Chapter I: Am the Man-Child

I am the man-child. From a virgin womb,
Begot among the hills of virgin loins,
The generation of a hundred kings,
I come. I am the man-child glorious,
The love-son of the second birth foretold
By western bards, the fruit of form and strength
By nature's prophylactic forethought joined
In marriage with their kind, the crown, the peak,
The summit of the scheme of things, the pride
And glory of the hand of God.

Behold!
Where in the spaces of the morning world
The sunrise shines my harbinger, the hills
Leap up, the young winds sing, the rivers dance,
The leaving forests laugh, the eagles scream;
For I am one with them, a mate, a brother,
Bound by nature to the human soul
That thro' the accidents of nature runs.
And wherefore do they leap and laugh and sing,
And dance like vestals on a holyday?
Because their hearts are glad, and maenad-like,
They fain would share the frenzied cup they drink
With me, the man-child glorious.

I am he,
Even he, the master-mould, the paragon!
Behold me in my nonage, child and man:
The ripest grape on beauty's procreant vine,
The reddest apple of ingathering:
Perfect in form, of peerless strength, and free
As Caoilte when he roamed the primal hills
(Those "wildernesses rich with liberty"),
A hero that the shocks of chance might strike,
But never tame, a giant druid-ringed,
A god-like savage of the golden days
Ere service shackled action: free itself
As Oisin when he strayed in Doire-cairn,
His hand upon the mountain top, his feet
Fixt in the flowing sea, his holy head
Crowned by a flight of birds, acclaiming him
The singer of the dawn.

FRAGMENT

I stand upon the summit now:
The falcon, flying from the heath,
Trails darkly o'er the mountain brow
And drops into the gloom beneath.
Night falls, and with it comes the wind
That blew on Fionn time out of mind,
When weary of love-feasts and wars
He left his comrades all behind
To dream upon the quiet stars.
Here on the lonely mountain height
Is ecstasy and living light--
The living inner light that burns
With magic caught from those white urns
That wander thro' the trackless blue
Forever, touching those they know
With beauty, and the things that come
Of beauty. Earth lies at my feet,
A dumb, vast shadow, vast as dumb.

AT THE WHITENING OF THE DAWN

At the whitening of the dawn,
As I came o'er the windy water,
I saw the salmon-fisher's daughter,
Nuala ni Cholumain.
Nuala ni Cholumain,
Nuala ni Cholumain,
Palest lily of the dawn
Is Nuala ni Cholumain.

In the dark of evendown
I went o'er the quiet water,
Dreaming of the fisher's daughter
And her bothy in the town.
And I made this simple rann
Ere the whitening of the dawn,
Singing to the beauty wan
Of Nuala ni Cholumain.

WHO ARE MY FRIENDS

Who are my friends,
Faithful and true?
Who but the stars
That burn in the blue.

Who but the sun
That sinketh so red,
Who but the clay
That giveth me bread.

Who but the hills,
Who but the sea,
Who but the flowers
That fold on the tree.

Who but the moths
That flutter and pass,
Who but the lambs
That cry in the grass.

Who but the darkness,
Who but the rain,
Who but the grave, the grave--
All else are vain!
All else are vain!

O GLORIOUS CHILDBEARER

O glorious childbearer,
O secret womb,
O gilded bridechamber, from which hath come the sightly Bridegroom forth,
O amber veil,
Thou sittest in heaven, the white love of the Gael.
Thy head is crowned with stars, thy radiant hair
Shines like a river thro' the twilight air;
Thou walkest by trodden ways and trackless seas,
Immaculate of man's infirmities.

CORONACH

Come, pipes, sound
A crooning coronach round,
Till hill and hollow glen and shadowed lake o'erflow
With welling music of our woe.
Beat, beat, ye muffled drums, ye drones and chanters wail,
With heartbreak of the baffled, battle-broken Gael.
The clay is deep on Ireland's breast:
Her proud and bleeding heart is laid at last to rest . .
To rest . . to rest!

TWILIGHT FALLEN

Twilight fallen white and cold,
Child in cradle, lamb in fold;
Glimmering thro' the ghostly trees,
Gemini and Pleiades.
Wounds of Eloim,
Weep on me!

Black-winged vampires flitting by,
Curlews crying in the sky;
Grey mists wreathing from the ground,
Wrapping rath and burial mound.
Wounds of Eloim,
Weep on me!

Heard, like some sad Gaelic strain,
Ocean's ancient voice in pain;
Darkness folding hill and wood,
Sorrow drinking at my blood.
Wounds of Eloim,
Weep on me!

THE DAWN WHITENESS

The dawn whiteness.
A bank of slate-grey cloud lying heavily over it.
The moon, like a hunted thing, dropping into the cloud.

THE DWARF

Look at him now, the son,
And the churchyard twist in his foot,
Standing there by his mother's door,
As if he had taken root!

She crossed a grave, they say,
On a black day in spring,
And bore him in the seventh month--
A poor, misshapen thing.

Kneeling down in the dark
She travailed without a cry,
And gave him the mothering kiss
Between the earth and the sky.

He licks cuckoo-spittle, they say,
And eats the dung of the roads,
Mocking the journeymen
As they pass by with their loads.

Look at his little face--
As grey as wool is grey--
And the cast in his green eye,
So wild and far away.

Does he see Magh-meala?
Is his breath human breath?
Are his thoughts of the hidden things
Untouched by time and death?

Hanging there by the half-door,
Dangling his devil's foot,
Stock-still on the threshold,
As if he had taken root!