Her great eyes gleaming through the dark.
“From close of flower, till song of lark,
By mist or moonshine, hill and hollow —
To follow still and still to hark —
To hearken still and still to follow.”
Strange music of an ecstasy —
’Twas hardly sound, and came unsought;
She smiled, and listened to the lay
As listening to a sad, sweet thought.
Glares in the west a stain of blood,
The Wizard North its black storm raises —
And eastward o’er Morrua’s wood,
One great white star portentous gazes.
Sitting, spinning in the hall,
With lamps alight, the sunset after,
The whirring task her maids speed all
With silvery song and girlish laughter.
But, like an apparition, she
Is lost — and lost — and lost for ever,
And O their loving eyes shall see
The splendrous Fionula — never.
Lost; but her love she’ll never find —
Sooner the foam wreath in its wake,
O’er ocean’s waste, in ocean’s wind,
The flying ship shall overtake.
Through the woods of Morrua and over its rootknotted flooring,
The hero speeds onward, alone, on his terrible message;
When faint and far-off, like the gathering gallop of battle,
The hoofs of the hurricane louder and louder come leaping,
There’s a gasp and a silence around him a swooning of nature,
And the forest trees moan, and complain with a presage of evil.
And nearer, like great organ’s wailing, high-piping through thunder,
Subsiding, then lifted again to a thousand-tongued tumult,
And crashing, and deafening and yelling in clangorous uproar
Soaring onward, down-riding, and rending the wreck of its conquest,
The tempest swoops on: all the branches before it bend, singing
Like cordage in shipwreck; before it sear leaves fly like vapour;
Before it bow down like wide armies, plumed heads of the forest,
In frenzy dark-rolling, up-tossing their scathed arms like Maenads.
Dizzy lightnings split this way and that in the blind void above him;
For a moment long passages reeling and wild with the tempest,
In the blue map and dazzle of lightning, throb vivid and vanish;
And white glare the wrinkles and knots of the oak trees beside him,
While close overhead clap the quick mocking palms of the Storm-Fiend.
Now southward drift the din and glare,
Like navies battling in the air;
On boom the thunder and the wind,
And wreck and silence lie behind,
While whirlwind roars and lightning burns,
The hero neither tires nor turns.
‘Mid the wild wail of shrilly boughs,
And pealing thunder’s claps and soughs;
And by the lightning’s livid tapers,
And the black pall of eddying vapours,
He follows the White Shadow’s call,
That never swerved for flash or wind,
And never stops nor looks behind,
But leads him to his funeral.
The forest opens as he goes,
And smitten trees in groups and rows
Beneath the tempest’s tune,
Stand in the mists of midnight drooping,
By mossgrown rocks fantastic stooping,
In the blue shadows of the yellow moon.
THE CROMLECH
And in the moonlight, bleached as bones,
Uprose the monumental stones,
Meeting the hero suddenly
With a blind stare
Dull as despair.
The formless boulder that blocked the door
Like a robed monster broad and hoar
He twice essayed to earth to throw
With quivering sinew, bursting vein,
With grinding teeth and scowling brow.
From his dark forehead with the strain,
Beads start and drop like thunder-rain;
And in the breathless tug and reek,
All his lithe body seems to creak.
The mighty stone to earth is hurled,
Black gapes the violated door,
Through which he rushes to rise no more
Into this fair, sad world.
THORGIL AND HIS GLAIVE
Where high the vaults of midnight gape
In the black waste, a blacker shape —
And near against a distant dark,
He could the giant Norseman mark
A black tarn’s waters sitting by;
Beneath a brazen, stormy sky,
That never moves but dead doth lie, —
And on the rock could darkly see
The mighty glaive beside his knee.
The hero’s front and upreared form,
Loomed dim as headlands in a storm.
No more will flicker passion’s meteors
O’er the dead shadow of his features,
Fixed in the apathy eternal
That lulls him in repose infernal.
The cornice of his knotted brows
A direful shadow downward throws
Upon his eyeballs dull and stark,
Like white stones glimmering in the dark;
And, carved in their forlorn despair,
His glooming features changeless wear
Gigantic sorrow and disdain,
The iron sneer of endless pain.
From the lips of the awful phantom woke
A voice, and thus, by the tarn, it spoke: —
“Son of Malmorra, what canst thou gather here?”
The spell was broke that struck him dumb,
And held his soul aghast and numb,
With a wild throb,
A laugh, and sob,
The frenzied courage came again
Of Cathair, the Prince of men.
With planted foot, with arm extended,
And his ferine gaze distended,
Back flowed the cataract of his hair
From the gleaming face of the great Cathair;
And he shouted lion-voiced,
Like one defying who rejoiced: —
“Thorgil, king of the wintry sea,
Of the nine-gapped sword and minstrel glee,
Of mountains dark and craggy valleys,
Of the golden cup and the hundred galleys,
Malmorra’s son, myself, have sworn
To take thy sword or ne’er return!”
The Norseman’s phantom, black and dread,
Turned not, lifted not his head.
Mute, without anger or alarm,
As shadow stretches, stretched his arm;
Upon the hilt his hand he laid,
The metal dull one bell-note made —
One cold flash from the awakened blade
Flecked the waste sky with flying glare,
Like northern lights
That sport o’ nights,
Shuddering across the empty air.
High overhead, where died the light
Through the wide caverns of the night,
The imprisoned echoes, whispering first,
Afar in moaning thunders burst.
Mortal armour nought avails —
Shearing the air, the enchanted blade
Of Thorgil a strange music made;
The brazen concave of the sky
Returns its shrilly sigh,
Above — around — along —
With the roaring shiver of a gong.
Black night around him floating, and booming of the sea
Have borne away the hero on the spirit-maelstrom free;
The shadows round him deepen in his soft and dreamless flight —
The pause of
a new birth,
A forgetting of the earth,
, Its action and its thinking,
A mighty whirl and sinking,
A lapsing into Lethe, and the ocean caves of night.
TIR NA N-OGE — THE LAND OF THE YOUNG
A silvery song is in his ears,
A melody all sad and lone,
The voice that Fionula hears,
And follows still by brake and stone.
It is the voice of early years,
The early love long dead and gone.
His wounded head is on her knee,
Her hand his sable locks among;
And still the song enchantingly
By that remembered voice is sung
And dreamily he opes his eyes.
Beneath in rosy lustre lies,
With many a shivered line of gold,
A misty lake in many a fold
Of wood, and slope, and rock, and hill,
And riven peak, and winding rill.
Long golden reeds and floating lilies tell
Their secrets and rejoicings to the breeze,
And every flowery star and bloomy bell
That glow like oriel windows ‘neath the trees,
In gules and azure mottling the soft sward,
In fragrance and dim music sigh,
And sleep, and wake, but never die.
Such is the blessèd mystery
That of their weakness is the ward.
Here memory doth the hour beguile
And never too much pains or cheers,
Here all things sad are with a smile,
And all rejoicing is with tears.
Through everything there thrills a gladness,
Through everything there throbs a sadness;
And memory, love, and gratitude
A glory shed on every mood.
FIONULA
How to this hour she is sometimes seen by night in Munster.
By the foot of old Keeper, beside the bohreen,
In the deep blue of night the thatched cabin is seen;
‘Neath the furze-covered ledge, by the wild mountain brook,
Where the birch and the ash dimly shelter the nook,
And many’s the clear star that trembles on high
O’er the thatch and the wild ash that melt in the sky.
“Shamus Oge” and old Teig are come home from the fair,
And the car stands up black with its shafts in the air,
A warbling of laughter hums over the floor,
And fragrant’s the flush of the turf through the door.
Round the glow the old folk, and the colleens, and boys
Wile the hour with their stories, jokes, laughter, and noise;
Dogs stretched on the hearth with their chins on their feet lie,
To her own purring music the cat dozes sweetly;
Pretty smiles answer, coyly, while soft spins the wheel,
The bold lover’s glances or whispered appeal.
Stealing in, like the leather-wings under the thatch,
A hand through the dark softly leans on the latch,
An oval face peeps through the clear deep of night,
From her jewels faint tremble blue splinters of light.
There’s a stranger among us, a chill in the air,
And an awful face silently framed over there;
The green light of horror glares cold from each eye,
And laughter breaks shivering into a cry.
A flush from the fire hovers soft to the door,
In the dull void the pale lady glimmers no more.
The cow’ring dogs howl, slowly growls the white cat,
And the whisper outshivers, “God bless us! what’s that?”
The sweet summer moon over Aherloe dreams,
And the Galtees, gigantic, loom cold in her beams;
From the wide flood of purple the pale peaks up rise,
Slowly gliding like sails ‘gainst the stars of the skies;
Soft moonlight is drifted on mountain and wood,
Airy voices sing faint to the drone of the flood,
As the traveller benighted flies onward in fear,
And the clink of his footsteps falls shrill on his ear.
There’s a hush in the bushes, a chill in the air,
While a breath steals beside him and whispers, “Beware!”
While aslant by the oak, down the hollow ravine,
Like a flying bird’s shadow smooth-gliding, is seen
Fionula the Cruel, the brightest, the worst,
With a terrible beauty the vision accurst,
Gold-filleted, sandalled, of times dead and gone —
Far-looking, and harking, pursuing, goes on;
Her white hand from her ear lifts her shadowy hair,
From the lamp of her eye floats the sheen of despair;
Her cold lips are apart, and her teeth in her smile
Glimmer death on her face with a horrible wile.
Three throbs at his heart — not a breath at his lip,
As the figure skims by like the swoop of a ship;
The breeze dies and drops like a bird on the wing,
And the pulse of the rivulet ceases to ring;
And the stars and the moon dilate o’er his head,
As they smile out an icy salute to the dead.
The traveller — alone — signs the cross on his breast,
Gasps a prayer to the saints for her weary soul’s rest;
His “gospel” close pressed to the beat of his heart,
And fears still to linger, yet dreads to depart.
By the village fire crouched, his the story that night,
While his listeners around him draw pale with affright;
Till it’s over the country— “God bless us, again!”
How he met Fionula in Aherloe glen.
SHAMUS O’BRIEN AND OTHER POEMS
Jist afther the war, in the year’98,
As soon as the boys wor all scattered and bate,
’Twas the custom, whenever a pisant was got,
To hang him by thrial — barrin’ sich as was shot.
There was trial by jury goin’ on by daylight,
And the martial-law hangin’ the lavins by night.
It’s them was hard times for an honest gossoon:
If he missed in the judges — he’d meet a dragoon;
An’ whether the sogers or judges gev sentence,
The divil a much time they allowed for repentance.
An’ it’s many’s the fine boy was then in his keepin’,
Wid small share iv restin’, or atin’, or sleepin’;
An’ because they loved Erin, an’ scorned to sell it,
A prey for the bloodhound, a mark for the bullet —
Unsheltered by night, and unrested by day,
They’d the heath for their barrack, revenge for their pay.
An’ the bravest an’ hardiest boy iv them all
Was Shamus O’Brien, from the town iv Glingall.
His limbs were well set, an’ his body was light,
An’ the keen-fangèd hound had not teeth half so white.
But his face was as pale as the face of the dead,
And his cheek never warmed with the blush of the red;
An’ for all that he wasn’t an ugly young bye,
For the divil himself couldn’t blaze with his eye,
So droll an’ so wicked, so dark and so bright,
Like a fire-flash that crosses the depth of the night;
An’ he was the best mower that ever has been,
An’ the illigantest hurler that ever was seen.
In fincin’ he gev Patrick Mooney a cut,
An’ in jumpin’ he bate Tim Malowney a fut;
For lightness iv fut there was never his peer,
For, by gorra, he’d almost outrun the red deer;
An’ his dancin’ was sich that the men used to stare,
An’ the women turn cra
zy, he done it so quare;
An’, by gorra, the whole world gev it in to him there.
An’ it’s he was the boy that was hard to be caught,
An’ it’s often he run, an’ it’s often he fought,
An’ it’s many’s the one can remimber right well
The quare things he done; an’ it’s oft I heerd tell
How he freckened the magisthrates in Cahirbally,
An’ escaped through the sodgers in Aherloe Valley;
An’leathered the yeomen, himself agin’ four,
An’ stretched the two strongest on ould Galtimore.
But the fox must sleep sometimes, the wild deer must rest,
An’ treachery preys on the blood iv the best.
Afther many a brave action of power and pride,
An’ many a hard night on the mountain’s bleak side,
An’ a thousand great dangers and toils overpast,
In the darkness of night he was taken at last.
Now, Shamus, look back on the beautiful moon,
For the door of the prison must close on you soon,
An’ take your last look at her dim lovely light,
That falls on the mountain and valley this night —
One look at the village, one look at the flood,
An’ one at the shelthering, far-distant wood.
Farewell to the forest, farewell to the hill,
An’ farewell to the friends that will think of you still;
Farewell to the patthern, the hurlin’, an’ wake,
And farewell to the girl that would die for your sake.
An’ twelve sodgers brought him to Maryborough gaol,
An’ the turnkey resaved him, refusin’ all bail.
The fleet limbs wor chained, an’ the sthrong hands wor bound,
An’ he laid down his length on the could prison ground.
An’ the dreams of his childhood kem over him there,
As gentle an’ soft as the sweet summer air;
An’ happy remembrances crowding on ever,
As fast as the foam-flakes dhrift down on the river,
Bringing fresh to his heart merry days long gone by,
Till the tears gathered heavy and thick in his eye.
But the!tears didn’t fall, for the pride of his heart
Would not suffer one drop down his pale cheek to start;
An3 he sprang to his feet in the dark prison cave,
An’ he swore with the fierceness that misery gave,
By the hopes of the good, an’ the cause of the brave,
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 867
