we, our singing and our love,
The mariners of night above,
And all the wizard things that go
About my table to and fro,
Are passing on to where may be,
In truth’s consuming ecstasy,
No place for love and dream at all;
For God goes by with white foot-fall.
I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.
EARLY POEMS
III
THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN
‘Give me the world if Thou wilt, but grant me an asylum for my affections.’
Tulka.
To Edwin J. Ellis
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[173]
BOOK I
[174]
[175]
THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN
S. PATRIC.
You who are bent, and bald, and blind,
With a heavy heart and a wandering mind,
Have known three centuries, poets sing,
Of dalliance with a demon thing.
OISIN.
Sad to remember, sick with years,
The swift innumerable spears,
The horsemen with their floating hair,
And bowls of barley, honey, and wine,
And feet of maidens dancing in tune,
And the white body that lay by mine;
But the tale, though words be lighter than air,
Must live to be old like the wandering moon.
Caolte, and Conan, and Finn were there,
When we followed a deer with our baying hounds,
With Bran, Sgeolan, and Lomair,
And passing the Firbolgs’ burial mounds,
Came to the cairn-heaped grassy hill
Where passionate Maeve is stony still;
And found on the dove-gray edge of the sea
A pearl-pale, high-born lady, who rode
On a horse with bridle of findrinny;
And like a sunset were her lips,
A stormy sunset on doomed ships;
A citron colour gloomed in her hair,
But down to her feet white vesture flowed,
And with the glimmering crimson glowed
Of many a figured embroidery;
And it was bound with a pearl-pale shell
That wavered like the summer streams,
As her soft bosom rose and fell.
S. PATRIC.
You are still wrecked among heathen dreams.
OISIN.
‘Why do you wind no horn?’ she said.
‘And every hero droop his head?
The hornless deer is not more sad
That many a peaceful moment had,
More sleek than any granary mouse,
In his own leafy forest house
Among the waving fields of fern:
The hunting of heroes should be glad.’
‘O pleasant maiden,’ answered Finn,
‘We think on Oscar’s pencilled urn,
And on the heroes lying slain,
On Gavra’s raven-covered plain;
But where are your noble kith and kin,
And into what country do you ride?’
‘My father and my mother are
Aengus and Edain, and my name
Is Niamh, and my land where tide
And sleep drown sun and moon and star.’
‘What dream came with you that you came
To this dim shore on foam-wet feet?
Did your companion wander away
From where the birds of Aengus wing?’
She said, with laughter tender and sweet:
‘I have not yet, war-weary king,
Been spoken of with any one;
For love of Oisin foam-wet feet
Have borne me where the tempests blind
Your mortal shores till time is done!’
‘How
