,
And to break away,
When they're just words on a screen
And I can pretend
It's not my life
That just shattered
Into a million sharp edged pieces.

 
I'm mad
Because you're mad
At him
And that makes me mad
At you both
Now we're all mad
At each other
And at life
It's not just your fault
It's mine
And his too
Blow out the candle
Because the smoke
Is dark
But
It keeps us safe
From the fire

My First Arrow
The first time my hand brushes across the sleek, glossy wood of a bow,
it's instinctive,
second nature,
a sixth sense.
 
My hearing becomes so focused that the only thing audible is the clip
of my arrow, feathered like the wings of an eagle,
as it attaches to my bowstring,
and the high‐pitched voices of the birds as they harmonize their song.
Chirp, chirp, chirp.
 
My vision is narrowing; zooming in on my target,
and leaving all other distractions out of focus.
I've never felt this sensation before,
but I know it is my body preparing to shoot.
 
As slow as a snail creeping across the ground, I raise my loaded bow,
the weight of the crescent wood resting in my hands.
The bow and I are one.
 
I don't know how long I stand
with the bowstring drawn back to the downturned corners of my mouth,
waiting for the perfect moment to shoot.
waiting
waiting
 
The pungent scent of the oaks and pines that surround me
waft up my nostrils. I welcome the sweet smell.
The moisture in the air dampens my dry mouth.
It is cool, fresh, and has a sweet tang of nature.
My olive skin is sticky with humidity and warm, despite the lack of sun.
Rain is coming, I think.
 
On an exhale, I release my bowstring,
sending my arrow sailing through the forest air.
Whoosh
I wait for the sensation of shooting to subside
before I locate my arrow.
It is probably planted in the ground far off in the surrounding woods,
I predict.

 
When my vision normalizes, I peer at the target in front of me.
My calloused hands gently rub my disbelieving eyes.
Once,
twice.
What I see can not be real.
Because piercing the center of my target's face is an arrow.
My arrow
My first arrow.
And it's a perfect bull's‐eye.

Middle School Honorable Mentions
“I didn't forget” by Catalina Aycardi, Wood Hill, Grade
I didn't forget
I just wanted to tell you I didn't forget
I might've been mad
But I never forgot
The advice and the talks you gave me
I know that it seemed as if I shut you out
I know that it seemed as if I didn't listen
But believe it or not
Every word you said
And every talk you gave me
Have been carved forever in my heart
“The Picture” by Sam Bird, Wood Hill, Grade
The Picture
Going through his stuff
The person I never knew
It feels as though it's wrong
To see the faces,
Of sorrow and grief
And how easy
To break, to have a child's grip slip
What you don't know is important, the last relic
But yet so hard to put back together
The picture you had loved,
The picture of your grandfather

Dazzled
My brother Adam
Dirty blonde hair
Sea blue eyes
I am dazzled
 
His modesty is comforting,
Kind,
Reassuring
Likeable in every way
I am dazzled
 
He carries himself
With a head held high
He is bright‐
Not just intelligent‐
But bright
Like the sun in the sky
Always positive
In a good mood
I am dazzled
 
Everything he is and does comes
Naturally
He says he doesn't try
It's just who he is
He sets his priorities
And always succeeds
I am inspired and dazzled


The Sad Shy Girl
Her brother was popular
Had the looks
The Athleticism
The whole nine yards
But her,
Huh,
She was shy
 
When her brother asked
If she wanted to play,
She just turned her head
His year old friends
Thought she had the looks
They couldn't get to know her
Because she never expressed herself
 
She knew from within
That if she was going to live
In this place we call Earth
Well,
Maybe she needs to open her eyes,
Crawl out from under the covers,
And be more like her brother
Open
After all, it all starts
With a first step


The Glassblower's Secret
He sits in a sweltering room,
Patiently molding liquid glass
Into a vase that someone will buy.
 
Beads of glass are added,
A few scarlets, a sprinkle of saffron,
And he swirls it all together.
 
The room smells of metal and campfire,
Of sweat and of passion,
With the subtle scent of secrecy.
 
The molten glass glows on the end of the pole
As it is rolled back and forth
Along a metal table.
 
The glassblower sets it back in the furnace,
Long enough so that he can blow the glass out,
As easily as a balloon.
 
Swiftly, he breathes air into the vase,
And it expands like magic.
Finally, the ordeal is over.
 
He places the glass in a metal box to cool,
And meanders outside to gaze at the ocean,
And feel the cool sea air on his face.
 
Once the two of them have prepared themselves,
The glassblower knocks the vase off of the rod,
Praying that it doesn't shatter.
 
It doesn't, and later, a hundred people bid on the vase,
With its warm summer tone, somehow infused with love.
His secrets safe in his studio, the glassblower smiles.

“Picture worth a thousand words” by Meg Davis, Wood Hill, Grade
Picture worth a thousand words
I couldn't help it Sneaking just one little peek The faded blues and greens Your smiles Which aren't fake
Young love Before the pain And the fading One less character in life All from one picture Hidden in your
dresser drawer I know you loved him But I know that now You are happy

walking back from the shower house
a dirty towel slung over my shoulder
I looked out
past the boathouse
with the dials and gauges
past the canoes
on the rusty rack
and
I saw the sunset
across the lake
the perfect blend
of white, pink, and amber
bringing in the indigo of night.

Never Let Them
I love how they try to mold me
And twist me
So unnaturally
Because they think they can
When I don't come out
The way they want me to
They try to pull me apart, again and again
But I'm the one who will never let them
Then they fake a smile
Because it's all just a show
And I smile back
Because that hurts them most


 
He stands apart,
With a heavy heart.
The memories he keeps,
So the others can sleep.
 
Life began In white and black,
Until the day he had that snack.
He saw the apple shiny red,
And wondered, is this in my head?
 
He learned to take away the pain,
But his life couldn't be the same.
Sad memories he kept away,
While his friends went out to play.
 
He stands apart,
With a heavy heart.
The memories he keeps,
So the others can sleep.
 
Soon he learned his community,
was not all that peaceful and free.
Everything was devilish hues.
This life was all just a big ruse.
 
He thought this pain would never end,
 
Off he ran with his little friend.
A brand new town, nice warm bed,
and wondered, is this in my head?
 
He stands apart,
With a heavy heart.
The memories he keeps,
So the others can sleep.


It might just be in,
Your croaking laugh,
That changes into a horrifying cough,
Or your turtle‐neck sweaters,
Maybe the wrinkles that,
Dance all over your face,
When you smile,
It could be in,
Your shaky hands,
Or your wobbly walking,
Possibly your huffing breaths,
Or the way you stand up to my mom,
When she yells at me,
It could be in,
The way you want to,
Get me every gift in the word,
Or the way you want to be,
Part of my life as much as you can,
Your love is everywhere


I remember sitting on the stair
In your cottage,
Giggling as you made cookies
And my fingers picked
At the murky, cracking, floral wallpaper.
Why didn't I spend more time with you?
I remember sitting on the leather seats
Of the silver car.
You were languid,
As you trudged your way
To the car door,
As slow as the changing seasons.
I signed impatiently.
“Go faster”
I urged in my mind.
Why hadn't I realized?
I can still hear,
My dad's voice in my mind
When he heard the news
For the first time.
“She was like a second mom to me”
That was when I realized.
Why had I been so foolish?

I remember racing to
My room to put the
Bracelet on.
The metal tarnished,
The silver butterfly in
The middle a little bent.
It was the kind with
An opening so small
You had to bend it just
A little
To put it on.
I bent it a little more
Than I should have
And just like that,
It snapped in two.
The tarnished metal pieces
Still sit
In a Ziploc bag
Where no one can see it.
“Berkeley” by Sarah MacGregor, Wood Hill, Grade
Berkeley
Watching the goodbyes like a movie
But you already know the end
The happiness
Trapped within the broken body
Without hope of release
If a single wish were ever offered
To let it out
It would be accepted
And like a bright light
The images of
Sorrowful faces
Burned forever into
Closed eyes


You would kneel
Ivory comb in hand
Over the old rug in the
Dining room
The one from Germany
And you would carefully
Bring the comb down
Screeching the teeth
Against the
Scratched wood floor
But you couldn't hear
All you could see was
The perfect alignment
Of the frayed tassels
Smiling, you moved onto
The next set
All the way around.
You're not here now
There is no one to comb
The disarray
And no one to be my grandmother


I have paced the confines of my cage
A tyger looking to hurt
Have stalked grimy, shadowed alleyways
Searching for the fight.
I have been that kind.
I have risen against the traitor
Waiting for the sting of a slap
Or the mind clearing jolt
Of love spilling blood
To finally realize whose side I'm on
And received comforting arms instead.
I have been that kind.
I have burned the night
With deep orange slashes
And have slaughtered the Lamb
With my own dread hand.
I have been that kind.
I have beaten the asphalt
With raging bright red energy
Running from our demons
Human desire screaming,
“Don't ever leave me.”
I have been that kind.

Her voice is harsh,
A cheese grater scraping
Against my ear drums
And wheezing,
Stale, muggy breath slipping out with a hiss
At the end of each phrase
And she's loud
Always loud
Even when she's silent
Her opinion announcing itself
With a quick look of disdain.
She thinks life is clear cut,
All straight lines and distinct boundaries
Separating black and white.
But as she rants and raves,
For the third time tonight
Droplets of spit launching onto
Tonight's special, pork and mashed potatoes
She does not realize
That I, her own flesh and blood
Have anything but straight lines
And made of
A million shades of grey.
I don't tell her so.
She's stuck in .

Faded pictures
Hang on the wall
Faces and places
From so long ago
 
Letters from family
And friends now gone
The letters they sent
Are the last reminder
That they were ever real
That they found this hidden sanctuary
High in the mountains
 
Man's evil clutches
Have not spread here
Have not tainted this raw beautiful land
Have not burned the trees
And trampled the flowers
Is this the last place on earth
That we have not killed
Have not molded to suit our needs
Only to leave
When we have drained it of its wealth
Once its people are starving
Dying
Because of the very people sent to help them
 
The ones that said everything would be okay
The ones that lied

Blank paper glares at me
Waiting to be filled with words
Waiting for me
To weave ordinary letters
Into magical stories
Of dragons and knights
Adventure and romance
True love and happy endings
 
But today the letters are stubborn
Refusing to become words
Protesting being sentences
Becoming a story I didn't write
One of horror and death
Sickness and poverty
The letters have written
The story of reality.


Should I write this poem
Or leave it an idea
One of a hundred
Running through my head
 
Should I write this poem
Or leave it to wither
Simply because it wasn't always perfect,
Wasn't worth seeing where it could take me
 
No.
I think I'll write this poem
Not because I was told to
Or even because I had an idea
Because when all is said and done
I really never had an idea
I had a beat up notebook
And a spark of inspiration
To lead me in the dark
Towards this poem

Me, Myself and My Mind
The way it is to sit
And get lost in a thought
And to forget all that is going on
To be lost in
Me, myself and my mind
To think about anything
Anything that doesn't matter
No looks
No nothing, just
Me, myself and my mind
To not think about others
Be lost in myself and
In what I feel
Be lost in
Me, myself and my mind
To not have a care in my mind
And to not know where you're going
Or where you're being led
Even if you're thinking about a poem
Like this one
I have no clue
Where I'm going with it
I guess it's just to
My mind, myself and me

Fire‐ Orange
I knew
From the first time
I saw your fire‐orange
Beiber hair flip,
That
You
Were the one.
You winked at me,
In the play.
It was
Scripted, but
It still counts.
Over the last month,
I have plastered my
Bedroom walls with
Carefully crafted pictures
Of your
Baby soft
Ears.

Bright Bunch of Flowers


Car Crash
One last thought
A flashback
Before the crash
The air bag explodes
I scream
The car skids
Sparks spit out of the engine
The whole world
Spinning in circles
Until I come to a halt
My vision blurs
I can hear the siren
The pain settles in
I roll my head to the side
And give in to the darkness


Grandpa
He sits there
In his worn recliner
Reading the sports section in the Boston Globe newspaper
Eyes glued
Glasses perched
Glasses perched on nose
Then looking out
Onto his world
With a lake to fish on
The sun shining to wake him up
To begin another morning
One after another
Days go by
Still watching
His beloved lake
Like a time machine
Bringing him back to his childhood
Fishing with his father
On an old, color washed boat
With worn, beat‐up paddles
That still took him
On the shimmering lake
In Canada
Waiting patiently and quietly
For the fish to be caught

The Misfit
I dance when others sing.
I sing when others dance.
I'm a fruit loop in a world of cheerios.
I'm a white chocolate in a Hershey's factory.
I'm not like everyone else.
I am myself and I'm ok with that.

Bloody walls
I sit there
Waiting for it to be over
Words being yelled at me
And they think I'm listening
But I'm really not
The only words I hear are
Bad, bad, bad
I feel the words
Passing through me
And cannot do anything…
And then
“Zyel are you listening?”
I always respond with a yes
Finally they all be quiet…
I run to my room
Punch my walls as I do everyday
Sometimes the blood gushing from my hand
Feels nice
And then I take a nap
For the rest of the day
Until the next day
When it all starts again…
“Imagine” by Gianna Truchon, Wood Hill, Grade
Imagine
 
She sits there leaning back
In the old red chair
Listening to the rhythm of the cars
And the tweets of the birds
She closes her eyes and
Imagines fields of perfume
Scented flowers
Dreaming about her childhood
Playing with her siblings
Never moving a muscle
 

“Sewing Machine” by Gianna Truchon, Wood Hill, Grade
Sewing Machine
 
Behind the old fashioned gray sewing machine
Sat an old wrinkled smiling face
Her frail hands lightly pushing pink
Fabric through
A slight push on the pedal
With her strawberry shoes
The click, click, click of the machine
That sewed yards and yards of fabric
In its life

Inspiration
The first day
I was unsuspecting
I walked into that room
I smelled the melted crayons
I watched the dripping paint
drip
drip
drip
out of it's can.
 
Day two
my oblivion was less.
I saw you for the first time.
Still
I did not know it would be you
who changed my life.
 
Day three
and I knew.
I saw you for what you really are
to me.
I saw you
as my motive.
As my inspiration
 
Those weeks went by all too fast.
Then I left.
But it was almost like you
were the one
who
left.
And with you
went
inspiration.

The Little Things
I breathed in the cool, mountain air.
It was refreshing.
It awakened my mind.
I straightened my slick skis
and I began to slide.
Down
Down
Down the giant,
racing over its icy coat.
And the faster I went
down that mountain
the more I felt
like I was gliding
on air.
 
Now I am trapped in a room
that reeks of putrid sweat.
Tendrils of moisture wrap around my limbs.
And all the while I am hearing
the odious comments
made by my peers
who watch me trip head over heels
as I scramble for a basketball.
Again.
 
But as I sit on the floor
having fallen once more,
I remember the howling mountain wind
and my skis coasting over the crystal snow.
Suddenly I don't care about my incompetence.
I know I am talented at other things.
These thoughts remind me that
it is the little things
that we love
that give us the strength
to get through life.

But Why
Why the Barking dog
In the ringing ear
That has been through enough?
Obsessing over pointing that
Yellow confession light at me
Over and over again
Getting the truth to come
From something
I didn't do
Expecting so much more,
More than what I have been
Doing?
Their mouths move like children
Dancing,
Pushing me out of their way,
Annoyed at me for no reason,
Is that why?
Then watching my worn out face
Clash against a pillow,
time and time again?
Responsible?
Nicer?
Their voices echo loudly
I try, I do
They blame it on me though

Hand In the Wrong Hand
Hand in hand
My fingers in your fingers
Not alone
But I find your hand in the wrong hand
Not mine
Your fingers intertwining with
Pink nail polish I would never wear,
Not me
Hands on eyes
Cupped over face
Leaning over knees
Fingers dripping with salty tears
Face aching with sorrow
me

A Summer Shower
A summer rain
Is like a shower‐only different
It's the oddball
The Clifford out of dogs
The warm out of the cold
But the only way to make it right again
Is to run right into the rain
Let it pour on you
Until the sun cuts through
Slicing and cutting
Until the rain is gone
Just gone
Until the next time‐
Next time something dares to be different

 
Reminiscence
She presses her sweaty palm against the sharp glass
as if rubbing it against the shards would fix it,
back and forth, back and forth
like the hands of a clock,
slowly forgetting the time.
Remember when?
The little finger‐tips
would shakily clutch the green crayon
and the wax would melt off the paper
crying tears of shiny scribbles
but no one knew that the maze of lines
made up a picture.
Just like no one knew
that the sounds of the howls
disturbing the night,
were not animals at all.
And crayons weren't the only thing
she broke in half
when the drawings appeared too childish.
Questions are like little pieces,
bits sliced up to create easy‐to‐swallow foods
although no one was there to do that
or to tear the green crayon from her red little hand
before it ripped across the paper
and drew another picture

green minivan, green children
You drive too fast in your mother's car,
Hands sweating, glued to leather,
Circle toward the light.
You hold her hand
And I hold my own
And my tongue, I hold that too,
Twisted tight against the roof of my mouth
And your words curl over,
One, two,
blinker feet, slow to stop, parking brake,
and by then all you've said to me is useless,
whispered words, promised at midnight, gone, all gone:
tumbling out open windows
and left behind on the glistening pavement
for the mist has fallen by now,
over the town, streetlights
catch the darkness
in droplets over the canopy of pines
so I slip outside,
cold feet, cold ground,
leaving you
and your light, your everything
within your warm glow in the front seat.

 
Silence
Through the bustling halls filled with others, Who would mock me for any sign of weakness. I smile to
release myself: From those who have judged me, From those who have expectations of me, From those
who have hurt me. Each day passes But nothing changes. Scurrying through the halls, I get a glimpse of
you. You stand there with no frown, no smile, no emotion. I pass by but was stopped by a tug of my
sleeve. You looked at me, Nor did not speak But I heard you. You, a stranger, tells me what I want to
hear. Those words I've read in stories, Those words I've heard of, Those words I've never believed in.
Through all the chaos and noise, you heard me.

 
To Dear
Sometimes he'd pick through her diariesscruffy pieces
of paper pulled loose from their bindings–– and implore

He held the bundles of parchment as if wads of cash he couldn't spend,
so one wouldn't consider him rich in that regard, yet it was
treasure enough to immerse himself
in.
His companion would trace the strips of words…
prose that looped in intangible ribbons, gnarled
as roots, brittle as wintered branches…
then confirming or denying.

Yes or no.
When it wasn't, the pages almost glittered with jewels of words haphazardly
littered,
the scribbles of lonely love poems, intelligible nonsense and whatever else her sister
–his wife–
had wrote.
The presence of the Other Man, clinging to similar strokes and stabs
of the pen, riddled with similar emotions,
was stark and wholly different
the entries cut clean like surgery,
infected
mined.
Is this him? Sometimes it was, otherwise not.
Now in relapses of memory
he was forced to confide in the only company available:
the sister who never married. She was more valuable to him than
the journals themselves, after all, what are ancient runes
without a translator? If you cannot make sense of your own treasure
map
So,
the least lovely daughter would digest the scrawled text; puckered throttled bruised
from years of fingerprints, with phrases that balanced on the surface like bobs or else
bled through
as passion tends to do.
I can tell it's about him
No, she wrote this for you.

Sometimes he'd ask just so she'd scream She loved you,
Richard! She did! And whoever else as well. But
while diaries, so untarnished and absolute are lasting, both
those who wrote and those who read them are not.
In his old age
the widowed man
quelled. Came
loose from his bindings in pieces
puckered throttled bruised
gnarled as roots, brittle as wintered branches.
He learned to bury his treasure.
but I swear I love you more.

This is our summer
It's one of those moments where you can taste the humidity,
sour and damp in your mouth,
roll it over your teeth
or
pinch it in the air,
a dab underneath yellowing nails with chipped paint and edges gnawed by teeth
a common misconception is that beavers chew logs for food, when really, they're just trying to
find some shelter
And one day, there might be nothing left except an empty, naked finger. But the point is, it is
everywhere
And it crawls with tired, lazy hands and tired, lazy feet all over everything
tracking
its
quiet,
torturous
heaviness through the windows, drowning and choking a line of plants by the glass panes
that's how they got their names, after all,
from destroying beautiful things
and it will wrap its little damp hands
although it is too small to have hands and to honestly do any damage with them
around your neck…
reaching…
and you, the plant, the life, anything with any sort of inner luminosity, knows inherently that it is safe,
but somehow it still feels like suicide

to not struggle a little and to not fight for oxygen untouched by heavy devil hands
Beelzebub as water, not a pig's head nor a horned beast.
But anyway, the air turns heavy and falls into the sea, angry and churning and blue blue cerulean blue
like a blue bonnet or a blue bird or a recycling bin,
because the ocean is, after all, a massive receptacle for condensation in breath,
for rainwater, for tears and for tares and for emptied gallon jugs of orange juice
the bluest of blues you can see from the sky to behind you and back.
And the flecks of sun glinting, winking
or you could say twinkling, like lights outside in the coldcoldcold and the
white of a whipping winter evening, trudging home on weary feet and even though you're
almost apathetic, you see something smiling in the distance and then you're smiling and your
teeth are just as white and just as cold as the snow on the ground and the roads and the roofs

closing its eyelids with a crash and opening in the calm, revealing nice little irises of blue.
And that is when you first realize that you are absolutely nothing
Mere nothingness embedded in a wall of sound
Birds chirping and grass growing and wind lightly whistling and children screaming and
waves crash‐crash‐crashing
And as much as this nothingness is just noise and blue, it's green
So green that it hurts and so green that when you walk inside from steeping in the greenness you are
stained green and your vision is stained red.
Fabric green at the corners, green at the junctures of your joints and the rims of your edges,
green on the floor by the window where you crawled in one night with the crickets chirping behind you
like a symphony they keet‐keet‐keet all at once, a background hum all night and all nighttime‐
peripheries, green in your hair and green to the very tip of your nose.
It's green on the trees and the ground, green on the centipedes and green supporting the flowers and
berries.

And sometimes it gets so warm that you're standing right on the surface of the sun,
glasses in one hand,
sunscreen in the other and you wonder when will this end? except that it doesn't,
there are sun spots and solar flares and it's hotter than the hottest place you can think of,
 
sweat stains and bare feet,
like you took a picture of the world and exposed it for point‐zero‐zero‐one seconds so that everything is
so bright it's almost white.
So you see things like this with the scent of lilies heavy and heady in the air and you think I am so tiny,
so very small, so insignificant because everything is so much bigger than you and it's quite literally the
world and you are quite literally a mere fleck, mere nothingness.
It's green, green, green all around you and blue, blue, blue in the sky and in the water and there you are,
this little speck, this little thing with thoughts and ideas and a sunburn
and you realize you are nothing more than this moment and this is your summer.