Poetry

their day;
And then on heaped-up skins of otters slept.
And when the sun once more in saffron stepped,
Rolling his flagrant wheel out of the deep,
We sang the loves and angers without sleep,
And all the exultant labours of the strong.
But now the lying clerics murder song
With barren words and flatteries of the weak.
In what land do the powerless turn the beak
Of ravening Sorrow, or the hand of Wrath?
For all your croziers, they have left the path
And wander in the storms and clinging snows,
Hopeless for ever: ancient Usheen knows,
For he is weak and poor and blind, and lies
On the anvil of the world. S. Patric

Be still: the skies
Are choked with thunder, lightning, and fierce wind,
For God has heard, and speaks His angry mind;
Go cast your body on the stones and pray,
For He has wrought midnight and dawn and day.

Usheen

Saint, do you weep? I hear amid the thunder
The Fenian horses; armour torn asunder;
Laughter and cries. The armies clash and shock;
And now the daylight-darkening ravens flock.
Cease, cease, oh mournful, laughing Fenian horn!

We feasted for three days. On the fourth morn
I found, dropping sea foam on the wide stair,
And hung with slime, and whispering in his hair,
That demon dull and unsubduable;
And once more to a day-long battle fell,
And at the sundown threw him in the surge,
To lie until the fourth morn saw emerge
His new healed shape; and for a hundred years
So warred, so feasted, with nor dreams nor fears,
Nor languor nor fatigue; an endless feast,
An endless war.

The hundred years had ceased;
I stood upon the stair; the surges bore
A beech bough to me, and my heart grew sore,
Remembering how I stood by white-haired Finn
Under a beech at Allen and heard the thin
Outcry of bats.

And then young Niam came
Holding that horse, and sadly called my name.
I mounted, and we passed over the lone
And drifting greyness, while this monotone,
Surly and distant, mixed inseparably
Into the clangour of the wind and sea.

“I hear my soul drop down into decay,
And Mananan’s dark tower, stone by stone,
Gather sea slime and fall the seaward way,
And the moon goad the waters night and day,
That all be overthrown.

“But till the moon has taken all, I wage
War on the mightiest men under the skies,
And they have fallen or fled, age after age.
Light is man’s love, and lighter is man’s rage;
His purpose drifts and dies.”

And then lost Niam murmured, “Love, we go
To the Island of Forgetfulness, for lo!
The Islands of Dancing and of Victories
Are empty of all power.”

“And which of these
Is the Island of Content?”

“None know,” she said;
And on my bosom laid her weeping head.

Book III

Usheen

Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke, High as the saddle girth, covering away from our glances the tide; And those that fled, and that followed, from the foam-pale distance broke; The immortal desire of immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed. I mused on the chase with the Fenians, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair, And never a song sang Niam, and over my finger-tips Came now the sliding of tears and sweeping of mist-cold hair, And now the warmth of sighs, and after the quiver of lips. Were we days long or hours long in riding, when rolled in a grisly peace, An isle lay level before us, with dripping hazel and oak? And we stood on a sea’s edge we saw not; for whiter than new-washed fleece Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke. And we rode on the plains of the sea’s edge; the sea’s edge barren and grey, Grey sand on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees, Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas. But the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark; Dropping; a murmurous dropping; old silence and that one sound; For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark: Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground. And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night, For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and the sun, Ceased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light, And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was one. Till the horse gave a whinny; for, cumbrous with stems of the hazel and oak, A valley flowed down from his hoofs, and there in the long grass lay, Under the starlight and shadow, a monstrous slumbering folk, Their naked and gleaming bodies poured out and heaped in the way. And by them were arrow and war-axe, arrow and shield and blade; And dew-blanched horns, in whose hollow a child of three years old Could sleep on a couch of rushes, and all inwrought and inlaid, And more comely than man can make them with bronze and silver and gold. And each of the huge white creatures was huger than fourscore men; The tops of their ears were feathered, their hands were the claws of birds, And, shaking the plumes of the grasses and the leaves of the mural glen, The breathing came from those bodies, long-warless, grown whiter than curds. The wood was so spacious above them, that He who had stars for His flocks Could fondle the leaves with His fingers, nor go from His dew-cumbered skies; So long were they sleeping, the owls had builded their nests in their locks, Filling the fibrous dimness with long generations of eyes. And over the limbs and the valley the slow owls wandered and came, Now in a place of star-fire, and now in a shadow place wide: And the chief of the huge white creatures, his knees in the soft star-flame, Lay loose in a place of shadow: we drew the reins by his side. Golden the nails of his bird-claws, flung loosely along the dim ground; In one was a branch soft-shining with bells more many than sighs In midst of an old man’s bosom; owls ruffling and pacing around, Sidled their bodies against him, filling the shade with their eyes. And my gaze was thronged with the sleepers; no, not since the world