William Yeats - Poems

Burning between her fingers, and in mine

Laid it and sighed: I held a sword whose shine

No centuries could dim: and a word ran

Thereon in Ogham letters, "Mananan";

That sea god's name, who in a deep content

Sprang dripping, and, with captive demons sent

Out of the seven-fold seas, built the dark hall

Rooted in foam and clouds, and cried to all

The mightier masters of a mightier race;

And at his cry there came no milk-pale face

Under a crown of thorns and dark with blood,

But only exultant faces.

Niam stood

With bowed head, trembling when the white blade shone,

But she whose hours of tenderness were gone

Had neither hope nor fear. I bade them hide

Under the shadows till the tumults died

Of the loud crashing and earth shaking fight,

Lest they should look upon some dreadful sight;

And thrust the torch between the slimy flags.

A dome made out of endless carven jags,

Where shadowy face flowed into shadowy face,

Looked down on me; and in the self-same place

I waited hour by hour, and the high dome,

Windowless, pillarless, multitudinous home

Of faces, waited; and the leisured gaze

Was loaded with the memory of days

Buried and mighty. When through the great door

The dawn came in, and glimmered on the floor

With a pale light, I journeyed round the hall

And found a door deep sunken in the wall,

The least of doors; beyond on a dim plain

A little runnel made a bubbling strain,

And on the runnel's stony and bare edge

A husky demon dry as a withered sedge

Swayed, crooning to himself an unknown tongue:

In a sad revelry he sang and swung

Bacchant and mournful, passing to and fro

His hand along the runnel's side, as though

The flowers still grew there: far on the sea's waste

Shaking and waving, vapour vapour chased,

While high frail cloudlets, fed with a green light,

Like drifts of leaves, immovable and bright,

Hung in the passionate dawn. He slowly turned:

A demon's leisure: eyes, first white, now burned

Like wings of kingfishers; and he arose

Barking. We trampled up and down with blows

Of sword and brazen battle-axe, while day

Gave to high noon and noon to night gave way;

And when at withering of the sun he knew

The Druid sword of Mananan, he grew

To many shapes; I lunged at the smooth throat

Of a great eel; it changed, and I but smote

A fir-tree roaring in its leafless top;

I held a dripping corpse, with livid chop

And sunken shape, against my face and breast,

When I tore down the tree; but when the west

Surged up in plumy fire, I lunged and drave

Through heart and spine, and cast him in the wave,

Lest Niam shudder.

Full of hope and dread

Those two came carrying wine and meat and bread,

And healed my wounds with unguents out of flowers

That feed white moths by some De Danaan shrine;

Then in that hall, lit by the dim sea shine,

We lay on skins of otters, and drank wine,

Brewed by the sea-gods, from huge cups that lay

Upon the lips of sea-gods in their day;

And then on heaped-up skins of otters slept.

But when the sun once more in saffron stept,

Rolling his flagrant wheel out of the deep,

We sang the loves and angers without sleep,

And all the exultant labours of the strong:

But now the lying clerics murder song

With barren words and flatteries of the weak.

In what land do the powerless turn the beak

Of ravening Sorrow, or the hand of Wrath?

For all your croziers, they have left the path

And wander in the storms and clinging snows,

Hopeless for ever: ancient Usheen knows,

For he is weak and poor and blind, and lies

On the anvil of the world.

S. PATRIC

Be still: the skies

Are choked with thunder, lightning, and fierce wind,

For God has heard, and speaks His angry mind;

Go cast your body on the stones and pray,

For He has wrought midnight and dawn and day.

USHEEN

Saint, do you weep? I hear amid the thunder

The Fenian horses; armour torn asunder;

Laughter and cries; the armies clash and shock;

All is done now; I see the ravens flock;

Ah, cease, you mournful, laughing Fenian horn!

We feasted for three days. On the fourth morn

I found, dropping sea foam on the wide stair,

And hung with slime, and whispering in his hair,

That demon dull and unsubduable;

And once more to a day-long battle fell,

And at the sundown threw him in the surge,

To lie until the fourth morn saw emerge

His new healed shape: and for a hundred years

So warred, so feasted, with nor dreams nor fears,

Nor languor nor fatigue: and endless feast,

An endless war.

The hundred years had ceased;

I stood upon the stair: the surges bore

A beech bough to me, and my heart grew sore,

Remembering how I had stood by white-haired Finn

Under a beech at Emen and heard the thin

Outcry of bats.

And then young Niam came

Holding that horse, and sadly called my name;

I mounted, and we passed over the lone

And drifting grayness, while this monotone,

Surly and distant, mixed inseparably

Into the clangour of the wind and sea.

"I hear my soul drop down into decay,

"And Mananan's dark tower, stone by stone,

"Gather sea slime and fall the seaward way,

"And the moon goad the waters night and day,

"That all be overthrown.

"But till the moon has taken all, I wage

"War on the mightiest men under the skies,

"And they have fallen or fled, age after age:

"Light is man's love, and lighter is man's rage;

"His purpose drifts and dies."

And then lost Niam murmured, "Love, we go

"To the Island of Forgetfulness, for lo!

"The Islands of Dancing and of Victories

"Are empty of all power."

"And which of these

"Is the Island of Content?"

"None know," she said;

And on my bosom laid her weeping head.

Fled foam underneath us, and around us, a wandering and milky smoke,

High as the saddle girth, covering away from our glances the tide;

And those that fled, and that followed, from the foam-pale distance broke;

The immortal desire of immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed.

I mused on the chase with the Fenians, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair,

And never a song sang Niam, and over my finger-tips

Came now the sliding of tears and sweeping of mist-cold hair,

And now the warmth of sighs, and after the quiver of lips.

Were we days long or hours long in riding, when rolled in a grisly peace,

An isle lay level before us, with dripping hazel and oak?

And we stood on a sea's edge we saw not; for whiter than new-washed fleece

Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke.

And we rode on the plains of the sea's edge; the sea's edge barren and gray,

Gray sand on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,

Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away

Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.

But the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark;

Dropping; a murmurous dropping; old silence and that one sound;

For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark:

Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground.

And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night,

For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and the sun,

Ceased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,