Classic Poem

Men of the Northern Half, a fiery track
Was on the inland waters as I went down
The granite causeway rutted by old wars
From slumbering Emain Macha and below me
The silent plain was flowing into mist.
Wrapped in a skincoat heavy with pelting rain
Beneath the thorns, I waded, swordless, unknown
Upon my way, but when the sleeting light
Trampled the river and far mountains peeled
Against the racing skies and every stone
Was silver, on the miring plain I saw
The hurlers, sinewed with that sunlight, leap
Into the wind upon the stroke; but soon
Their shouts were smaller than themselves; I passed
The furrows of the hills, the gabbling ford
Where men have driven mares beyond the fields
Of greyish barley smoking in the wind
I leaned against the shower-sided days
In many a glen before the women came
To wash beside the river and the clouds
Were steeping their own shadows; and I caught
The bird-cry of a plain where only the wind
Herded the grasses and the rocks grew strange
And deeper in untrodden bracken.
Once
In a half glen I met a barefoot girl
That ran beside the daylight-slips of water
Calling wing-tilted creatures to her hand
Before she sang:
" O when the air is blowsy
And pools are blue, the goose-white clouds gleam out
Across the bogland where the streams can light
Themselves at every rise, and the cold sun
Is heathering. But why do wicked paths
Of forest hide the glen of Lunasa?
Sweetness is there and the warmth of yellow days,
Speckling of thrushes, murmur of bees
In bramble near the hazel and a browsing wind
Astray in grass.
O to be there,
Without grief, without care, though an hour's flight beyond,
Lu stride, unclouded, to his fiery seat
And rousing in their underworld the gods
Begin to stretch."
And as she sang in sorrow
I saw no messenger, no flock of geese —
Only the grey cuttings of the wave
On stone.
Along the shadow-stepping heather
I climbed into the highlands. There like snipe
In the last light of day the darting winds
Rippled the toughs into trickle of silver.
But far beyond the gravel, sink of glen
And rain of ridges that came near, I saw
A haze of peaks that had been secreted
By day and drawn their paleness from the sea;
And all that night I dreamed of messengers
Too great for thought that hides itself in time
And all night heard the murmuring of new waters
That go within the tide.
At break
Of day I heard below the crags a stir
Of forest rains. I clambered down, unharmed
As runnels; there the gnarled clans of the oak
Gloomed with their green moons and the last boars
Sank in old mast and under midnight yew
Where no bird sleeps. Far down the rainy glades
At twilight in the slush the feeding doe
Eared silence and faded from the misting ways.
Sometimes as hawk along the birching daylight
I wandered with a troubled shadow. Sometimes
I snared the rabbit at my feet. I broke
Into a riper shade on the third day
Still seeking the lost Dectora; and there,
Among such leaves as none might pillage, I knew
The graspings of great nuts would stand unprized
By human eye. But I had seen for sign
The sunlight grassing near a thunder-oak
That aired young leaves —
I had come to the wood's
Green shore.
At sunset a druid mist
Crept from the mountains like grey sleep. All night
I dreamed, and in my dream came to the ledges
Of early dawn and far below me lay
Another valley rivering through mist;
And as I wandered, One passed by with eyes
Brighter than sunlight on a hawk's poised wings
Above the bracken, and a frightened blackbird
Scuttered out of the brambles with guttural sobs.
I lay beneath a cairn all day and watched
The heather-darkened gleam of water-fire
Between the mountain-rocks, and far below
Weir-silver flowing through the sallow tops —
All day. But when the red-sea-dreaming sun
Was darkly wooded in the west, I sank
Below the curlew cry into the dew,
Into the misting valley, and I saw
A crumbling well where nine old hazels swayed
And in the waters the nine shadows. I
Flung as a thirsted stag the louder leaves
Into the darkness and drank where the waters
Stumbled upon the stones. A river flowed
Beyond that sacred well into the night,
And with its hazel murmur, dark in wisdom
I crossed the fiery mearing of the sunset.

Because the mind has many changes, time
Has shut my memory. I cannot tell
The day that I had hidden in the heather,
Storing the honey of thought in the sun
And dreaming of Uladh. But rain-purple ridges
Came nearer and the air was welled
With smallness of sun-hidden larks. I knew,
O Concobar, that iron is unwrought
When the last gods withdraw themselves from earth
And sky, but those who dream of them again
Shall be the holders of our darkened mind.
But now grey berries of evening grew in the woods
And the cuckoo of the softness had left
His branch to a low soughing; I made stir
And went with starlit brows into the night. . . .
The river slipped the hollows of its echo
And poured the dawn from dark-green-wooded rocks
Into the Valley of the Wandering Voices
Where many sang:
" In the ring of day
I was above the flighting of the clouds
And saw the dewy, dark-blue pinewoods reel
From mist below."
" Wings thickened in the sedge-tops
And winter honey shone outside the bark
As I came."
" When the heather in the twilight
Turned purple and air cast a shiny hoop
Along the thinness of the lake, we sang
Of lovers, who must leave the table, tired
Of appetite, to wander from the grass
And rock that they may grope with timid hands
Within the dark ways of a wood, feeling
The hardness, softness, of the night is less
Than the glowing of their curious minds —
Is less than drowsy breathing."
" O hurry now,
For those two stir with daylight and the birds
Are busy as their eyes."
And they sang:
" When grasses in the windy heatherland
Half ran, we heard them far below us, deeper
Than blackbirds at the filters of the wood
And wearied by the inner lights of bramble
They ventured out, browbeaten by the east.
They climbed, they swiftly glanced at one another.
The pinewood sank below them — hasty steps
Of water — as they sped from soft to hard.
Too soon! they cried, to pull the wildish fruit,
The purple stainer! So they wandered loud
And joyfully above the sunning hawk
Where grasses through the windy heather ran."
Another sang:
" I saw them when the wheel-ray
Went splashing through the thicks of dewy grass
Beneath a carven pillar in the valley
Who now are hidden in the sunlight, closer
Than their own secret-sharing eyes."
" At dark
Of rain the cliffs are looming, but the lakes
Still blaze with noon. We see those lovers going
Into the gale. They mingle in the clouds
That overshadow them with changing shapes
Of animals in flanking flight from horn and wing
They cannot see."
" Mortals have never known
The might of that desire who have not fled
In slumber from the flanking horn and claws
Beneath the wings."
And rapidly as echo
Along the valley rock the voices fled,
But when westward the quiet air was red
And airs came out like rabbits through the grass
Again and on the mountain ridge the cairns
Were passionate as their past, a voice
Spoke in the woods:
" I pulled strange boughs around me
For a shelter when the stars were in the trees.
They were thick with unripe berries and brought me dreams
Of birds that sang among them long ago
And, knowing my love would come, I groped
For flowers in the grass and with their dew
Upon my hands I gathered rushes
Growing between the water and the breeze;
Yet hidden in my thoughts of her, how could
I tell that she was passing by?"
The wood
Was silent, but I knew that Aongus sang
And many days went towards the western ridge
Until the fire-head sank. But on a strange day
About that gorgeous red hour when the sun
Becomes a god, I heard the voices call:

" O Love, faint songs are setting in the woods
And sleep hangs in each flower. Yet Dectora
Is pale, is beautiful this hour. She leans
Awhile between the shadows where the grass
Is deeper."
" Sad, O Love," Lu cries
And passes —
— " sleepily the blackbirds talk.
Dew is too frail to lie along the branch
And the proud grow mild with love."
" O Lu,
As I went by the woods that tend a cloud
On Luachra, she came to wash herself
At morning. Water-hens had picked their way
In silver where the roots are overgrown
As branch — and the blossoms half-way down the rushes
Hang as brown bees."
" O then, she ran with laughter
Along the stepping-stones and lightly dipped
Her naked feet into the lake."
" We knew
A little creek among the twisted trees
And when the far light of the sunset lingers
In dewdrops as the leap of trout in rain
Below the branches, otter lifts a head
Of starlight."
" We have heard the voice of Lu,
O breathers of the sky, he rims with fire
His forearm now against the firmament
And day is prey'd with fears."
" He flames
Along the lakes for Dectora. He peers
Into the forests and in every glen
He keeps an eye."
" All day, all day
I sought for Dectora. I saw her drowse
Beneath the hazels and the coupling gold
Upon her bosom was the gleaming hollow
Of my own hands. But when she knew in dream
My child was hers, she fled for shame. All day,
All day, I sought her with the hawking ray
Above the plenteous, streamy hazelwoods
Of Glenasmole; beneath the ferny hill
Where granite has a colder side, I thought
She lay or safe in Derryvara.
Green
The berry on the rowan bough, a cold lake-star
Is falling from a silver sling. Make haste,
O weary Brightness over water, in
The glen few cuckoos woo you from the dew;
Haste with you now into the dreeping grass
And we will push through hazels to a rush-strewn bed
Beneath the foxglove moon.
I made your sleep
Grow monstrous with those dreams of man, that fear
Of marriage. I have come with human step
And arms that I may know the grief of those
Who breathe in ignorance beneath the stars. . . ."
Because the mind has many changes, time
Has shut my memory. I cannot tell
How I was banished from that glen or came
Into a barren land of reeds by day,
And mountain-lifted cromlechs, harsh with scream
Of sea-fowl, where the shadow-eaters dwell
And the reddening sun goes down with spears.