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.’
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 brotherhoodOf sun and moon and hollow and…
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 broodUpon love’s bitter mystery;For Fergus rules the brazen cars,And rules the shadows of the wood,And the white breast of the dim seaAnd all dishevelled wandering stars.
My discontented heart to draw contentFrom beauty that is cast out of a mouldIn bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,Appears, but when wc have gone is gone again,Being more indifferent to our solitudeThan ’twere an apparition. O heart, we are old;The living beauty is for younger men:We cannot pay its rribute of wild tears.
And shook at Inver AmerginThe hearts of the world-troubling seamen,And drove tumult and war awayFrom 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…
To build a perfect beauty in rhymeAre overthrown by a woman’s gazeAnd by the unlabouring brood of the skies:And therefore my heart will bow, when dewIs dropping sleep, until God burn time,Before the unlabouring stars and you.
In country shawl or Paris cloak, had put my wits astray,And what’s the good of women, for all that they can sayIs fol de rol de rolly O.Round Lough Derg’s holy island I went upon the stones,I prayed at all the Stations upon my matrow-bones,And there I found an old man, and though, I prayed…
