I watched you saunter down the sand: Serene and large, the golden weather Flowed radiant round your peacock feather, And glistered from your jewelled hand. Your tawny hair, turned strand on strand...
With a ripple of leaves and a tinkle of streams The full world rolls in a rhythm of praise, And the winds are one with the clouds and beams - Midsummer days! Midsummer days!...
Spring at her height on a morn at prime, Sails that laugh from a flying squall, Pomp of harmony, rapture of rhyme - Youth is the sign of them, one and all....
Where are the passions they essayed, And where the tears they made to flow? Where the wild humours they portrayed For laughing worlds to see and know? Othello's wrath and Juliet's woe?...
Fools may pine, and sots may swill, Cynics gibe, and prophets rail, Moralists may scourge and drill, Preachers prose, and fainthearts quail. Let them whine, or threat, or wail!...
The big teetotum twirls, And epochs wax and wane As chance subsides or swirls; But of the loss and gain The sum is always plain. Read on the mighty pall, The weed of funeral...
To GARRYOWEN upon an organ ground Two girls are jigging. Riotously they trip, With eyes aflame, quick bosoms, hand on hip, As in the tumult of a witches' round....
He's called The General from the brazen craft And dash with which he sneaks a bit of road And all its fares; challenged, or chafed, or chaffed, Back-answers of the newest he'll explode;...
Who says Drum-Major says a man of mould, Shaking the meek earth with tremendous tread, And pacing still, a triumph to behold, Of his own spine at least two yards ahead!...
In the waste hour Between to-day and yesterday We watched, while on my arm - Living flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone - Dabbled in sweat the sacred head...
Not to the staring Day, For all the importunate questionings he pursues In his big, violent voice, Shall those mild things of bulk and multitude, The Trees - God's sentinels...
Space and dread and the dark - Over a livid stretch of sky Cloud-monsters crawling, like a funeral train Of huge, primeval presences Stooping beneath the weight Of some enormous, rudimentary grief;...
The gods are dead? Perhaps they are! Who knows? Living at least in Lempriere undeleted, The wise, the fair, the awful, the jocose, Are one and all, I like to think, retreated...
The shadow of Dawn; Stillness and stars and over-mastering dreams Of Life and Death and Sleep; Heard over gleaming flats, the old, unchanging sound Of the old, unchanging Sea.