by J. M. Synge
Till stars look out to see the dance
Where nets are laid to dry.
We’ll have no priest or peeler in
To dance in Beg-Innish;
But we’ll have drink from M’riarty Jim
Rowed round while gannets fish,
A keg with porter to the brim,
That every lad may have his whim,
Till we up sails with M’riarty Jim
And sail from Beg-Innish.
THE PASSING OF THE SHEE
AFTER LOOKING AT one of A.E.’s pictures.
ADIEU, sweet Angus, Maeve and Fand,
Ye plumed yet skinny Shee,
That poets played with hand in hand
To learn their ecstasy.
We’ll search in Red Dan Sally’s ditch,
And drink in Tubber fair,
Or poach with Red Dan Philly’s bitch
The badger and the hare.
EPITAPH
AFTER READING RONSARD’S lines from Rabelais.
IF fruits are fed on any beast
Let vine-roots suck this parish priest,
For while he lived, no summer sun
Went up but he’d a bottle done,
And in the starlight beer and stout
Kept his waistcoat bulging out.
Then Death that changes happy things
Damned his soul to water springs.
DREAD
BESIDE a chapel I’d a room looked down,
Where all the women from the farms and town,
On Holy-days, and Sundays used to pass
To marriages, and Christenings and to Mass.
Then I sat lonely watching score and score,
Till I turned jealous of the Lord next door....
Now by this window, where there’s none can see,
The Lord God’s jealous of yourself and me.
THE ALTERATION
I KNEW all solitude, it seemed
That any man might know
Dead year met year, and then I dreamed
I might have comfort so.
But now when you and I apart
Must pass two days or three
Then in the desert of my heart
I perish utterly.
SAMHAIN
THOUGH trees have many a flake
Of copper, gold, and brass,
And fields are in a lake
Beneath the withered grass;
Though hedges show their hips
And leaves blow by the wall
I taste upon your lips
The whole year’s festival.
THE MEETING
WE met among the furze in golden mist,
Watching a golden moon that filled the sky,
And there my lips your lips’ young glory kissed
Till old high loves, in our high love went by.
Then in the hush of plots with shining trees
We lay like gods disguised in shabby dress,
Making with birches, bracken, stars and seas,
Green courts of pleasure for each long caress;
Till there I found in you and you in me
The crowns of Christ and Eros — all divinity.
And all we knew of quiver hymn and creeds
And old divinities construed by men
Flamed out when some strange moonbeam touched the reeds
Or sweet new scent upon our nostrils ran
Till we were left two gods in shabby dress
And made our Eden in the gold moon’s light
Who while their arms grew tight for each caress
IN GLENASAMOLE
WE reached the Glen of Thrushes where Usheen
Lost all his youth and turned diseased and grey,
And there your lips — such lips few men have seen —
With one long kiss took my dead years away.
And then your young girl’s voice grew wide and deep,
With happy words in love’s long wisdom planned,
And all the glen grew dim with sunny sleep,
While brow met brow and hand met happy hand.
AND A THIRD, ENTITLED TIR-NA-OG:
In Glenasmoil where Finn’s Usheen
Was aged one summer’s day,
Your lips and cap of gold and green
Enticed my years away
And then your words grew wild and deep
In love’s long wisdom planned
And all the glen grew dim with sleep
In our Youth’s Holy-Land.
TO THE OAKS OF GLENCREE
MY arms are round you, and I lean
Against you, while the lark
Sings over us, and golden lights, and green
Shadows are on your bark.
There’ll come a season when you’ll stretch
Black boards to cover me:
Then in Mount Jerome I will lie, poor wretch,
With worms eternally.
IN GLENCULLEN
THRUSH, linnet, stare and wren,
Brown lark beside the sun,
Take thought of kestril, sparrow-hawk,
Birdlime, and roving gun.
You great-great-grand-children
Of birds I’ve listened to,
I think I robbed your ancestors
When I was young as you.
THE CURSE
TO A SISTER of an enemy of the author s who
disapproved of’The Playboy’
LORD, confound this surly sister,
Blight her brow with blotch and blister,
Cramp her larynx, lung, and liver,
In her guts a galling give her.
Let her live to earn her dinners
In Mountjoy with seedy sinners:
Lord, this judgment quickly bring,
And I’m your servant, J. M. Synge.
A WISH
MAY seven tears in every week
Touch the hollow of your cheek,
That I — signed with such a dew —
For a lion’s share may sue
Of the roses ever curled
Round the May-pole of the world.
Heavy riddles lie in this,
Sorrow’s sauce for every kiss.
IS IT A MONTH
Is it a month since I and you
In the starlight of Glen Dubh
Stretched beneath a hazel bough
Kissed from ear and throat to brow,
Since your fingers, neck, and chin
Made the bars that fenced me in,
Till Paradise seemed but a wreck
Near your bosom, brow, and neck,
And stars grew wilder, growing wise,
In the splendour of your eyes!
Since the weasel wandered near
Whilst we kissed from ear to ear
And the wet and withered leaves
Blew about your cap and sleeves,
Till the moon sank tired through the ledge
Of the wet and windy hedge?
And we took the starry lane
Back to Dublin town again.
IN MAY
IN a nook
That opened south,
You and I
Lay mouth to mouth.
A snowy gull
And sooty daw
Came and looked
With many a caw;
‘Such,’ I said,
‘Are I and you,
When you’ve kissed me
Black and blue!’
THE MASQUE OF MAY
THE chiffchaff and the celandine
The blackbird and the bee
The chestnut branches topped with green
Have met my love and me
And we have played the masque of May
So sweet and commonplace and gay
The sea’s first miracle of blue
Bare trees that glitter near the sky
Grow with a love and longing new
Where went my love and I
And there we played the masque of May
So old and infi
nite and gay.
IN KERRY
WE heard the thrushes by the shore and sea,
And saw the golden stars’ nativity,
Then round we went the lane by Thomas Flynn,
Across the church where bones lie out and in;
And there I asked beneath a lonely cloud
Of strange delight, with one bird singing loud,
What change you’d wrought in graveyard, rock and sea,
This new wild paradise to wake for me....
Yet knew no more than knew these merry sins
Had built this stack of thigh-bones, jaws and shins.
DANNY
ONE night a score of Erris men,
A score I’m told and nine,
Said, ‘We’ll get shut of Danny’s noise
Of girls and widows dyin’.
‘There’s not his like from Binghamstown
To Boyle and Ballycroy,
At playing hell on decent girls,
At beating man and boy.
‘He’s left two pairs of female twins
Beyond in Killacreest,
And twice in Crossmolina fair
He’s struck the parish priest.
‘But we’ll come round him in the night
A mile beyond the Mullet;
Ten will quench his bloody eyes,
And ten will choke his gullet.’
It wasn’t long till Danny came,
From Bangor making way,
And he was damning moon and stars
And whistling grand and gay.
Till in a gap of hazel glen —
And not a hare in sight —
Out lepped the nine-and-twenty lads
Along his left and right.
Then Danny smashed the nose on Byrne,
He split the lips on three,
And bit across the right hand thumb
Of one Red Shawn Magee.
But seven tripped him up behind,
And seven kicked before,
And seven squeezed around his throat
Till Danny kicked no more.
Then some destroyed him with their heels,
Some tramped him in the mud,
Some stole his purse and timber pipe,
And some washed off his blood.
And when you’re walking out the way
From Bangor to Belmullet,
You’ll see a flat cross on a stone
Where men choked Danny’s gullet.
THE MERGENCY MAN
HE was lodging above in Coom,
And he’d the half of the bailiff’s room.
Till a black night came in Coomasaharn
A night of rains you’d swamp a star in.
‘To-night,’ says he, ‘with the devil’s weather
The hares itself will quit the heather,
I’ll catch my boys with a latch on the door,
And serve my process on near a score.’
The night was black at the fording place
And the flood was up in a whitened race
But devil a bit he’d turn his face,
Then the peelers said, ‘Now mind your lepping,
How can you see the stones for stepping?
We’ll wash our hands of your bloody job.’
‘Wash and welcome,’ says he, ‘begob.’
He made two leps with a run and dash,
Then the peelers heard a yell and splash.
And the Mergency man in two days and a bit
Was found in the ebb tide stuck in a net.
I’VE THIRTY MONTHS
I’VE thirty months, and that’s my pride,
Before my age’s a double score,
Though many lively men have died
At twenty-nine or little more.
I’ve left a long and famous set
Behind some seven years or three,
But there are millions I’d forget
Will have their laugh at passing me.
25, ix, 1908.
ON A BIRTHDAY
FRIEND of Ronsard, Nashe, and Beaumont,
Lark of Ulster, Meath and Thomond,
Heard from Smyrna and Sahara
To the surf of Connemara,
Lark of April, June, and May,
Sing loudly this my Lady-day.
AT COBLENZ
OAKS and beeches heath and rushes
You’ve kept your graces by the Rhine
Since Walter of the Vogelweide
Sang from Coblenz to the Main
But the great-great-great-great bastards
Of the queens that Walter knew
Wear pot-bellies in the breach
And bald heads are potted too
ABROAD
SOME go to game, or pray in Rome
I travel for my turning home
For when I’ve been six months abroad
Faith your kiss would brighten God!
WINTER
WITH LITTLE MONEY in a great city.
THERE’S snow in every street
Where I go up and down,
And there’s no woman, man, or dog
That knows me in the town.
I know each shop, and all
These Jews, and Russian Poles,
For I go walking night and noon
To spare my sack of coals.
A QUESTION
I ASKED if I got sick and died, would you
With my black funeral go walking too,
If you’d stand close to hear them talk or pray
While I’m let down in that steep bank of clay.
And, No, you said, for if you saw a crew
Of living idiots, pressing round that new
Oak coffin — they alive, I dead beneath
That board, — you’d rave and rend them with your teeth.
A WORD ON THE LIFE-FORCE
You squirrel angel eel and bat
You seal, sea-serpent water-hen
You badger cur-dog mule and cat
You player with the shapes of men
END OF THE BOOK
I READ about the Blaskets and Dunquin,
The Wicklow towns and fair days I’ve been in.
I read of Galway, Mayo, Aranmore,
And men with kelp along a wintry shore.
Then I remembered that that ‘I’ was I,
And I’d a filthy job — to waste and die.
Translations
PRAYER OF THE OLD WOMAN, VILLON’S MOTHER
MOTHER OF GOD that’s Lady of the Heavens, take myself, the poor sinner, the way I’ll be along with them that’s chosen.
Let you say to your own Son that He’d have a right to forgive my share of sins, when it’s the like He’s done, many’s the day, with big and famous sinners. I’m a poor aged woman, was never at school, and is no scholar with letters, but I’ve seen pictures in the chapel with Paradise on one side, and harps and pipes in it, and the place on the other side, where sinners do be boiled in torment; the one gave me great joy, the other a great fright and scaring, let me have the good place, Mother of God, and it’s in your faith I’ll live always.
It’s yourself that bore Jesus, that has no end or death, and He the Lord Almighty, that took our weakness and gave Himself to sorrows, a young and gentle man. It’s Himself is our Lord surely, and it’s in that faith I’ll live always.
THE man I had a love for — a great rascal would kick me in the gutter — is dead thirty years and over it, and it is I am left behind, grey and aged. When I do be minding the good days I had, minding what I was one time, and what it is I’m come to, and when I do look on my own self, poor and dry, and pinched together, it wouldn’t be much would set me raging in the streets.
Where is the round forehead I had, and the fine hair, and the two eyebrows, and the eyes with a big gay look out of them would bring folly from a great scholar? Where is my straight shapely nose, and two ears, and my chin with a valley in it, and my lips were red and open?
Where are the pointed shoulders were on me, and the
long arms and nice hands to them? Where is my bosom was as white as any, or my straight rounded sides?
It’s the way I am this day — my forehead is gone away into furrows, the hair of my head is grey and whitish, my eyebrows are tumbled from me, and my two eyes have died out within my head — those eyes that would be laughing to the men, — my nose has a hook on it, my ears are hanging down, and my lips are sharp and skinny.
That’s what’s left over from the beauty of a right woman — a bag of bones, and legs the like of two shrivelled sausages going beneath it.
It’s of the like of that we old hags do be thinking, of the good times are gone away from us, and we crouching on our hunkers by a little fire of twigs, soon kindled and soon spent, we that were the pick of many.
LEOPARDI
SILVIA
ARE you bearing in mind that time when there was a fine look out of your eyes, and yourself, pleased and thoughtful, were going up the boundaries that are set to childhood? That time the quiet rooms, and the lanes about the house, would be noisy with your songs that were never tired out; the time you’d be sitting down with some work that is right for women, and well pleased with the hazy coming times you were looking out at in your own mind.
May was sweet that year, and it was pleasantly you’d pass the day.
Then I’d leave my pleasant studies, and the paper I had smudged with ink where I would be spending the better part of the day, and cock my ears from the sill of my father’s house, till I’d hear the sound of your voice, or of your loom when your hands moved quickly. It’s then I would set store on the quiet sky and the lanes and little places, and the sea was far away in one place and the high hills in another.
There is no tongue will tell till the judgment what I feel in myself those times.
COLIN MUSET, AN OLD POET, COMPLAINS TO HIS PATRON I
