The Complete Works. William Butler Yeats

a ring hung on the wall,

      And in the ring a torch, and with its flare

      Making a world about her in the air,

      Passed under a dim doorway, out of sight,

      And came again, holding a second light

      Burning between her fingers, and in mine

      Laid it and sighed: I held a sword whose shine

      No centuries could dim: and a word ran

      Thereon in Ogham letters, ‘Mananan’:

      That sea-god’s name, who in a deep content

      Sprang dripping, and, with captive demons sent

      Out of the seven-fold seas, built the dark hall

      Rooted in foam and clouds, and cried to all

      The mightier masters of a mightier race;

      And at his cry there came no milk-pale face

      Under a crown of thorns and dark with blood,

      But only exultant faces.

      Niamh stood

      With bowed head, trembling when the white blade shone,

      But she whose hours of tenderness were gone

      Had neither hope nor fear. I bade them hide

      Under the shadows till the tumults died

      Of the loud crashing and earth-shaking fight,

      Lest they should look upon some dreadful sight;

      And thrust the torch between the slimy flags.

      A dome made out of endless carven jags,

      Where shadowy face flowed into shadowy face,

      Looked down on me; and in the self-same place

      I waited hour by hour, and the high dome

      Windowless, pillarless, multitudinous home

      Of faces, waited; and the leisured gaze

      Was loaded with the memory of days

      Buried and mighty: when through the great door

      The dawn came in, and glimmered on the floor

      With a pale light, I journeyed round the hall

      And found a door deep sunken in the wall,

      The least of doors; beyond on a dim plain

      A little runnel made a bubbling strain,

      And on the runnel’s stony and bare edge

      A dusky demon dry as a withered sedge

      Swayed, crooning to himself an unknown tongue:

      In a sad revelry he sang and swung

      Bacchant and mournful, passing to and fro

      His hand along the runnel’s side, as though

      The flowers still grew there: far on the sea’s waste;

      Shaking and waving, vapour vapour chased,

      While high frail cloudlets, fed with a green light,

      Like drifts of leaves, immovable and bright,

      Hung in the passionate dawn. He slowly turned:

      A demon’s leisure: eyes, first white, now burned

      Like wings of kingfishers; and he arose

      Barking. We trampled up and down with blows

      Of sword and brazen battle-axe, while day

      Gave to high noon and noon to night gave way;

      But when at withering of the sun he knew

      The Druid sword of Mananan, he grew

      To many shapes; I lunged at the smooth throat

      Of a great eel; it changed, and I but smote

      A fir-tree roaring in its leafless top;

      And I but held a corpse, with livid chop

      And dripping and sunken shape, to face and breast,

      When I tore down that tree; but when the west

      Surged up in plumy fire, I lunged and drave

      Through heart and spine, and cast him in the wave,

      Lest Niamh shudder.

      Full of hope and dread

      Those two came carrying wine and meat and bread,

      And healed my wounds with unguents out of flowers,

      That feed white moths by some De Danaan shrine;

      Then in that hall, lit by the dim sea-shine,

      We lay on skins of otters, and drank wine,

      Brewed by the sea-gods, from huge cups that lay

      Upon the lips of sea-gods in their day;

      And then on heaped-up skins of otters slept.

      But when the sun once more in saffron stept,

      Rolling his flagrant wheel out of the deep,

      We sang the loves and angers without sleep,

      And all the exultant labours of the strong:

      But now the lying clerics murder song

      With barren words and flatteries of the weak.

      In what land do the powerless turn the beak

      Of ravening Sorrow, or the hand of Wrath?

      For all your croziers, they have left the path

      And wander in the storms and clinging snows,

      Hopeless for ever: ancient Oisin knows,

      For he is weak and poor and blind, and lies

      On the anvil of the world.

      S. PATRIC.

      Be still: the skies

      Are choked with thunder, lightning, and fierce wind,

      For God has heard, and speaks His angry mind;

      Go cast your body on the stones and pray,

      For He has wrought midnight and dawn and day.

      OISIN.

      Saint, do you weep? I hear amid the thunder

      The Fenian horses; armour torn asunder;

      Laughter and cries: the armies clash and shock;

      All is done now; I see the ravens flock;

      Ah, cease, you mournful, laughing Fenian horn!

      We feasted for three days. On the fourth morn

      I found, dropping sea-foam on the wide stair,

      And hung with slime, and whispering in his hair,

      That demon dull and unsubduable;

      And once more to a day-long battle fell,

      And at the sundown threw him in the surge,

      To lie until the fourth morn saw emerge

      His new healed shape: and for a hundred years

      So warred, so feasted, with nor dreams, nor fears

      Nor languor nor fatigue: an endless feast,

      An endless war.

      The