The Complete Works - William Butler Yeats

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might have known at last unhaunted sleep

      Under that cold and vapour-turbaned steep,

      Now that old earth had taken man and all:

      Were not the worms that spired about his bones

      A-telling with their low and reedy cry,

      Of how God leans His hands out of the sky,

      To bless that isle with honey in His tones;

      That none may feel the power of squall and wave,

      And no one any leaf-crowned dancer miss

      Until He burn up Nature with a kiss:

      The man has found no comfort in the grave.

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      Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,

      The holy tree is growing there;

      From joy the holy branches start,

      And all the trembling flowers they bear.

      The changing colours of its fruit

      Have dowered the stars with merry light;

      The surety of its hidden root

      Has planted quiet in the night;

      The shaking of its leafy head

      Has given the waves their melody,

      And made my lips and music wed,

      Murmuring a wizard song for thee.

      There, through bewildered branches, go

      Winged Loves borne on in gentle strife,

      Tossing and tossing to and fro

      The flaming circle of our life.

      When looking on their shaken hair,

      And dreaming how they dance and dart,

      Thine eyes grow full of tender care:

      Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

      Gaze no more in the bitter glass

      The demons, with their subtle guile,

      Lift up before us when they pass,

      Or only gaze a little while;

      For there a fatal image grows,

      With broken boughs, and blackened leaves,

      And roots half hidden under snows

      Driven by a storm that ever grieves.

      For all things turn to barrenness

      In the dim glass the demons hold,

      The glass of outer weariness,

      Made when God slept in times of old.

      There, through the broken branches, go

      The ravens of unresting thought;

      Peering and flying to and fro,

      To see men’s souls bartered and bought.

      When they are heard upon the wind,

      And when they shake their wings; alas!

      Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:

      Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

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      Know, that I would accounted be

      True brother of that company,

      Who sang to sweeten Ireland’s wrong,

      Ballad and story, rann and song;

      Nor be I any less of them,

      Because the red-rose-bordered hem

      Of her, whose history began

      Before God made the angelic clan,

      Trails all about the written page;

      For in the world’s first blossoming age

      The light fall of her flying feet

      Made Ireland’s heart begin to beat;

      And still the starry candles flare

      To help her light foot here and there;

      And still the thoughts of Ireland brood

      Upon her holy quietude.

      Nor may I less be counted one

      With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,

      Because to him, who ponders well,

      My rhymes more than their rhyming tell

      Of the dim wisdoms old and deep,

      That God gives unto man in sleep.

      For the elemental beings go

      About my table to and fro.

      In flood and fire and clay and wind,

      They huddle from man’s pondering mind;

      Yet he who treads in austere ways

      May surely meet their ancient gaze.

      Man ever journeys on with them

      After the red-rose-bordered hem.

      Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon,

      A Druid land, a Druid tune!

      While still I may, I write for you

      The love I lived, the dream I knew.

      From our birthday, until we die,

      Is but the winking of an eye;

      And we, our singing and our love,

      The mariners of night above,

      And all the wizard things that go

      About my table to and fro,

      Are passing on to where may be,

      In truth’s consuming ecstasy,

      No place for love and dream at all;

      For God goes by with white foot-fall.

      I cast my heart into my rhymes,

      That you, in the dim coming times,

      May know how my heart went with them

      After the red-rose-bordered hem.

       III

       THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

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      ‘Give me the world if Thou wilt, but grant me an asylum for my affections.’

      Tulka.

      To Edwin J. Ellis

      [172]

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