Classic Poem

The fog horns sound
With a note so prolonged
That the whole air is thronged,
And the sound is to me,
In spite of its crying,
The most satisfying,
The bravest of all the brave sounds of the sea.

From the fjords of the North
The fogs belly forth
Like sails of the long ships
That trouble the earth.
They stand with loose sail
In the fords of the Gael:
From Dark Pool to White Ford the surf-light is pale.

The chronicles say
That the Danes in their day
Took a very great prey
Of women from Howth.
They seem to imply
That the women were shy,
That the women were loath
To be taken from Howth.
From bushy and thrushy, sequestering Howth.
No mists of the Druid
Could halt or undo it
When long ships besetted
The warm sands wave-netted.
In vain might men pray
To be spared the invader
To that kind eye of gray,
To the Saint who regretted
Sea-purple Ben Edar.
They sailed to the town
That is sprung from the sea
Where the Liffey comes down
Down to roll on the Lea.

The fog horns sound
With the very same roar
That was sounded of yore
When they sounded for war.
As the war horns sounded
When men leapt ashore,
And raised up the stane
Where the long ships had grounded.
You hear them again
As they called to the Dane,
And the glens were astounded.
War horns sounded,
And strong men abounded
When Dublin was founded.

Whenever a woman of Moore Street complains
With hawser of hair
Where the golds and browns are,
And under her arm
A sieve or a dish
Full of flowers or of fish,
I think of that ancient forgotten alarm:
Of horror and grief
As she snatched at the leaf
In tunnels sea-ended that fall to the reef.

It was all Long Ago,
Only now to the slow
Groping in of the ships
In the sunlight's eclipse,
Are the fog horns sounded;
When war horns sounded
War ships could be grounded,
And dynasties founded.
But now they crawl in
With a far louder din
Than the old horns' could be;
And that's as it should be,
Because we put now
In the place of the prow
Of the dragon-head boats
A bowsprit of notes
With their loud, Safety First!
Where blue-eyed men burst,
And founded a city and founded a thirst!
And founded far more than to-day could be found:
The lesser the courage, the louder the sound!

But when the Dark Linn
Is aloud from the Rinn
I think of the women the sea-kings brought in:
The women of Dublin, the women who mother
A breed that the land and the sea cannot bother.
In flagons that ream
Like my own river's stream,
That gold of the granite
Gone black in the bogs,
I drink to our Race
That will go to the dogs,
Unless it can trace
And revive the old ways
Of the city when only
The bravest could man it,
Unless it can hold
To the virtues of old
When women resisted
And lovers were bold;
And steer through each upstart
Miasma that clogs
Its mind with the ravings
Of sly pedagogues;
And blow its own trumpet
To shatter the fogs.