Out yonder, where the race course is,Delight makes all of the one mind,Riders upon the swift horses,The field that closes in behind:We, too, had good attendance once,Hearers and hearteners of the work;Aye, horsemen for companions,Before the merchant and the clerkBreathed on the world with timid breath.Sing on: sometime, and at some new moon,We’ll learn that […]

These are the clouds about the fallen sun,The majesty that shuts his burning eye;The weak lay hand on what the strong has done,Till that be tumbled that was lifted highAnd discord follow upon unison,And all things at one common level lie.And therefore, friend, if your great race were runAnd these things came, so much the […]

Imitated from Ronsard Dear Craoibhin Aoibhin, look into our case.When we are high and airy hundreds sayThat if we hold that flight they’ll leave the place,While those same hundreds mock another dayBecause we have made our art of common things,So bitterly, you’d dream they longed to lookAll their lives through into some drift of wings.You’ve […]

I heard the old, old men say‘Everything alters,And one by one we drop away.’They had hands like claws, and their kneesWere twisted like the old thorn treesBy the waters.I heard the old, old men say‘All that’s beautiful drifts awayLike the waters.’

The old brown thorn trees break in two high over Cummen StrandUnder a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand,Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies;But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyesOf Cathleen the daughter of Houlihan. The wind has bundled […]

We sat together at one summer’s endThat beautiful mild woman your close friendAnd you and I, and talked of poetry. I said ‘a line will take us hours maybe,Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thoughtOur stitching and unstitching has been naught.Better go down upon your marrow bonesAnd scrub a kitchen pavement, or break […]

I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds,‘Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will,I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words,For the roads are unending and there is no place to my mind.’The honey-pale moon lay low on the sleepy hillAnd I fell asleep upon lonely Echtge of streams;No […]

One that is ever kind said yesterday:‘Your well beloved’s hair has threads of greyAnd little shadows come about her eyes;Time can but make it easier to be wiseThough now it’s hard, till trouble is at an end;And so be patient, be wise and patient, friend.’But heart, there is no comfort, not a grain.Time can but […]

I thought of your beauty and this arrowMade out of a wild thought is in my marrow.There’s no man may look upon her, no man,As when newly grown to be a woman,Blossom pale, she pulled down the pale blossomAt the moth hour and hid it in her bosom.This beauty’s kinder yet for a reasonI could […]

Argument. Baile and Aillinn were lovers, butAengus, the Master of Love, wishing them to behappy in his own land among the dead, told toeach a story of the other’s death, so that theirhearts were broken and they died.I hardly hear the curlew cry,Nor the grey rush when wind is high,Before my thoughts begin to runOn […]

Maeve the great queen was pacing to and fro,Between the walls covered with beaten bronze,In her high house at Cruachan; the long hearth,Flickering with ash and hazel, but half showedWhere the tired horse-boys lay upon the rushes,Or on the benches underneath the walls,In comfortable sleep; all living sleptBut that great queen, who more than half […]

From the play of The Country of the Young. There’s many a strong farmerWhose heart would break in twoIf he could see the townlandThat we are riding to;Boughs have their fruit and blossom,At all times of the year,Rivers are running overWith red beer and brown beer.An old man plays the bagpipesIn a golden and silver […]

Three Voices togetherHurry to bless the hands that play,The mouths that speak, the notes and strings,O masters of the glittering town!O! lay the shrilly trumpet down,Though drunken with the flags that swayOver the ramparts and the towers,And with the waving of your wings.First VoiceMaybe they linger by the way;One gathers up his purple gown;One leans […]

I have no happiness in dreaming of Brycelinde;Nor Avalon the grass green hollow, nor Joyous Isle,Where one found Lancelot crazed and hid him for a while,Nor Ulad when Naoise had thrown a sail upon the wind,Nor lands that seem too dim to be burdens on the heart,Land-under-Wave, where out of the moon’s light and the […]

Costello had come up from the fields and lay upon the ground before the door of his square tower, resting his head upon his hands and looking at the sunset, and considering the chances of the weather. Though the customs of Elizabeth and James, now going out of fashion in England, had begun to prevail […]

The little wicker houses at Tullagh, where the Brothers were accustomed to pray, or bend over many handicrafts, when twilight had driven them from the fields, were empty, for the hardness of the winter had brought the brotherhood together in the little wooden house under the shadow of the wooden chapel; and Abbot Malathgeneus, Brother […]

At the place, close to the Dead Man’s Point, at the Rosses, where the disused pilot-house looks out to sea through two round windows like eyes, a mud cottage stood in the last century. It also was a watchhouse, for a certain old Michael Bruen, who had been a smuggler in his day, and was […]

A man, with thin brown hair and a pale face, half ran, half walked, along the road that wound from the south to the town of Sligo. Many called him Cumhal, the son of Cormac, and many called him the Swift, Wild Horse; and he was a gleeman, and he wore a short parti-coloured doublet, […]

One winter evening an old knight in rusted chain-armour rode slowly along the woody southern slope of Ben Bulben, watching the sun go down in crimson clouds over the sea. His horse was tired, as after a long journey, and he had upon his helmet the crest of no neighbouring lord or king, but a […]

The High-Queen of the Island of Woods had died in childbirth, and her child was put to nurse with a woman who lived in a hut of mud and wicker, within the border of the wood. One night the woman sat rocking the cradle, and pondering over the beauty of the child, and praying that […]