Poems

He stood among a crowd at Drumahair;

His heart hung all upon a silken dress,

And he had known at last some tenderness,

Before earth made of him her sleepy care;

But when a man poured fish into a pile,

It seemed they raised their little silver heads,

And sang how day a Druid twilight sheds

Upon a dim, green, well-beloved isle,

Where people love beside star-laden seas;

How Time may never mar their faery vows

Under the woven roofs of quicken boughs:

The singing shook him out of his new ease.

He wandered by the sands of Lisadill;

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 gray and muddy mouth

Sang how somewhere to north or west or south

There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race;

And how beneath those three times blessed skies

A Danaan fruitage makes a shower of moons,

And as it falls awakens leafy tunes:

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,

Now that deep earth has drunk his body in;

But one small knot-grass growing by the pool

Told where, ah, little, all-unneeded voice!

Old Silence bids a lonely folk rejoice,

And chaplet their calm brows with leafage cool,

And how, when fades the sea-strewn rose of day,

A gentle feeling wraps them like a fleece,

And all their trouble dies into its 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 old earth had taken man and all:

Were not the worms that spired about his bones

A-telling with their low and reedy cry,

Of how God leans His hands out of the sky,

To bless that isle with honey in His tones;

That none may feel the power of squall and wave

And no one any leaf-crowned dancer miss

Until He burn up Nature with a kiss:

The man has found no comfort in the grave.