The Complete Works. William Butler Yeats

hold no wearisome tool;

      Folded in love that fears no morrow,

      Nor the gray wandering osprey Sorrow.’

      O Patric! for a hundred years

      I chased upon that woody shore

      The deer, the badger, and the boar.

      O Patric! for a hundred years

      At evening on the glimmering sands,

      Beside the piled-up hunting spears,

      These now outworn and withered hands

      Wrestled among the island bands.

      O Patric! for a hundred years

      We went a-fishing in long boats

      With bending sterns and bending bows,

      And carven figures on their prows

      Of bitterns and fish-eating stoats.

      O Patric! for a hundred years

      The gentle Niamh was my wife;

      But now two things devour my life;

      The things that most of all I hate:

      Fasting and prayers.

      S. PATRIC.

      Tell on.

      OISIN.

      Yes, yes,

      For these were ancient Oisin’s fate

      Loosed long ago from heaven’s gate,

      For his last days to lie in wait.

      When one day by the shore I stood,

      I drew out of the numberless

      White flowers of the foam a staff of wood

      From some dead warrior’s broken lance:

      I turned it in my hands; the stains

      Of war were on it, and I wept,

      Remembering how the Fenians stept

      Along the blood-bedabbled plains,

      Equal to good or grievous chance:

      Thereon young Niamh softly came

      And caught my hands, but spake no word

      Save only many times my name,

      In murmurs, like a frighted bird.

      We passed by woods, and lawns of clover,

      And found the horse and bridled him,

      For we knew well the old was over.

      I heard one say ‘his eyes grow dim

      With all the ancient sorrow of men’;

      And wrapped in dreams rode out again

      With hoofs of the pale findrinny

      Over the glimmering purple sea:

      Under the golden evening light.

      The immortals moved among the fountains

      By rivers and the woods’ old night;

      Some danced like shadows on the mountains,

      Some wandered ever hand in hand,

      Or sat in dreams on the pale strand;

      Each forehead like an obscure star

      Bent down above each hooked knee:

      And sang, and with a dreamy gaze

      Watched where the sun in a saffron blaze

      Was slumbering half in the sea ways;

      And, as they sang, the painted birds

      Kept time with their bright wings and feet;

      Like drops of honey came their words,

      But fainter than a young lamb’s bleat.

      ‘An old man stirs the fire to a blaze,

      In the house of a child, of a friend, of a brother;

      He has over-lingered his welcome; the days,

      Grown desolate, whisper and sigh to each other;

      He hears the storm in the chimney above,

      And bends to the fire and shakes with the cold,

      While his heart still dreams of battle and love,

      And the cry of the hounds on the hills of old.

      ‘But we are apart in the grassy places,

      Where care cannot trouble the least of our days,

      Or the softness of youth be gone from our faces,

      Or love’s first tenderness die in our gaze.

      The hare grows old as she plays in the sun

      And gazes around her with eyes of brightness;

      Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done

      She limps along in an aged whiteness;

      A storm of birds in the Asian trees

      Like tulips in the air a-winging,

      And the gentle waves of the summer seas,

      That raise their heads and wander singing,

      Must murmur at last “unjust, unjust”;

      And “my speed is a weariness,” falters the mouse;

      And the kingfisher turns to a ball of dust,

      And the roof falls in of his tunnelled house.

      But the love-dew dims our eyes till the day

      When God shall come from the sea with a sigh

      And bid the stars drop down from the sky,

      And the moon like a pale rose wither away.’

BOOK II

       Table of Contents

      [194]

       [195]

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

       Table of Contents

      Now, man of croziers, shadows called our names

      And then away, away, like whirling flames;

      And now fled by, mist-covered, without sound,

      The youth and lady and the deer and hound;

      ‘Gaze no more on the phantoms,’ Niamh said,

      And kissed my eyes, and, swaying her bright head

      And her bright body, sang of faery and man

      Before God was or my old line began;

      Wars shadowy, vast, exultant; faeries of old

      Who wedded men with rings of Druid gold;

      And how those lovers never turn their eyes

      Upon the life that fades and flickers and dies,

      But love and kiss on dim shores far away

      Rolled round with music of the sighing spray:

      But sang no more, as when, like a brown