Classic Poem

Voice of the stranger rose. The red stone eyed him
From the breast of Concobar.
" As a kittiwake
Driven, in sleet, from two thousand feet of cliff
With feeble screams, bewildered by a tumult
Of seaward mountains silent in the night,
I fled in a dream beyond the soundings, the forelands,
Into our forgetful past. There, King after King
With white-bronze-hammered shield that seemed to mourn
Their misery, despair, led the defeated
Fomorian hosts, mocked by iron harp-note,
By far-off laughter.
Vision hurried me backward,
Vision hurried me onward. I saw in confusion
The Battle of Moytura. I heard a clamour
Of shoring waters surge below me: a King
Passed, mantling the tide, tip of his spear,
A sea-green star. Within my vision, appeared
The demi-gods, Midir the Proud, Iuchar,
Bore Derg, clapped in thunder, Diancecht,
Erc, Len. I counted the assembly of those heroes
In wars, too terrible for the annals of men, as
Leaning on sword-hilts, their great paps dark as warts
Within the gleam of breast, their scrota bulged
In shadow.
Vision hurried me on, vision hurried me back.
Out of the tidal glimmer, Mannanan rose
Again from the shallows of bladder-weed, his cloak-hem
Rolled slower than the lengthening billow lifting
A curl of incoming spray on Carrig-na-ron.
There I saw Losrem, fierce-born from the womb
Upon a cold flagstone, among his attendants
Greasing a targe of leather bull-hide, there,
Balor — his baleful eye was fleshed with sleep,
Cuoch, the harper, fretted by gull-cries, Tethra
Whose nameless sea-children move in clumsy flight
Slower than bull-seals carried on the billows.
Dream within dream.
In a confusion of brightness,
Appeared the Tuatha da Danaan, godlike.
Their brows were glibbed with overlocks, their bratta
Dyed sunlight from the ample ochre vats,
Ready with spears, their gilded shields embossed
And graven — with a woman's name.
Enemy
Clans marched with lifted spear, coarse bratta fastened
By massive brooches of iron, in each brooch
A rough-hewn stone of eager fire. They held
Flat blades. Far off I spied another clan
With tussle of head-manes loading their rough shoulders,
Aprons of hide, septs from Tory, half hidden
By wash of tide and knobbled as their cliffs.
North of the shelving shore, clans with flails
To thresh the iron crop of battle, clans whose
Outlandish weapons were lean with hunger. Far
Away I saw the billow-riding champions
In whistling mantle shaped from the glossy skin
Of sharklets, damp with brine. Flotilla
Of men at the thwart; low as cormorants,
They ruddered their way to shore:
The Eye of Balor
Stared through the freezing clouds. Losrem,
His locks unfluttered by the fatal ray,
Lifted his war cap, crying:
" Beware, beware,
The blanching of the moon!"
Gobain, the armourer,
Heard clangour. Sparks on his sooty skin, he sprang from
The anvil horn, plunged the hiss of a blade,
Scarce forged, into sudden steam of a cauldron,
Then, as he gored a moaning way into the darkness
A thickness stood before him. When the rattle
Of blade was flung back by his answering shield,
He hurled his pike through quick expanding echoes,
Caverned himself and grasping his adversary,
Strangled him to a scream.
Far off, a bale-fire,
He saw the eye of Ruadan: two shafts
Pierced deeply through the gaps of breasting wolf-skin
Tearing the tender pap. Backward he staggered
Fearfully swaying like a charioteer
Tilted by speed above the plunge of fetlock,
Thudding of track, then doubling his hurt arm
He raised his blade and, with a heaving groan, cleft
The Fomor through the groin.
Out of the night
Came Brife, the mother of slain Ruadan
And crouching like a she-wolf from the forests
Above her dead, she raised so long a howl
Into the night that distant warriors hushed
Their weapons and looked at one another, gray
With fear; while Goibniu by a flooded river
Washing the heavy gouts stained black in the moonlight
From his deep holes, trembled.
Uala, hearing,
Outleaped his leapy shadow from rock to rock, but
Luoch cast down his angled harp, sworded
Himself. They fought against the defiance
Of their own breathing; nethers close
As lovers on the first night.
Within the valley
Heroes lay warring against death, eyes closed,
While Diancecht, the druid, with wonderful hands,
Laid on their burning brows the drip of glass
Grown i' the chill of woods and poured softness
Into their wound-holes; and from under the boughs
Slumber came mothering through the dew.
Once more
The Eye of Balor stared — a vacant moon
Risen above the sky-line. Midir aimed spear.
Gathering a mile from the leather thong it soared, then
Falconing over a tilt of lake, it swooped —
And, moaning, the unmooned monster sank into
Nothingness.
As the rock-beaten rain
Comes lately, dragging night, so the Fomorians
Attacked a press of cars. Axles went awry,
Rims cracked. But the fugitives had changed
Into a herd of elk, plunging from river bed
Through forest, tossing back the waves of leaves
With swimming antlers more than five miles
Beyond.
Their King fled through the pathless gloom
Between cloud-oozing defiles, his seven wound-holes
Pursuing him like a wolf-pack in the raining
Darkfall, then fought his rival. So a boar would
Charge when he heard the quicker baying of hounds.
Then crashing through the leafy forest lairs
Of Liathdruim-na-Lir, he lurks, hearing
The scenters scrubbing closer; unthicketing,
He turns with snarl of tusk.
A voice cried:
" Where
Is Mannanaun MacLir?"
And others clamoured
That sea-name:
" Mannanaun, O Mannanaun!"

Then dark against the sky a form
Arose. As when our fishermen are blown
With the last light of day towards a fiord
Of Lochlinn, tossed on the billow tops, they see
Between the storm-rents of sails and cordage
A headland loom from the east, the blue-haired god
Walked through the waves; he held in readiness
A brace of javelins and on his forearm
A shield of copper like a blood-red moon
Clotted in sea-fog. At every stride of his,
The shore changed to brine and the Fomors became
A raft of tern, a row of rocks.
Vision
Of good and evil hurried me, hurried me on. I
Saw, then, the ray of Lu lengthening in the dawn.
The clouds rolled backwards as it hurled the void
Of gods into the void.