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Delphi Complete Poetry and Plays of W. B. Yeats (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

Page 33

by W. B. Yeats


  That in every generation

  Must Ireland’s blood be shed.

  From mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.

  THE BLACK TOWER

  SAY that the men of the old black tower,

  Though they but feed as the goatherd feeds,

  Their money spent, their wine gone sour,

  Lack nothing that a soldier needs,

  That all are oath-bound men:

  Those banners come not in.

  There in the tomb stand the dead upright,

  But winds come up from the shore:

  They shake when the winds roar,

  Old bones upon the mountain shake.

  Those banners come to bribe or threaten,

  Or whisper that a man’s a fool

  Who, when his own right king’s forgotten,

  Cares what king sets up his rule.

  If he died long ago

  Why do yopu dread us so?

  There in the tomb drops the faint moonlight,

  But wind comes up from the shore:

  They shake when the winds roar,

  Old bones upon the mountain shake.

  The tower’s old cook that must climb and clamber

  Catching small birds in the dew of the morn

  When we hale men lie stretched in slumber

  Swears that he hears the king’s great horn.

  But he’s a lying hound:

  Stand we on guard oath-bound!

  There in the tomb the dark grows blacker,

  But wind comes up from the shore:

  They shake when the winds roar,

  Old bones upon the mountain shake.

  CUCHULAIN COMFORTED

  A MAN that had six mortal wounds, a man

  Violent and famous, strode among the dead;

  Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.

  Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head

  Came and were gone. He leant upon a tree

  As though to meditate on wounds and blood.

  A Shroud that seemed to have authority

  Among those bird-like things came, and let fall

  A bundle of linen. Shrouds by two and thrce

  Came creeping up because the man was still.

  And thereupon that linen-carrier said:

  ‘Your life can grow much sweeter if you will

  ‘Obey our ancient rule and make a shroud;

  Mainly because of what we only know

  The rattle of those arms makes us afraid.

  ‘We thread the needles’ eyes, and all we do

  All must together do.’ That done, the man

  Took up the nearest and began to sew.

  ‘Now must we sing and sing the best we can,

  But first you must be told our character:

  Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain

  ‘Or driven from home and left to dic in fear.’

  They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,

  Though all was done in common as before;

  They had changed their thtoats and had the throats of birds.

  THREE MARCHING SONGS

  REMEMBER all those renowned generations,

  They left their bodies to fatten the wolves,

  They left their homesteads to fatten the foxes,

  Fled to far countries, or sheltered themselves

  In cavern, crevice, or hole,

  Defending Ireland’s soul.

  Be still, be still, what can be said?

  My father sang that song,

  But time amends old wrong,

  All that is finished, let it fade.

  Remember all those renowned generations,

  Remember all that have sunk in their blood,

  Remember all that have died on the scaffold,

  Remember all that have fled, that have stood,

  Stood, took death like a tune

  On an old,tambourine.

  Be still, be still, what can be said?

  My father sang that song,

  But time amends old wrong,

  And all that’s finished, let it fade.

  Fail, and that history turns into rubbish,

  All that great past to a trouble of fools;

  Those that come after shall mock at O’Donnell,

  Mock at the memory of both O’Neills,

  Mock Emmet, mock Parnell,

  All the renown that fell.

  Be still, be still, what can be said?

  My father sang that song,

  but time amends old wrong,

  And all that’s finished, let it fade.

  The soldier takes pride in saluting his Captain,

  The devotee proffers a knee to his Lord,

  Some back a mare thrown from a thoroughbred,,

  Troy backed its Helen; Troy died and adored;

  Great nations blossom above;

  A slave bows down to a slave.

  What marches through the mountain pass?

  No, no, my son, not yet;

  That is an airy spot,

  And no man knows what treads the grass.

  We know what rascal might has defiled,

  The lofty innocence that it has slain,

  Were we not born in the peasant’s cot

  Where men forgive if the belly gain?

  More dread the life that we live,

  How can the mind forgive?

  What marches down the mountain pass?

  No, no, my son, not yet;

  That is an airy spot,

  And no man knows what treads the grass.

  What if there’s nothing up there at the top?

  Where are the captains that govern mankind?

  What tears down a tree that has nothing within it?

  A blast of the wind, O a marching wind,

  March wind, and any old tune.

  March, march, and how does it run?

  What marches down the mountain pass?

  No, no, my son, not yet;

  That is an airy spot,

  And no man knows what treads the grass.

  III

  Grandfather sang it under the gallows:

  ‘Hear, gentlemen, ladies, and all mankind:

  Money is good and a girl might be better,

  But good strong blows are delights to the mind.’

  There, standing on the cart,

  He sang it from his heart.

  <1Robbers had taken his old tambourine,

  But he took down the moon

  And rattled out a tunc;

  Robbers had taken his old tambourinc.>1

  ‘A girl I had, but she followed another,

  Money I had, and it went in the night,

  Strong drink I had, and it brought me to sorrow,

  But a good strong cause and blows are delight.’

  All there caught up the tune:

  ‘Oh, on, my darling man.’

  Robbers had taken his old tambourine,

  But he took down the moon

  And rattled out a tune;>1

  Robbers had taken his old tambourine.

  ‘Money is good and a girl might be better,

  No matter what happens and who takes the fall,

  But a good strong cause’ — the rope gave a jerk there,

  No more sang he, for his throat was too small;

  But he kicked before he died,

  He did it out of pride.

  <1Robbers had taken his old tambourine,

  But he took down the moon

  And rattled out a tune;

  Robbers had taken his old tambourine.

  IN TARA’S HALLS

  A MAN I praise that once in Tara’s Hals

  Said to the woman on his knees, ‘Lie still.

  My hundredth year is at an end. I think

  That something is about to happen, I think

  That the adventure of old age begins.

  To many women I have said, ‘‘Lie still,’’

  And given everything a woman needs,

  A
roof, good clothes, passion, love perhaps,

  But never asked for love; should I ask that,

  I shall be old indeed.’

  Thereon the man

  Went to the Sacred House and stood between

  The golden plough and harrow and spoke aloud

  That all attendants and the casual crowd might hear.

  ‘God I have loved, but should I ask return

  Of God or woman, the time were come to die.’

  He bade, his hundred and first year at end,

  Diggers and carpenters make grave and coffin;

  Saw that the grave was deep, the coffin sound,

  Summoned the generations of his house,

  Lay in the coffin, stopped his breath and died.

  THE STATUES

  PYTHAGORAS planned it. Why did the people stare?

  His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move

  In marble or in bronze, lacked character.

  But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love

  Of solitary beds, knew what they were,

  That passion could bring character enough,

  And pressed at midnight in some public place

  Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.

  No! Greater than Pythagoras, for the men

  That with a mallet or a chisel’ modelled these

  Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down

  All Asiatic vague immensities,

  And not the banks of oars that swam upon

  The many-headed foam at Salamis.

  Europe put off that foam when Phidias

  Gave women dreams and dreams their looking-glass.

  One image crossed the many-headed, sat

  Under the tropic shade, grew round and slow,

  No Hamlet thin from eating flies, a fat

  Dreamer of the Middle Ages. Empty eyeballs knew

  That knowledge increases unreality, that

  Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.

  When gong and conch declare the hour to bless

  Grimalkin crawls to Buddha’s emptiness.

  When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side.

  What stalked through the post Office? What intellect,

  What calculation, number, measurement, replied?

  We Irish, born into that ancient sect

  But thrown upon this filthy modern tide

  And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,

  Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace

  The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.

  April 9,

  NEWS FOR THE DELPHIC ORACLE

  THERE all the golden codgers lay,

  There the silver dew,

  And the great water sighed for love,

  And the wind sighed too.

  Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed

  By Oisin on the grass;

  There sighed amid his choir of love

  Tall pythagoras.

  plotinus came and looked about,

  The salt-flakes on his breast,

  And having stretched and yawned awhile

  Lay sighing like the rest.

  Straddling each a dolphin’s back

  And steadied by a fin,

  Those Innocents re-live their death,

  Their wounds open again.

  The ecstatic waters laugh because

  Their cries are sweet and strange,

  Through their ancestral patterns dance,

  And the brute dolphins plunge

  Until, in some cliff-sheltered bay

  Where wades the choir of love

  Proffering its sacred laurel crowns,

  They pitch their burdens off.

  LONG-LEGGED FLY

  THAT civilisation may not sink,

  Its great battle lost,

  Quiet the dog, tether the pony

  To a distant post;

  Our master Caesar is in the tent

  Where the maps ate spread,

  His eyes fixed upon nothing,

  A hand under his head.

  Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

  His mind moves upon silence.

  That the topless towers be burnt

  And men recall that face,

  Move most gently if move you must

  In this lonely place.

  She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,

  That nobody looks; her feet

  Practise a tinker shuffle

  Picked up on a street.

  Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

  Her mind moves upon silence.

  That girls at puberty may find

  The first Adam in their thought,

  Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,

  Keep those children out.

  There on that scaffolding reclines

  Michael Angelo.

  With no more sound than the mice make

  His hand moves to and fro.

  Like a long-leggedfly upon the stream

  His mind moves upon silence.

  A BRONZE HEAD

  HERE at right of the entrance this bronze head,

  Human, superhuman, a bird’s round eye,

  Everything else withered and mummy-dead.

  What great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky

  (Something may linger there though all else die;)

  And finds there nothing to make its tetror less

  Hysterica passio of its own emptiness?

  No dark tomb-haunter once; her form all full

  As though with magnanimity of light,

  Yet a most gentle woman; who can tell

  Which of her forms has shown her substance right?

  Or maybe substance can be composite,

  profound McTaggart thought so, and in a breath

  A mouthful held the extreme of life and death.

  But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,

  I saw the wildness in her and I thought

  A vision of terror that it must live through

  Had shattered her soul. Propinquity had brought

  Imagiation to that pitch where it casts out

  All that is not itself: I had grown wild

  And wandered murmuring everywhere, ‘My child, my

  child! ‘

  Or else I thought her supernatural;

  As though a sterner eye looked through her eye

  On this foul world in its decline and fall;

  On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,

  Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,

  Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave,

  And wondered what was left for massacre to save.

  A STICK OF INCENSE

  Whence did all that fury come?

  From empty tomb or Virgin womb?

  Saint Joseph thought the world would melt

  But liked the way his finger smelt.

  HOUND VOICE

  BECAUSE we love bare hills and stunted trees

  And were the last to choose the settled ground,

  Its boredom of the desk or of the spade, because

  So many years companioned by a hound,

  Our voices carry; and though slumber-bound,

  Some few half wake and half renew their choice,

  Give tongue, proclaim their hidden name — ‘Hound Voice.’

  The women that I picked spoke sweet and low

  And yet gave tongue. ‘Hound Voices’ were they all.

  We picked each other from afar and knew

  What hour of terror comes to test the soul,

  And in that terror’s name obeyed the call,

  And understood, what none have understood,

  Those images that waken in the blood.

  Some day we shall get up before the dawn

  And find our ancient hounds before the door,

  And wide awake know that the hunt is on;

  Stumbling upon the blood-dark track once more,

  Then stumbling to the kill beside the shore;
>
  Then cleaning out and bandaging of wounds,

  And chantS of victory amid the encircling hounds.

  JOHN KINSELLA’S LAMENT FOR MR. MARY MOORE

  A BLOODY and a sudden end,

  Gunshot or a noose,

  For Death who takes what man would keep,

  Leaves what man would lose.

  He might have had my sister,

  My cousins by the score,

  But nothing satisfied the fool

  But my dear Mary Moore,

  None other knows what pleasures man

  At table or in bed.

  What shall I do for pretty girls

  Now my old bawd is dead?

  Though stiff to strike a bargain,

  Like an old Jew man,

  Her bargain struck we laughed and talked

  And emptied many a can;

  And O! but she had stories,

  Though not for the priest’s ear,

  To keep the soul of man alive,

  Banish age and care,

  And being old she put a skin

  On everything she said.

  What shall I do for pretty girls

  Now my old bawd is dead?

  The priests have got a book that says

  But for Adam’s sin

  Eden’s Garden would be there

  And I there within.

  No expectation fails there,

  No pleasing habit ends,

  No man grows old, no girl grows cold

  But friends walk by friends.

  Who quarrels over halfpennies

  That plucks the trees for bread?

  What shall I do for pretty girls

  Now my old bawd is dead?

  HIGH TALK

  PROCESSIONS that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.

  What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,

  And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern Stalks upon higher,

  Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.

  Because piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, ake but poor shows,

  Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon This timber toes,

  Because women in the upper storeys demand a face at the pane,

 

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