A speckled cat and a tame hare Eat at my hearthstone And sleep there; And both look up to me alone For learning and defence As I look up to Providence.
My Paistin Finn is my sole desire, And I am shrunken to skin and bone, For all my heart has had for its hire Is what I can whistle alone and alone. i(Oro, oro.!)...
Has no one said those daring Kind eyes should be more learn'd? Or warned you how despairing The moths are when they are burned? I could have warned you; but you are young,...
Do not because this day I have grown saturnine Imagine that lost love, inseparable from my thought Because I have no other youth, can make me pine; For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought,...
I have no happiness in dreaming of Brycelinde, Nor Avalon the grass-green hollow, nor Joyous Isle, Where one found Lancelot crazed and hid him for a while; Nor Uladh, when Naoise had thrown a sail upon the wind;...
'Although I'd lie lapped up in linen A deal I'd sweat and little earn If I should live as live the neighbours,' Cried the beggar, Billy Byrne; 'Stretch bones till the daylight come...
With the old kindness, the old distinguished grace She lies, her lovely piteous head amid dull red hair Propped upon pillows, rouge on the pallor of her face....
How should the world be luckier if this house, Where passion and precision have been one Time out of mind, became too ruinous To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun?...
Between extremities Man runs his course; A brand, or flaming breath. Comes to destroy All those antinomies Of day and night; The body calls it death, The heart remorse....
The Heavenly Circuit; Berenice's Hair; Tent-pole of Eden; the tent's drapery; Symbolical glory of the earth and air! The Father and His angelic hierarchy That made the magnitude and glory there...
He holds him from desire, all but stops his breathing lest primordial Motherhood forsake his limbs, the child no longer rest, Drinking joy as it were milk upon his breast....
His chosen comrades thought at school He must grow a famous man; He thought the same and lived by rule, All his twenties crammed with toil; "i(What then?" sang Plato's ghost. "What then?") ...
I sing what was lost and dread what was won, I walk in a battle fought over again, My king a lost king, and lost soldiers my men; Feet to the Rising and Setting may run,...
Eternity is passion, girl or boy Cry at the onset of their sexual joy "For ever and for ever'; then awake Ignorant what Dramatis personae spake; A passion-driven exultant man sings out...
We have cried in our despair That men desert, For some trivial affair Or noisy, insolent, sport, Beauty that we have won From bitterest hours; Yet we, had we walked within Those topless towers...
When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;...
Who will go drive with Fergus now, And pierce the deep wood's woven shade, And dance upon the level shore? Young man, lift up your russet brow, And lift your tender eyelids, maid,...
Why should not old men be mad? Some have known a likely lad That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist Turn to a drunken journalist; A girl that knew all Dante once Live to bear children to a dunce;...
The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary. Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeler; Swept the Sawdust from the floor...