The Complete Works. William Butler Yeats

of a beautiful, unheard-of kind

      That is not in the world.

      AIBRIC.

      And yet the world

      Has beautiful women to please every man.

      FORGAEL.

      But he that gets their love after the fashion

      Loves in brief longing and deceiving hope

      And bodily tenderness, and finds that even

      The bed of love, that in the imagination

      Had seemed to be the giver of all peace,

      Is no more than a wine-cup in the tasting,

      And as soon finished.

      AIBRIC.

      All that ever loved

      Have loved that way—there is no other way.

      FORGAEL.

      Yet never have two lovers kissed but they

      Believed there was some other near at hand,

      And almost wept because they could not find it.

      AIBRIC.

      When they have twenty years; in middle life

      They take a kiss for what a kiss is worth,

      And let the dream go by.

      FORGAEL.

      It’s not a dream,

      But the reality that makes our passion

      As a lamp shadow—no—no lamp, the sun.

      What the world’s million lips are thirsting for,

      Must be substantial somewhere.

      AIBRIC.

      I have heard the Druids

      Mutter such things as they awake from trance.

      It may be that the ever-living know it—

      No mortal can.

      FORGAEL.

      Yes; if they give us help.

      AIBRIC.

      They are besotting you as they besot

      The crazy herdsman that will tell his fellows

      That he has been all night upon the hills,

      Riding to hurley, or in the battle-host

      With the ever-living.

      FORGAEL.

      What if he speak the truth,

      And for a dozen hours have been a part

      Of that more powerful life?

      AIBRIC.

      His wife knows better.

      Has she not seen him lying like a log,

      Or fumbling in a dream about the house?

      And if she hear him mutter of wild riders,

      She knows that it was but the cart-horse coughing

      That set him to the fancy.

      FORGAEL.

      All would be well

      Could we but give us wholly to the dreams,

      And get into their world that to the sense

      Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly

      Among substantial things; for it is dreams

      That lift us to the flowing, changing world

      That the heart longs for. What is love itself,

      Even though it be the lightest of light love,

      But dreams that hurry from beyond the world

      To make low laughter more than meat and drink,

      Though it but set us sighing? Fellow-wanderer,

      Could we but mix ourselves into a dream,

      Not in its image on the mirror!

      AIBRIC.

      While

      We’re in the body that’s impossible.

      FORGAEL.

      And yet I cannot think they’re leading me

      To death; for they that promised to me love

      As those that can outlive the moon have known it,

      Had the world’s total life gathered up, it seemed,

      Into their shining limbs—I’ve had great teachers.

      Aengus and Edain ran up out of the wave—

      You’d never doubt that it was life they promised

      Had you looked on them face to face as I did,

      With so red lips, and running on such feet,

      And having such wide-open, shining eyes.

      AIBRIC.

      It’s certain they are leading you to death.

      None but the dead, or those that never lived,

      Can know that ecstasy. Forgael! Forgael!

      They have made you follow the man-headed birds,

      And you have told me that their journey lies

      Towards the country of the dead.

      FORGAEL.

      What matter

      If I am going to my death, for there,

      Or somewhere, I shall find the love they have promised.

      That much is certain. I shall find a woman,

      One of the ever-living, as I think—

      One of the laughing people—and she and I

      Shall light upon a place in the world’s core,

      Where passion grows to be a changeless thing,

      Like charmed apples made of chrysoprase,

      Or chrysoberyl, or beryl, or chrysolite;

      And there, in juggleries of sight and sense,

      Become one movement, energy, delight,

      Until the overburthened moon is dead.

      [A number of SAILORS enter hurriedly.]

      FIRST SAILOR.

      Look there! there in the mist! a ship of spice!

      And we are almost on her!

      SECOND SAILOR.

      We had not known

      But for the ambergris and sandalwood.

      FIRST SAILOR.

      No; but opoponax and cinnamon.

      FORGAEL.

       [Taking the tiller from AIBRIC.]

      The ever-living have kept my bargain for me,

      And paid you on the nail.

      AIBRIC.

      Take up that rope

      To make her fast while we are plundering her.

      FIRST SAILOR.

      There is a king and queen upon her deck,

      And