The Complete Works. William Butler Yeats

has drunk full, she crossed the misty sea

      With me in her white arms a hundred years

      Before this day; for now the fall of tears

      Troubled her song.

      I do not know if days

      Or hours passed by, yet hold the morning rays

      Shone many times among the glimmering flowers

      Wove in her flower-like hair, before dark towers

      Rose in the darkness, and the white surf gleamed

      About them; and the horse of faery screamed

      And shivered, knowing the Isle of many Fears,

      Nor ceased until white Niamh stroked his ears

      And named him by sweet names.

      A foaming tide

      Whitened afar with surge, fan-formed and wide,

      Burst from a great door marred by many a blow

      From mace and sword and pole-axe, long ago

      When gods and giants warred. We rode between

      The seaweed-covered pillars, and the green

      And surging phosphorus alone gave light

      On our dark pathway, till a countless flight

      Of moonlit steps glimmered; and left and right

      Dark statues glimmered over the pale tide

      Upon dark thrones. Between the lids of one

      The imaged meteors had flashed and run

      And had disported in the stilly jet,

      And the fixed stars had dawned and shone and set,

      Since God made Time and Death and Sleep: the other

      Stretched his long arm to where, a misty smother,

      The stream churned, churned, and churned—his lips apart,

      As though he told his never slumbering heart

      Of every foamdrop on its misty way:

      Tying the horse to his vast foot that lay

      Half in the unvesselled sea, we climbed the stairs

      And climbed so long, I thought the last steps were

      Hung from the morning star; when these mild words

      Fanned the delighted air like wings of birds:

      ‘My brothers spring out of their beds at morn,

      A-murmur like young partridge: with loud horn

      They chase the noon-tide deer;

      And when the dew-drowned stars hang in the air

      Look to long fishing-lines, or point and pare

      A larch-wood hunting spear.

      ‘O sigh, O fluttering sigh, be kind to me;

      Flutter along the froth lips of the sea,

      And shores the froth lips wet:

      And stay a little while, and bid them weep:

      Ah, touch their blue veined eyelids if they sleep,

      And shake their coverlet.

      ‘When you have told how I weep endlessly,

      Flutter along the froth lips of the sea

      And home to me again,

      And in the shadow of my hair lie hid,

      And tell me how you came to one unbid,

      The saddest of all men.’

      A maiden with soft eyes like funeral tapers,

      And face that seemed wrought out of moonlit vapours,

      And a sad mouth, that fear made tremulous

      As any ruddy moth, looked down on us;

      And she with a wave-rusted chain was tied

      To two old eagles, full of ancient pride,

      That with dim eyeballs stood on either side.

      Few feathers were on their dishevelled wings,

      For their dim minds were with the ancient things.

      ‘I bring deliverance,’ pearl-pale Niamh said.

      ‘Neither the living, nor the unlabouring dead,

      Nor the high gods who never lived, may fight

      My enemy and hope; demons for fright

      Jabber and scream about him in the night;

      For he is strong and crafty as the seas

      That sprang under the Seven Hazel Trees.

      And I must needs endure and hate and weep,

      Until the gods and demons drop asleep,

      Hearing Aed touch the mournful strings of gold.’

      ‘Is he so dreadful?’

      ‘Be not over-bold,

      But flee while you may flee from him.’

      Then I:

      ‘This demon shall be pierced and drop and die,

      And his loose bulk be thrown in the loud tide.’

      ‘Flee from him,’ pearl-pale Niamh weeping cried,

      ‘For all men flee the demons’; but moved not,

      Nor shook my firm and spacious soul one jot;

      There was no mightier soul of Heber’s line;

      Now it is old and mouse-like: for a sign

      I burst the chain: still earless, nerveless, blind,

      Wrapped in the things of the unhuman mind,

      In some dim memory or ancient mood

      Still earless, nerveless, blind, the eagles stood.

      And then we climbed the stair to a high door,

      A hundred horsemen on the basalt floor

      Beneath had paced content: we held our way

      And stood within: clothed in a misty ray

      I saw a foam-white seagull drift and float

      Under the roof, and with a straining throat

      Shouted, and hailed him: he hung there a star,

      For no man’s cry shall ever mount so far;

      Not even your God could have thrown down that hall;

      Stabling His unloosed lightnings in their stall,

      He had sat down and sighed with cumbered heart,

      As though His hour were come.

      We sought the part

      That was most distant from the door; green slime

      Made the way slippery, and time on time

      Showed prints of sea-born scales, while down through it

      The captives’ journeys to and fro were writ

      Like a small river, and, where feet touched, came

      A momentary gleam of phosphorus flame.

      Under the deepest shadows of the hall

      That