The Complete Works. William Butler Yeats

sleepers, a sound like the stirring of flies.

      He, shaking the fold of his lips, and heaving the pillar of his throat,

      Watched me with mournful wonder out of the wells of his eyes.

      I cried, ‘Come out of the shadow, king of the nails of gold!

      And tell of your goodly household and the goodly works of your hands,

      That we may muse in the starlight and talk of the battles of old;

      Your questioner, Oisin, is worthy, he comes from the Fenian lands.’

      Half open his eyes were, and held me, dull with the smoke of their dreams;

      His lips moved slowly in answer, no answer out of them came;

      Then he swayed in his fingers the bell-branch, slow dropping a sound in faint streams

      Softer than snow-flakes in April and piercing the marrow like flame.

      Wrapt in the wave of that music, with weariness more than of earth,

      The moil of my centuries filled me; and gone like a sea-covered stone

      Were the memories of the whole of my sorrow and the memories of the whole of my mirth,

      And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.

      In the roots of the grasses, the sorrels, I laid my body as low;

      And the pearl-pale Niamh lay by me, her brow on the midst of my breast;

      And the horse was gone in the distance, and years after years ’gan flow;

      Square leaves of the ivy moved over us, binding us down to our rest.

      And, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot;

      How the fetlocks drip blood in the battle, when the fallen on fallen lie rolled;

      How the falconer follows the falcon in the weeds of the heron’s plot,

      And the names of the demons whose hammers made armour for Midhir of old.

      And, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot;

      That the spearshaft is made out of ashwood, the shield out of osier and hide;

      How the hammers spring on the anvil, on the spear-head’s burning spot;

      How the slow, blue-eyed oxen of Finn low sadly at evening tide.

      But in dreams, mild man of the croziers, driving the dust with their throngs,

      Moved round me, of seamen or landsmen, all who are winter tales;

      Came by me the Kings of the Red Branch, with roaring of laughter and songs,

      Or moved as they moved once, love-making or piercing the tempest with sails.

      Came Blanid, MacNessa, tall Fergus who feastward of old time slunk;

      Cook Barach, the traitor; and warward, the spittle on his beard never dry,

      Dark Balor, as old as a forest, car-borne, his mighty head sunk

      Helpless, men lifting the lids of his weary and death-making eye.

      And by me, in soft red raiment, the Fenians moved in loud streams,

      And Grania, walking and smiling, sewed with her needle of bone.

      So lived I and lived not, so wrought I and wrought not, with creatures of dreams,

      In a long iron sleep, as a fish in the water goes dumb as a stone.

      At times our slumber was lightened. When the sun was on silver or gold;

      When brushed with the wings of the owls, in the dimness they love going by;

      When a glow-worm was green on a grass leaf lured from his lair in the mould;

      Half wakening, we lifted our eyelids, and gazed on the grass with a sigh.

      So watched I when, man of the croziers, at the heel of a century fell,

      Weak, in the midst of the meadow, from his miles in the midst of the air,

      A starling like them that forgathered ’neath a moon waking white as a shell,

      When the Fenians made foray at morning with Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair.

      I awoke: the strange horse without summons out of the distance ran,

      Thrusting his nose to my shoulder; he knew in his bosom deep

      That once more moved in my bosom the ancient sadness of man,

      And that I would leave the immortals, their dimness, their dews dropping sleep.

      O, had you seen beautiful Niamh grow white as the waters are white,

      Lord of the croziers, you even had lifted your hands and wept:

      But, the bird in my fingers, I mounted, remembering alone that delight

      Of twilight and slumber were gone, and that hoofs impatiently stept.

      I cried, ‘O Niamh! O white one! if only a twelve-houred day,

      I must gaze on the beard of Finn, and move where the old men and young

      In the Fenians’ dwellings of wattle lean on the chessboards and play,

      Ah, sweet to me now were even bald Conan’s slanderous tongue!

      ‘Like me were some galley forsaken far off in Meridian isle,

      Remembering its long-oared companions, sails turning to thread-bare rags;

      No more to crawl on the seas with long oars mile after mile,

      But to be amid shooting of flies and flowering of rushes and flags.’

      Their motionless eyeballs of spirits grown mild with mysterious thought,

      Watched her those seamless faces from the valley’s glimmering girth;

      As she murmured, ‘O wandering Oisin, the strength of the bell-branch is naught,

      For there moves alive in your fingers the fluttering sadness of earth.

      ‘Then go through the lands in the saddle and see what the mortals do,

      And softly come to your Niamh over the tops of the tide;

      But weep for your Niamh, O Oisin, weep; for if only your shoe

      Brush lightly as haymouse earth pebbles, you will come no more to my side.

      ‘O flaming lion of the world, O when will you turn to your rest?’

      I saw from a distant saddle; from the earth she made her moan;

      ‘I would die like a small withered leaf in the autumn, for breast unto breast

      We shall mingle no more, nor our gazes empty their sweetness lone

      ‘In the isles of the farthest seas where only the spirits come.

      Were the winds less soft than the breath of a pigeon who sleeps on her nest,

      Nor lost in the star-fires and odours the sound of the sea’s vague drum,

      O flaming lion of the world, O when will you turn to your rest?’

      The wailing grew distant; I rode by the woods of the wrinkling bark,

      Where ever is murmurous dropping, old silence and that one sound;

      For no live creatures live there, no weasels move in the dark;

      In a reverie forgetful of all things, over the bubbling ground.

      And I rode by the plains of the sea’s edge, where all is barren and gray,

      Gray