And here men catch no fish – here tend
No sheep – to no town-markets wend;
But aye in these
Green shades men felled, and still fell,
And ever will fell
Trees.’
Him with his axe I left, and journeyed on,
But when a thousand years were come and gone,
Again I passed
That way, and lo! a town –
And spires, and domes, and towers looked proudly down
Upon a vast
And sounding tide of life,
That flowed through many a street, and surged
In many a market-place, and urged
Its way in many a wheeling current, hither
And thither.
How rose the strife
Of sounds! the ceaseless beat
Of feet!
The noise of carts, of whips – the roll
Of chariots, coaches, cabs, gigs – all
Who keep the last-named vehicle we call
Respectable – horse-trampings, and the toll
Of bells; the whirl, the clash, the hubbub-mingling
Of voices, deep and shrill; the clattering, jingling,
The indescribable, indefinable roar;
The grating, creaking, booming, clanking, thumping,
And bumping;
The stumping,
Of folks with wooden legs; the gabbling,
And babbling,
And many more
Quite nameless helpings
To the general effect; dog-yelpings,
Laughter, and shout, and cry; all sounds of gladness,
Of sadness,
And madness –
For there were people marrying,
And others carrying
The dead they would have died for, to the grave –
(Sadly the church bell tolled
When the young were burying the old,
More sadly spake that bodeful tongue
When the old were burying the young.)
Thus did the tumult rave
Through that fair city – nor were wanting there
Or dancing dogs or bear,
Or needy knife-
Grinder, or man with dismal wife,
That sang deplorably of ‘purling groves
And verdant streams, all where young Damon roves
With tender Phillida, the nymph he loves,
And softly breathe
The balmy moonbeam’s wreathe,
And amorous turtle-doves’;
Or other doleful men, that blew
The melancholiest tunes – the which they only knew –
On flutes, and other instruments of wind;
Or small dark imp, with hurdy-
Gurdy,
And marmoset, that grinned
For nuts, and might have been his brother,
They were so like each other;
Or man,
That danced like the god Pan,
Twitching
A spasmy face
From side to side with a grace
Bewitching,
The while he whistled
In sorted pipes, all at his chin that bristled;
Or fiddler, fiddling much
For little profit, and a many such
Street musics most forlorn,
In that too pitiless rout quite overborne.
Now, when as I beheld
The stir, and heard the din of life once more
Swell, as it swelled
In that same place four thousand years before,
I asked of them that passed me in the throng,
How long
The city thereabouts had stood,
And what was gone with pasture, lake, and wood.
But at such questions most men did but stare,
And so pass on; and some did laugh and shake
Their heads, me deeming mad; but none would spare
The time, or take
The pains to answer me, for there
All were in haste – all busy – bent to make
The most of every minute,
And do, an’ if they might, an hour’s work in it.
Yet as I gave not o’er, but pertinaciously
Plied with my question every passer-by,
A dozen voices did at length reply
Ungraciously –
‘What ravest thou
Of pasture, lake, and wood? As it is now,
So was it always here, and so will be for aye.’
Them, hurrying there, I left, and journeyed on –
But when a thousand years are come and gone,
Again I’ll pass that way.
Siberia
In Siberia’s wastes
The Ice-wind’s breath
Woundeth like the toothèd steel.
Lost Siberia doth reveal
Only blight and death.
Blight and death alone.
No Summer shines.
Night is interblent with Day.
In Siberia’s wastes alway
The blood blackens, the heart pines.
In Siberia’s wastes
No tears are shed,
For they freeze within the brain.
Nought is felt but dullest pain,
Pain acute, yet dead;
Pain as in a dream,
When years go by
Funeral-paced, yet fugitive,
When man lives, and doth not live,
Doth not live – nor die.
In Siberia’s wastes
Are sands and rocks.
Nothing blooms of green or soft,
But the snowpeaks rise aloft
And the gaunt ice-blocks.
And the exile there
Is one with those;
They are part, and he is part,
For the sands are in his heart,
And the killing snows.
Therefore, in those wastes
None curse the Czar.
Each man’s tongue is cloven by
The North Blast, who heweth nigh
With sharp scymitar.
And such doom each drees,
Till, hunger-gnawn,
And cold-slain, he at length sinks there,
Yet scarce more a corpse than ere
His last breath was drawn.
Dark Rosaleen
O, my Dark Rosaleen,
Do not sigh, do not weep!
The priests are on the ocean green,
They march along the Deep.
There’s wine … from the royal Pope,
Upon the ocean green;
And Spanish ale shall give you hope,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope,
Shall give you health, and help, and hope,
My Dark Rosaleen!
Over hills, and through dales,
Have I roamed for your sake;
All yesterday I sailed with sails
On river and on lake.
The Erne … at its highest flood,
I dashed across unseen,
For there was lightning in my blood,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
Oh! there was lightning in my blood,
Red lightning lightened through my blood,
My Dark Rosaleen!
All day long, in unrest,
To and fro, do I move.
The very soul within my breast
Is wasted for you, love!
The heart … in my bosom faints
To think of you, my Queen,
My life of life, my saint of saints,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
To hear your sweet and sad complaints,
My life, my love, my saint of saints,
My Dark Rosaleen!
Woe and pain, pain and woe,
Are my lot, night and noon,
To see your bright
face clouded so,
Like to the mournful moon.
But yet … will I rear your throne
Again in golden sheen;
’Tis you shall reign, shall reign alone,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
’Tis you shall have the golden throne,
’Tis you shall reign, and reign alone,
My Dark Rosaleen!
Over dews, over sands,
Will I fly, for your weal;
Your holy delicate white hands
Shall girdle me with steel.
At home … in your emerald bowers,
From morning’s dawn till e’en,
You’ll pray for me, my flower of flowers,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My fond Rosaleen!
You’ll think of me through Daylight’s hours,
My virgin flower, my flower of flowers,
My Dark Rosaleen!
I could scale the blue air,
I could plough the high hills,
Oh, I could kneel all night in prayer,
To heal your many ills!
And one … beamy smile from you
Would float like light between
My toils and me, my own, my true,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My fond Rosaleen!
Would give me life and soul anew,
A second life, a soul anew,
My Dark Rosaleen!
O! the Erne shall run red
With redundance of blood,
The earth shall rock beneath our tread,
And flames wrap hill and wood,
And gun-peal, and slogan cry,
Wake many a glen serene,
Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
The Judgement Hour must first be nigh,
Ere you can fade, ere you can die,
My Dark Rosaleen!
The Nameless One
Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river
That sweeps along to the mighty sea;
GOD will inspire me while I deliver
My soul of thee!
Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening
Amid the last homes of youth and eld,
That there was once one whose veins ran lightning
No eye beheld.
Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,
How shone for him, through his griefs and gloom,
No star of all Heaven sends to light our
Path to the tomb.
Roll on, my song, and to after-ages
Tell how, disdaining all earth can give,
He would have taught Men, from Wisdom’s pages,
The way to live.
And tell how, trampled, derided, hated,
And worn by Weakness, Disease, and Wrong,
He fled for shelter to GOD, who mated
His soul with song –
With song which alway, sublime or vapid,
Flowed like a rill in the morning-beam,
Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid –
A mountain-stream.
Tell how this Nameless, condemned for years long
To herd with demons from Hell beneath,
Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long
For even Death.
Go on to tell how, with genius wasted,
Betrayed in Friendship, befooled in Love,
With spirit shipwrecked, and young hopes blasted,
He still, still strove –
Till, spent with Toil, dreeing Death for others,
And some whose hands should have wrought for him
(If children live not for sires and mothers),
His mind grew dim;
And he fell far through that pit abysmal,
The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns,
And pawned his soul for the Devil’s dismal
Stock of returns –
But yet redeemed it in days of darkness,
And shapes and signs of the Final Wrath,
When Death, in hideous and ghastly starkness,
Stood on his path.
And tell how now, amid Wreck and Sorrow,
And Want, and Sickness, and houseless nights,
He bides in calmness the Silent Morrow
That no ray lights.
And lives he still, then? Yes! Old and hoary
At thirty-nine, from Despair and Woe,
He lives, enduring what future Story
Will never know.
Him grant a grave to, ye pitying Noble,
Deep in your bosoms! There let him dwell!
He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble,
Here and in Hell.
SAMUEL FERGUSON
(1810–86)
The Forging of the Anchor
Come, see the Dolphin’s anchor forged – ’tis at a white heat now:
The bellows ceased, the flames decreased though on the forge’s brow
The little flames still fitfully play through the sable mound,
And fitfully you still may see the grim smiths ranking round,
All clad in leathern panoply, their broad hands only bare:
Some rest upon their sledges here, some work the windlass there.
The windlass strains the tackle chains, the black mound heaves below,
And red and deep a hundred veins burst out at every throe:
It rises, roars, rends all outright – O, Vulcan, what a glow!
’Tis blinding white, ’tis blasting bright – the high sun shines not so!
The high sun sees not, on the earth, such fiery fearful show,
The roof-ribs swarth, the candent hearth, the ruddy lurid row
Of smiths that stand, an ardent band, like men before the foe,
As, quivering through his fleece of flame, the sailing monster, slow
Sinks on the anvil: – all about the faces fiery grow;
‘Hurrah!’ they shout, ‘leap out – leap out’; bang, bang the sledges go:
Hurrah! the jetted lightnings are hissing high and low –
A hailing fount of fire is struck at every squashing blow;
The leathern mail rebounds the hail, the rattling cinders strow
The ground around; at every bound the sweltering fountains flow,
And thick and loud the swinking crowd at every stroke pant ‘ho!’
Leap out, leap out, my masters; leap out and lay on load!
Let’s forge a goodly anchor – a bower thick and broad;
For a heart of oak is hanging on every blow, I bode;
I see the good ship riding all in a perilous road –
The low reef roaring on her lee – the roll of ocean pour’d
From stem to stern, sea after sea, the mainmast by the board,
The bulwarks down, the rudder gone, the boats stove at the chains!
But courage still, brave mariners – the bower yet remains,
And not an inch to flinch he deigns, save when ye pitch sky high;
Then moves his head, as though he said, ‘Fear nothing – here am I.’
Swing in your strokes in order, let foot and hand keep time;
Your blows make music sweeter far than any steeple’s chime:
But, while you sling your sledges, sing – and let the burthen be,
The anchor is the anvil-king, and royal craftsmen we!
Strike in, strike in – the sparks begin to dull their rustling red;
Our hammers ring with sharper din, our work will soon be sped.
Our anchor soon must change his bed of fiery rich array,
For a hammock at the roaring bows, or an oozy couch of clay;
Our anchor soon must change the lay of merry craftsmen here,
For the yeo-heave-o’, and the heave-away, and the sighing seaman’s cheer;
When, weighing slow, at eve they go – far, far from love and home;
And sobbing sweethea
rts, in a row, wail o’er the ocean foam.
In livid and obdurate gloom he darkens down at last:
A shapely one he is, and strong, as e’er from cat was cast:
O trusted and trustworthy guard, if thou hadst life like me,
What pleasures would thy toils reward beneath the deep green sea!
O deep-Sea-diver, who might then behold such sights as thou?
The hoary monster’s palaces! methinks what joy ’twere now
To go plumb plunging down amid the assembly of the whales,
And feel the churn’d sea round me boil beneath their scourging tails!
Then deep in tangle-woods to fight the fierce sea unicorn,
And send him foil’d and bellowing back, for all his ivory horn;
To leave the subtle sworder-fish of bony blade forlorn;
And for the ghastly-grinning shark, to laugh his jaws to scorn:
To leap down on the kraken’s back, where ’mid Norwegian isles
He lies, a lubber anchorage for sudden shallow’d miles;
Till snorting, like an under-sea volcano, off he rolls;
Meanwhile to swing, a-buffeting the far astonished shoals
Of his back-browsing ocean-calves; or, haply, in a cove,
Shell-strown, and consecrate of old to some Undiné’s love,
To find the long-hair’d mermaidens; or, hard by icy lands,
To wrestle with the Sea-serpent, upon cerulean sands.
O broad-arm’d Fisher of the deep, whose sports can equal thine?
The Dolphin weighs a thousand tons, that tugs thy cable line;
And night by night, ’tis thy delight, thy glory day by day,
Through sable sea and breaker white the giant game to play –
But shamer of our little sports! forgive the name I gave –
A fisher’s job is to destroy – thine office is to save.
O lodger in the sea-kings’ halls, couldst thou but understand
Whose be the white bones by thy side, or whose that dripping band,
Slow swaying in the heaving waves, that round about thee bend,
With sounds like breakers in a dream blessing their ancient friend –
Oh, couldst thou know what heroes glide with larger steps round thee,
Thine iron side would swell with pride; thou’dst leap within the sea!
Give honour to their memories who left the pleasant strand,
To shed their blood so freely for the love of Fatherland –
Who left their chance of quiet age and grassy churchyard grave,
So freely, for a restless bed amid the tossing wave –
Oh, though our anchor may not be all I have fondly sung,
Honour him for their memory, whose bones he goes among!
Lament for Thomas Davis
I walked through Ballinderry in the spring-time,
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 44
