Chapter CLXXXIV: The Old Country

Not tasselled palm or bended cypress wooing
The languid wind on temple-crownèd heights,
Not heaven’s myriad stars in lustre strewing
Smooth sapphire bays in hushed Ionian nights,
Not the clear peak of dawn-encrimsoned snow,
Or plumage-lighted wood, or gilded pile
Sparkling amid the imperial city’s glow,
Endears our Isle.

Thine the weird splendour of the restless billow
For ever breaking over lonely shores,
The reedy mere that is the wild-swan’s pillow,
The crag to whose torn spire the eagle soars,
The moorland where the solitary hern
Spreads his grey wings upon the breezes cold,
The pink sweet heather’s bloom, the waving fern,
The gorse’s gold.

And we who draw our being from thy being,
Blown by the untimely blast about the earth,
Back in love’s visions to thy bosom fleeing,
Droop with thy sorrows, brighten with thy mirth;
O, from afar, with sad and straining eyes,
Tired arms across the darkness and the foam
We stretch to thy bluff capes and sombre skies,
Belovèd home!

The nurselings of thy moorlands and thy mountains,
Thy children tempered by thy winter gales,
Swayed by the tumult of thy headlong fountains
That clothe with pasture green thy grassy vales,
True to one love in climes’ and years’ despite,
We yearn, in our last hour, upon thy breast,
When the Great Darkness wraps thee from our sight,
To sink to rest!

_George Francis Savage-Armstrong._

GRAVES

CLXXXV

THE SONGS OF ERIN

(‘Music shall outlive all the songs of the birds.’--_Old Irish_)

I’ve heard the lark’s cry thrill the sky o’er the meadows of Lusk,
And the first joyous gush of the thrush from Adare’s April Wood;
At thy lone music’s spell, Philomel, magic-stricken I’ve stood,
When, in Espan afar, star on star trembled out of the dusk.

While Dunkerron’s blue dove murmured love, ’neath her nest I
have sighed,
And by mazy Culdaff with a laugh mocked the cuckoo’s refrain;
Derrycarn’s dusky bird I have heard piping joy hard by pain,
And the swan’s last lament sobbing sent over Moyle’s mystic tide.

Yet as bright shadows pass from the glass of the darkening lake,
As the rose’s rapt sigh will soon die, when the zephyr is stilled;
In oblivion grey sleeps each lay that those birds ever trilled,
But the songs Erin sings from her strings shall immortally wake.

_Alfred Perceval Graves._

CASEY