For vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.
Their legs long, delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,
Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs.
The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,
Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,
Have closed the ladies’ eyes, their minds are but a pool
Where even longing drowns under its own excess;
Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full
Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.
The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,
The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,
Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,
Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place
To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,
Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone,
Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency,
The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.
I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
In something that all others understand or share;
But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth
A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,
The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,
Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.
1923
In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz
The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer’s wreath:
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams –
Some vague Utopia – and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.
October 1927
Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931
Under my window-ledge the waters race,
Otters below and moor-hens on the top,
Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven’s face
Then darkening through ‘dark’ Raftery’s ‘cellar’ drop,
Run underground, rise in a rocky place
In Coole demesne, and there to finish up
Spread to a lake and drop into a hole.
What’s water but the generated soul?
Upon the border of that lake’s a wood
Now all dry sticks under a wintry sun,
And in a copse of beeches there I stood,
For Nature’s pulled her tragic buskin on
And all the rant’s a mirror of my mood:
At sudden thunder of the mounting swan
I turned about and looked where branches break
The glittering reaches of the flooded lake.
Another emblem there! That stormy white
But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight
And in the morning’s gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So arrogantly pure, a child might think
It can be murdered with a spot of ink.
Sound of a stick upon the floor, a sound
From somebody that toils from chair to chair;
Beloved books that famous hands have bound,
Old marble heads, old pictures everywhere;
Great rooms where travelled men and children found
Content or joy; a last inheritor
Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame
Or out of folly into folly came.
A spot whereon the founders lived and died
Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,
Or gardens rich in memory glorified
Marriages, alliances and families
And every bride’s ambition satisfied.
Where fashion or mere fantasy decrees
We shift about – all that great glory spent –
Like some poor Arab tribesman and his tent.
We were the last romantics – chose for theme
Traditional sanctity and loveliness;
Whatever’s written in what poets name
The book of the people; whatever most can bless
The mind of man or elevate a rhyme;
But all is changed, that high horse riderless,
Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode
Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.
from Words for Music Perhaps
VI
Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
‘Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’
‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.
‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’
XX
‘I am of Ireland’
‘I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,’ cried she.
‘Come out of charity,
Come dance with me in Ireland.’
One man, one man alone
In that outlandish gear,
One solitary man
Of all that rambled there
Had turned his stately head.
‘That is a long way off,
And time runs on,’ he said,
‘And the night grows rough.’
‘I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,’ cried she.
‘ Come out of charity
And dance with me in Ireland.’
‘The fiddlers are all thumbs,
Or the fiddle-string accursed,
The drums and the kettledrums
And the trumpets all are burst,
And the trombone,’ cried he,
‘The trumpet and trombone,’
And cocked a malicious eye,
‘But time runs on, runs on.’
‘I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,’ cried she.
‘Come out of charity
And dance w
ith me in Ireland.’
Lapis Lazuli
For Harry Clifton
I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.
All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilizations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus,
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay.
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.
Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
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, make but poor shows,
Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon his timber toes,
Because women in the upper storeys demand a face at the pane,
That patching old heels they may shriek, I take to chisel and plane.
Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.
All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.
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 three
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 die in fear.’
They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before;
They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.
January 13, 1939
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
from Prison Poems
Chesspieces
It was a time of trouble – executions,
Dearth, searches, nightly firing, balked escapes –
And I sat silent, while my cellmate figured
Ruy Lopez’ Gambit from the ‘Praxis’. Silence
Best fitted with our mood: we seldom spoke.
‘I have a thought,’ he said, tilting his stool.
‘We prisoners are so many pieces taken,
Swept from the chessboard, only used again
When a new game is started.’ ‘There’s that hope,’
I said, ‘the hope of being used again.
Some day of strength, when ploughs are out in March,
The Dogs of Fionn will slip their iron chains,
And, heedless of torn wounds and failing wind,
Will run the old grey Wolf to death at last.’
He smiled. ‘I like the image. My fat Kings,
And painted Queens, and purple-cassocked Bishops
Are tame, indeed, beside your angry Dogs!’
New Year, 1923
Lying awake at midnight in the prison,
I heard a sudden crash of chiming bells,
Bronze bass and silver tenor, tone on tone.
– ‘The church,’ thought I, ‘rings in another year.’
Then through the jangled bells the wail of horns
(Ship’s sirens blowing from the river walls)
Smote, like a trumpet blast in sea-born ‘Tristan.’
– ‘Commerce,’ thought I, ‘rings in another year.’
And, as if stricken with the night’s wild fever,
The prison shook in peals of Fenian cheers;
Mugs rattled, chambers clanked, old songs were sung.
– ‘The Law,’ thought I, ‘rings in another year.’
Ear-surfeited, I turned to sleep; but sleep
Fled fearfully before a Thompson gun
Making new music at the prison gate.
– ‘War,’ pondered I, ‘rings in another year!’
Country Sorrow
In quiet dawn
Across small farms cold with shadow
A cock answers another:
Lonelier than lakewash,
Sadder than lightrise.
– Ai-ai, ai-oa, ai-ee!
In golden noon
From the thorned briars of the pasture
A lamb bleats to the ewe:
Lonelier than scythewhet,
Sadder than sawsound.
In set of sun
Somewhere along the
mountain
A fluteplayer plays his flute:
Lonelier than grassbreath,
Sadder than girlsong.
In blueing dusk
On the road to the lighted hamlet
A cart’s axle clacks:
Lonelier than dogbark,
Sadder than deadbell.
In midmost night
Over the sleeping doors and haggards
A goatowl passes:
Lonelier than cronecough,
Sadder than childsigh.
– Ai-ai, ai-oa, ai-ee!
Ad Limina
The ewes and lambs, loving the far hillplaces,
Cropping by choice the succulent tops of heather,
Drinking the pure water of cloudborn lochlands,
Resting under erratics fostered with Abel –
Come to my haggard gate, my very doorstep.
The birds of freest will and strongest wingbeat,
Sad curlew, garrulous stonechat, hawk and coaltit,
Haunting lone bog or scalp or broken ruin,
Poising the rough thrust of air’s excesses –
Come to my haggard gate, my very doorstep.
The trout in the river, below the hanging marllot,
Swift, with ancestral fear of hook and shadow,
The elvers of cold drain and slough, remembering
The warm tangles of Caribbee and Sargasso –
Come to my haggard gate, my very doorstep.
Even the stoats and rats, who know a possessor
Of the rare sixth sense, the bardic insight,
Match, and more, for their devilish perversions,
And the deer, shyest of shy at autumn rutting –
Come to my haggard gate, my very doorstep.
Am I not a lucky man, trusted, Franciscan,
That these spacious things, gentle or hostile,
Following God’s urge, denying their nature,
Harbingers of high thoughts and fathers of poems –
Come to my haggard gate, my very doorstep.
BLANAID SALKELD
(1880–1959)
Role
I am become tired warder of the days:
Each greets me, risen, with a sulphur glare,
Since I prolong time’s wrong, time’s useless care –
The dry routine – though I am loth to raise
Dead eyes to window, nor can ever praise
The grudging slave that peddles my despair
About the parish. I uptie my hair,
And jolt the jolly mirror with my face,
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 54