The Complete Works. William Butler Yeats

you for all the wildness of your blood,

      And though your father came out of the sun,

      Are but a little king and weigh but light

      In anything that touches government,

      If put into the balance with my children.

      CUCHULAIN.

      It’s well that we should speak our minds out plainly,

      For when we die we shall be spoken of

      In many countries. We in our young days

      Have seen the heavens like a burning cloud

      Brooding upon the world, and being more

      Than men can be now that cloud’s lifted up,

      We should be the more truthful. Conchubar,

      I do not like your children—they have no pith,

      No marrow in their bones, and will lie soft

      Where you and I lie hard.

      CONCHUBAR.

      You rail at them

      Because you have no children of your own.

      CUCHULAIN.

      I think myself most lucky that I leave

      No pallid ghost or mockery of a man

      To drift and mutter in the corridors,

      Where I have laughed and sung.

      CONCHUBAR.

      That is not true,

      For all your boasting of the truth between us;

      For, there is no man having house and lands,

      That have been in the one family

      And called by the one name for centuries,

      But is made miserable if he know

      They are to pass into a stranger’s keeping,

      As yours will pass.

      CUCHULAIN.

      The most of men feel that,

      But you and I leave names upon the harp.

      CONCHUBAR.

      You play with arguments as lawyers do,

      And put no heart in them. I know your thoughts,

      For we have slept under the one cloak and drunk

      From the one wine cup. I know you to the bone.

      I have heard you cry, aye in your very sleep,

      ‘I have no son,’ and with such bitterness

      That I have gone upon my knees and prayed

      That it might be amended.

      CUCHULAIN.

      For you thought

      That I should be as biddable as others

      Had I their reason for it; but that’s not true,

      For I would need a weightier argument

      Than one that marred me in the copying,

      As I have that clean hawk out of the air

      That, as men say, begot this body of mine

      Upon a mortal woman.

      CONCHUBAR.

      Now as ever

      You mock at every reasonable hope,

      And would have nothing, or impossible things.

      What eye has ever looked upon the child

      Would satisfy a mind like that?

      CUCHULAIN.

      I would leave

      My house and name to none that would not face

      Even myself in battle.

      CONCHUBAR.

      Being swift of foot,

      And making light of every common chance,

      You should have overtaken on the hills

      Some daughter of the air, or on the shore

      A daughter of the Country-under-Wave.

      CUCHULAIN.

      I am not blasphemous.

      CONCHUBAR.

      Yet you despise

      Our queens, and would not call a child your own,

      If one of them had borne him.

      CUCHULAIN.

      I have not said it.

      CONCHUBAR.

      Ah! I remember I have heard you boast,

      When the ale was in your blood, that there was one

      In Scotland, where you had learnt the trade of war,

      That had a stone-pale cheek and red-brown hair.

      And that although you had loved other women,

      You’d sooner that fierce woman of the camp

      Bore you a son than any queen among them.

      CUCHULAIN.

      You call her a ‘fierce woman of the camp,’

      For having lived among the spinning-wheels,

      You’d have no woman near that would not say,

      ‘Ah! how wise!’ ‘What will you have for supper?’

      ‘What shall I wear that I may please you, sir?’

      And keep that humming through the day and night

      Forever. A fierce woman of the camp!

      But I am getting angry about nothing.

      You have never seen her. Ah! Conchubar, had you seen her

      With that high, laughing, turbulent head of hers

      Thrown backward, and the bow-string at her ear,

      Or sitting at the fire with those grave eyes

      Full of good counsel as it were with wine,

      Or when love ran through all the lineaments

      Of her wild body—although she had no child,

      None other had all beauty, queen, or lover,

      Or was so fitted to give birth to kings.

      CONCHUBAR.

      There’s nothing I can say but drifts you farther

      From the one weighty matter. That very woman—

      For I know well that you are praising Aoife—

      Now hates you and will leave no subtilty

      Unknotted that might run into a noose

      About your throat, no army in idleness

      That might bring ruin on this land you serve.

      CUCHULAIN.

      No wonder in that, no wonder at all in that.

      I never have known love but as a kiss

      In the mid-battle, and a difficult truce

      Of oil and water, candles and dark night,

      Hillside and hollow, the hot-footed sun,

      And the cold, sliding, slippery-footed moon—

      A brief forgiveness between opposites

      That have been hatreds for