by J. M. Synge
‘Now listening to the sad winds’ moan
‘And now before them bending.
‘When clouds and mists infold thee round
‘For many days together
‘And o’er thee weep until the ground
‘Is murky as the weather,
‘I fear thy life is lone and sad,
‘Thy soul encased in sorrow,
‘Thou hast no songs to make thee glad;
‘No bees come here to borrow
‘Tell me the secret of thy life,
‘Thy very soul’s religion,
‘That I may know the hope and strife
‘That fill this dreary region.’
‘My life is lonely as the sea,’
It softly made reply,
‘But not so sad as seems to thee
‘Or I should quickly die.
‘I live not here to pine and mourn
‘O’er what is not my making,
‘But to fulfil my fate inborn
‘And hold myself unquaking.
‘Though gloomy cloud and storms of might
‘Are not forever raging,
‘And times there come of calm delight
‘My weary woes assuaging;
‘Yet cloud and storm can hurt me not,
‘My joy it is not pleasure,
‘But ’tis to be, no humble lot,
‘One jewel ‘mid God’s treasure.’
THE CREED
MY thinking clear, soul powerful, my sight
The wealth of sun, moon, sea, cloud-vesture drains,
The loneliness of heather breathes delight,
I court steep streamlets, withered woods, and lanes.
For my own soul I would a world create,
A Christless creed, incredulous, divine,
With Earth’s young majesty would yearning mate,
The arms of God around my breast intwine.
IN A NEW DIARY
WHAT records will this new year write
Upon these pages crisp and clear,
Will courage mark them with her might
Or leave them to the tones of fear?
Before these leaves are laid aside
To where their fellows crumpled lie,
Twelve months will pass in grief or pride
And marshal all the seasons by.
I start upon a stoney way
Untrod by feet of men
My strength or weakness to display
Until these leaves are sealed again.
BALLAD OF A PAUPER
‘GOOD evenin Misther niver more
My face you’ll see again
I’m so filled full of emptiness
So drownded with the rain
‘That I’m jist goin’ to the House
Jist goin’ to be a pauper
To axe her gracious Majesty
For a life of meal and torper’
‘Why ragged bones twere better choose
A schoolin in Glencree
Where you’d be taught a dacent thrade
With duds and eating free’
‘There’s none goes there but them as steals
I’m honester nor you,
I niver stole a staavin thef
As yous are proud to do!’
‘This but the course of equity
We work for laws and right’
‘Och Misther Homey spake the thruth
Your jobbers all for might!
‘Well looked here young double phrase
If words are your desire,’ —
‘Its food I want great dunder head
Its cloths and meat and fire’
‘Hold your whist you graceless imp
And let me say my say—’
‘It’s I thats fagged wid waitin for’t
I’m wastin night and day’
‘If you adopt the pauper thrade
They pay with public gold
For all your keep till daddy Nick
Upon your life grab hold
‘But if you my advice will heed
And just some thrifle steal
In some six years of strict Glencree
You’ll quite a rouser feel’
‘By Jabs I niver had beleeved
It was a Horney spoke
Your comin nice and easy on
Wid us young thinkin folk!
‘Its deuced stiff a cove must steal
To grow an honest man
But Gob I’ll do’t if you think
It is the best I can!’
HIS FATE
BY my light and only love
Long I lived in glee
Marked her musing deep delight
Murmur love for me
A footfall faint arose
Timid touched the way
Of one that many loved
In days passed away.
I faltered, found my feet
Bound me to her side
We wandered years and years
Till she drooped and died.
AT A FUNERAL MASS
I HEARD low music wail
Woe wanton, wed to fear,
Heard chords to cleave and quail
Quelled by terror sheer.
I saw a woman bend,
Bowed in saintly prayer,
Where shadow round did wend,
Won by face so fair,
Like yours that kneeling form,
Far under mine that woe,
Our sorrow’s rage and storm,
Stern gods had died to know.
IN A DREAM
I SAW thee start and quake,
When we in face did meet,
I saw dead passion wake,
One thrill of yearning sweet.
Then came a change, a wave,
Of bitterness, disdain,
That through my grassy grave
Will rack my haunted brain.
IN REBELLION
THRICE cruel fell my fate,
Did I, death tortured, see,
A God, inhuman, great,
Sit weaving woes for me.
So hung as Hell the world,
Death’s light with venom stung,
Toward God high taunts I hurled,
With cursing parched my tongue.
EXECRATION
I CURSE my bearing, childhood, youth
I curse the sea, sun, mountains, moon,
I curse my learning, search for truth,
I curse the dawning, night, and noon.
Cold, joyless I will live, though clean,
Nor, by my marriage, mould to earth
Young lives to see what I have seen,
To curse — as I have cursed — their birth.
THE FUGITIVE
I FLED from all the wilderness of cities,
And nature’s choristers my art saluted,
Chanting aloud to me their times and ditties
And to my silent songs like joys imputed;
But when they heard me singing in my sorrow,
My broken voice that spoke a bosom breaking,
They fled afar and cried! Hell did borrow
As through their notes my notes fell discord waking.
IN THE CITY AGAIN
WET winds and rain are in the street,
Where I must pass alone,
Where no one wayfarer I meet
That I have loved or known.
’Tis winter in my heart, the air
Is wailing, bitter cold,
While I am wailing with despair,
As I have wailed of old.
THE VISITATION
I SAW among the clouds one woman white
Star-like descend. When I her aim descried
My temples reeled, I staggered, scarlet dyed,
Then sightless stood, heard, weeping, swift endite: —
‘From Heaven have I seen thee, Wherefore here?
‘I loved thee, named thee noble, praised thee pure,
‘How canst thou to all lowness turn thee near,<
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‘With loathsome life, how meditate, endure?’
I moaned, ‘Sad, resolute, I torture flee:
‘Him wouldst thou blame, joy-exiled, damned by thee?’
IN DREAM
AGAIN, again, I sinful see
Thy face, as men who weep
Doomed by eternal Hell’s decree
Might meet their Christ in sleep.
THE CONVICTION
FIVE fives this year my years
Half life I live to dread,
Yet judged by weight of tears
Now were I calmed, were dead.
Yet this I hold as true.
That sleeping ends the strife
With death undying due
To soothe the pang of life.
THE PARTING
I STOPPED where you stood when you went you ways
And thought you would turn there never again
And my soul was sick where you went your ways
And dead if you never find it again
And I will wander and count the quais
By the church of our Lady beyond the Seine
Though my soul is sick of the countless quais
And the church of our Lady beyond the Seine.
RENDEZ-VOUS MANQUÉ DANS LA RUE RACINE
WHEN your hour was rung at last
I stood as in terror to watch the turn,
And met two creaking coffins that passed.
Lord God, I am slow to learn!
L’ÉCHANGE
‘You are my God and my Heaven
Take me and my pearls and gold,
Yet leave me a franc for my souper,
My kitchen is rank with mould.’
She gathered my gold and my jewels,
Spangled her breast and head,
Yet I found when I sought my veau-piqué,
She had left me a franc of lead.
QUATRAIN
Is my love living to hold my hate
Or silently searching my soul with the dead
Would she forgive me or fool my fate
I loath the living to death I am wed!
AT DAWN
RAINING came with dawning
Plastered our hair on our eyes,
Our agony gained with the daylight;
Our breathing cramped with cries;
Still we sat at the edge of the valley
Wet bat wings still beat at our ears
Till we dropped on the weeds that were withered
Scalding their roots with tears.
THE OMISSION
TODAY you have tutored and healed my head
Have taught me to see you and love you apart
But you have not forgiven the words I said
You have not renewed me the life of my heart
THREE SIGHS
I KNOW the songs of the shower
Of thrush and pipit and wren
All the passionate flower
Of anguish in morbid men
Yet sweeter the sighs of your sighing
Three sighs half sighed for me
With lips that wrecked yet derided
The depth of my ecstasy.
IN SPRING
BUDS are opening their lips to the South
Sparrows are pluming their mates on the sill
Lovers are laying red mouth to mouth
Maidens are marging their smocks with a frill
Yet I lie alone with my depth of desire
No daughter of men would I choose for my mate
I have learned loving and lived to require
A woman the Lord had not strength to create
NOTRE DAME DES CHAMPS
PIGEONS are cooing along the eaves
Grey flies are wooing their like on the leaves;
White-hood sisters sit at their prayer
With dronings that beat at my breast with the air;
The dust and the pavement are hot to my skin,
‘Rise, little sisters, and let me in,
‘You who are fragrant, and cool, and white,
Sisters of Mercy, to love is delight!’
THE SERVING GIRL
You are a peasant, mere maid by the day,
Humming in Gaelic sad songs while you dust,
I am a passer on paths of grey,
With a wallet half-worn for rhymes and a crust.
You who have eyes like stars lost in a wave,
A cadence to challenge dim nights of cloud,
I think you lean to my chant of the grave,
Will weave with my passion wild web for a shroud.
TO RONSARD
AM I alone in Leinster, Meath and Connaught
In Ulster and the south,
To trace your spirit, Ronsard, in each song and sonnet
Shining with wine or drouth?
How you were happy in your old sweet France
Beside the Bellerie
Where you heard nymphs and Naiads wheel and dance
In moon-light jovially.
EPITAPH
A SILENT sinner, nights and days,
No human heart to him drew nigh,
Alone he wound his wonted ways,
Alone and little loved did die.
And autumn Death for him did choose,
A season dank with mists and rain,
And took him, while the evening dews
Were settling o’er the fields again.
PRELUDE
STILL south I went and west and south again,
Through Wicklow from the morning till the night,
And far from cities, and the sites of men,
Lived with the sunshine and the moon’s delight.
I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds,
The grey and wintry sides of many glens,
And did but half remember human words,
In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens.
ON AN ANNIVERSARY
AFTER READING THE dates in a book of Lyrics.
WITH Fifteen-ninety or Sixteen-sixteen
We end Cervantes, Marot, Nashe or Green:
Then Sixteen-thirteen till two score and nine,
Is Crashaw’s niche, that honey-lipped divine.
And so when all my little work is done
They’ll say I came in Eighteen-seventy-one,
And died in Dublin.... What year will they write
For my poor passage to the stall of Night?
QUEENS
SEVEN dog-days we let pass
Naming Queens in Glenmacnass,
All the rare and royal names
Wormy sheepskin yet retains,
Etain, Helen, Maeve, and Fand,
Golden Deirdre’s tender hand,
Bert, the big-foot, sung by Villon,
Cassandra, Ronsard found in Lyon.
Queens of Sheba, Meath and Connaught,
Coifed with crown, or gaudy bonnet,
Queens whose finger once did stir men,
Queens were eaten of fleas and vermin,
Queens men drew like Monna Lisa,
Or slew with drugs in Rome and Pisa,
We named Lucrezia Crivefli,
And Titian’s lady with amber belly,
Queens acquainted in learned sin,
Jane of Jewry’s slender shin:
Queens who cut the bogs of Glanna,
Judith of Scripture, and Gloriana,
Queens who wasted the East by proxy,
Or drove the ass-cart, a tinker’s doxy,
Yet these are rotten — I ask their pardon —
And we’ve the sun on rock and garden,
These are rotten, so you’re the Queen
Of all are living, or have been.
ON AN ISLAND
YOU’VE plucked a curlew, drawn a hen,
Washed the shirts of seven men,
You’ve stuffed my pillow, stretched the sheet,
And filled the pan to wash your feet,
You’ve cooped the pullets, wound the clock,
And ri
nsed the young men’s drinking crock;
And now we’ll dance to jigs and reels,
Nailed boots chasing girls’ naked heels,
Until your father’ll start to snore,
And Jude, now you’re married, will stretch on the floor.
PATCH-SHANEEN
SHANEEN and Maurya Prendergast
Lived west in Carnareagh,
And they’d a cur-dog, cabbage plot,
A goat, and cock of hay.
He was five foot one or two,
Herself was four foot ten,
And he went travelling asking meal
Above through Caragh Glen.
She’d pick her bag of carrageen
Or perries through the surf,
Or loan an ass of Foxy Jim
To fetch her creel of turf.
Till on one windy Samhain night,
When there’s stir among the dead,
He found her perished, stiff and stark,
Beside him in the bed.
And now when Shaneen travels far
From Droum to Ballyhyre
The women lay him sacks or straw,
Beside the seed of fire.
And when the grey cocks crow and flap,
And winds are in the sky,
‘Oh, Maurya, Maurya, are you dead?’
You’ll hear Patch-Shaneen cry.
BEG-INNISH
BRING Kateen-beug and Maurya Jude
To dance in Beg-Innish,
And when the lads (they’re in Dunquin)
Have sold their crabs and fish,
Wave fawny shawls and call them in,
And call the little girls who spin,
And seven weavers from Dunquin,
To dance in Beg-Innish.
I’ll play you jigs, and Maurice Kean,
Where nets are laid to dry,
I’ve silken strings would draw a dance
From girls are lame or shy;
Four strings I’ve brought from Spain and France
To make your long men skip and prance,
