I woke and rose and slipt away
To the heathery hills in the morning grey.
In a field where the dew lay cold and deep
I met an ass, new-roused from sleep.
I stroked his nose and I tickled his ears,
And spoke soft words to quiet his fears.
His eyes stared into the eyes of me
And he kissed my hands of his courtesy.
“O big, brown brother out of the waste,
How do thistles for breakfast taste?
“And do you rejoice in the dawn divine
With a heart that is glad no less than mine?
“For, brother, the depth of your gentle eyes
Is strange and mystic as the skies:
“What are the thoughts that grope behind,
Down in the mist of a donkey mind?
“Can it be true, as the wise men tell,
That you are a mask of God as well,
“And, as in us, so in you no less
Speaks the eternal Loveliness,
“And words of the lips that all things know
Among the thoughts of a donkey go?
“However it be, O four-foot brother,
Fair to-day is the earth, our mother.
“God send you peace and delight thereof,
And all green meat of the waste you love,
“And guard you well from violent men
Who’d put you back in the shafts again.”
But the ass had far too wise a head
To answer one of the things I said,
So he twitched his fair ears up and down
And turned to nuzzle his shoulder brown.
XXVIII
Ballade Mystique
The big, red house is bare and lone
The stony garden waste and sere
With blight of breezes ocean blown
To pinch the wakening of the year;
My kindly friends with busy cheer
My wretchedness could plainly show.
They tell me I am lonely here—
What do they know? What do they know?
They think that while the gables moan
And easements creak in winter drear
I should be piteously alone
Without the speech of comrades dear;
And friendly for my sake they fear,
It grieves them thinking of me so
While all their happy life is near—
What do they know? What do they know?
That I have seen the Dagda’s throne
In sunny lands without a tear
And found a forest all my own
To ward with magic shield and spear,
Where, through the stately towers I rear
For my desire, around me go
Immortal shapes of beauty clear:
They do not know, they do not know.
L’Envoi
The friends I have without a peer
Beyond the western ocean’s glow,
Wither the faerie galleys steer,
They do not know: how should they know?
XXIX
Night
I know a little Druid wood
Where I would slumber if I could
And have the murmuring of the stream
To mingle with a midnight dream,
And have the holy hazel trees
To play above me in the breeze,
And smell the thorny eglantine;
For there the white owls all night long
In the scented gloom divine
Hear the wild, strange, tuneless song
Of faerie voices, thin and high
As the bat’s unearthly cry,
And the measure of their shoon
Dancing, dancing, under the moon,
Until, amid the pale of dawn
The wandering stars begin to swoon. …
Ah, leave the world and come away!
The windy folk are in the glade,
And men have seen their revels, laid
In secret on some flowery lawn
Underneath the beechen covers
Kings of old, I’ve heard them say,
Here have found them faerie lovers
That charmed them out of life and kissed
Their lips with cold lips unafraid,
And such a spell around them made
That they have passed beyond the mist
And fount eh Country-under-wave. …
Kings of old, whom none could save!
XXX
Oxford
It is well that there are palaces of peace
And discipline and dreaming and desire,
Lest we forget our heritage and cease
The Spirit’s work—to hunger and aspire:
Lest we forget that we were born divine,
Now tangled in red battle’s animal net,
Murder the work and lust the anodyne,
Pains of the beast ’gainst bestial solace set.
But this shall never be: to us remains
One city that has nothing of the beast,
That was not built for gross, material gains,
Sharp, wolfish power or empire’s glutted feast.
We are not wholly brute. To us remains
A clean, sweet city lulled by ancient streams,
A place of visions and of loosening chains,
A refuge of the elect, a tower of dreams.
She was not builded out of common stone
But out of all men’s yearning and all prayer
That she might live, eternally our own,
The Spirit’s stronghold—barred against despair.
XXXI
Hymn (For Boy’s Voices)
All the things magicians do
Could be done by me and you
Freely, if we only knew.
Human children every day
Could play at games the faeries play
If they were but shown the way.
Every man a God would be
Laughing through eternity
If as God’s his eyes could see.
All the wizardries of God—
Slaying matter with a nod,
Charming spirits with his rod,
With the singing of his voice
Making lonely lands rejoice,
Leaving us no will nor choice,
Drawing headlong me and you
As the piping Orpheus drew
Man and beast the mountains through,
By the sweetness of his horn
Calling us from lands forlorn
Nearer to the widening morn—
All that loveliness of power
Could be man’s peculiar dower,
Even mine, this very hour;
We should reach the Hidden Land
And grow immortal out of hand,
If we could but understand!
We could revel day and night
In all power and all delight
If we learn to think aright.
XXXII
“Our Daily Bread”
We need no barbarous words nor solemn spell
To raise the unknown. It lies before our feet;
There have been men who sank down into Hell
In some suburban street,
And some there are that in their daily walks
Have met archangels fresh from sight of God,
Or watched how in their beans and cabbage-stalks
Long files of faerie trod.
Often me too the Living voices call
In many a vulgar and habitual place,
I catch a sight of lands beyond the wall,
I see a strange god’s face.
And some day this will work upon me so
I shall arise and leave both friends and home
And over many lands a pilgrim go
Through alien woods and foam,
Seeking the last steep edges of the earth
Whence I may leap into that gulf of light
Wherein, before my narrowing Self had birth,
Part of me lived aright.
XXXIII
How He Saw Angus the God
I heard the swallow sing in the eaves and rose
All in a strange delight while others slept,
And down the creaking stair, alone, tip-toes,
So carefully I crept.
The
