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THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

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Now, man of croziers, shadows called our names

And then away, away, like whirling flames;

And now fled by, mist-covered, without sound,

The youth and lady and the deer and hound;

‘Gaze no more on the phantoms,’ Niamh said,

And kissed my eyes, and, swaying her bright head

And her bright body, sang of faery and man

Before God was or my old line began;

Wars shadowy, vast, exultant; faeries of old

Who wedded men with rings of Druid gold;

And how those lovers never turn their eyes

Upon the life that fades and flickers and dies,

But love and kiss on dim shores far away

Rolled round with music of the sighing spray:

But sang no more, as when, like a brown bee

That has drunk full, she crossed the misty sea

With me in her white arms a hundred years

Before this day; for now the fall of tears

Troubled her song.

I do not know if days

Or hours passed by, yet hold the morning rays

Shone many times among the glimmering flowers

Wove in her flower-like hair, before dark towers

Rose in the darkness, and the white surf gleamed

About them; and the horse of faery screamed

And shivered, knowing the Isle of many Fears,

Nor ceased until white Niamh stroked his ears

And named him by sweet names.

A foaming tide

Whitened afar with surge, fan-formed and wide,

Burst from a great door marred by many a blow

From mace and sword and pole-axe, long ago

When gods and giants warred. We rode between

The seaweed-covered pillars, and the green

And surging phosphorus alone gave light

On our dark pathway, till a countless flight

Of moonlit steps glimmered; and left and right

Dark statues glimmered over the pale tide

Upon dark thrones. Between the lids of one

The imaged meteors had flashed and run

And had disported in the stilly jet,

And the fixed stars had dawned and shone and set,

Since God made Time and Death and Sleep: the other

Stretched his long arm to where, a misty smother,

The stream churned, churned, and churned—his lips apart,

As though he told his never slumbering heart

Of every foamdrop on its misty way:

Tying the horse to his vast foot that lay

Half in the unvesselled sea, we climbed the stairs

And climbed so long, I thought the last steps were

Hung from the morning star; when these mild words

Fanned the delighted air like wings of birds:

‘My brothers spring out of their beds at morn,

A-murmur like young partridge: with loud horn

They chase the noon-tide deer;

And when the dew-drowned stars hang in the air

Look to long fishing-lines, or point and pare

A larch-wood hunting spear.

‘O sigh, O fluttering sigh, be kind to me;

Flutter along the froth lips of the sea,

And shores the froth lips wet:

And stay a little while, and bid them weep:

Ah, touch their blue veined eyelids if they sleep,

And shake their coverlet.

‘When you have told how I weep endlessly,

Flutter along the froth lips of the sea

And home to me again,

And in the shadow of my hair lie hid,

And tell me how you came to one unbid,

The saddest of all men.’

A maiden with soft eyes like funeral tapers,

And face that seemed wrought out of moonlit vapours,

And a sad mouth, that fear made tremulous

As any ruddy moth, looked down on us;

And she with a wave-rusted chain was tied

To two old eagles, full of ancient pride,

That with dim eyeballs stood on either side.

Few feathers were on their dishevelled wings,

For their dim minds were with the ancient things.

‘I bring deliverance,’ pearl-pale Niamh said.

‘Neither the living, nor the unlabouring dead,

Nor the high gods who never lived, may fight

My enemy and hope; demons for fright

Jabber and scream about him in the night;

For he is strong and crafty as the seas

That sprang under the Seven Hazel Trees.

And I must needs endure and hate and weep,

Until the gods and demons drop asleep,

Hearing Aed touch the mournful strings of gold.’

‘Is he so dreadful?’

‘Be not over-bold,

But flee while you may flee from him.’

Then I:

‘This demon shall be pierced and drop and die,

And his loose bulk be thrown in the loud tide.’

‘Flee from him,’ pearl-pale Niamh weeping cried,

‘For all men flee the demons’; but moved not,

Nor shook my firm and spacious soul one jot;

There was no mightier soul of Heber’s line;

Now it is old and mouse-like: for a sign

I burst the chain: still earless, nerveless, blind,

Wrapped in the things of the unhuman mind,

In some dim memory or ancient mood

Still earless, nerveless, blind, the eagles stood.

And then we climbed the stair to a high door,

A hundred horsemen on the basalt floor

Beneath had paced content: we held our way

And stood within: clothed in a misty ray

I saw a foam-white seagull drift and float

Under the roof, and with a straining throat

Shouted, and hailed him: he hung there a star,

For no man’s cry shall ever mount so far;

Not even your God could have thrown down that hall;

Stabling His unloosed lightnings in their stall,

He had sat down and sighed with cumbered heart,

As though His hour were come.

We sought the part

That was most distant from the door; green slime

Made the way slippery, and time on time

Showed prints of sea-born scales, while down through it

The captives’ journeys to and fro were writ

Like a small river, and, where feet touched, came

A momentary gleam of phosphorus flame.

Under the deepest shadows of the hall

That maiden found a ring hung on the wall,

And in the ring a torch, and with its flare

Making a world about her in the air,

Passed under a dim doorway, out of sight,

And came again, holding a second light

Burning between her fingers, and in mine

Laid it and sighed: I held a sword whose shine

No centuries could dim: and a word ran

Thereon in Ogham letters, ‘Mananan’:

That sea-god’s name, who in a deep content

Sprang dripping, and, with captive demons sent

Out of the seven-fold seas, built the dark hall

Rooted in foam and clouds, and cried to all

The mightier masters of a mightier race;

And at his cry there came no milk-pale face

Under a crown of thorns and dark with blood,

But only exultant faces.

Niamh stood

With bowed head, trembling when the white blade shone,

But she whose hours of tenderness were gone

Had neither hope nor fear. I bade them hide

Under the shadows till the tumults died

Of the loud crashing and earth-shaking fight,

Lest they should look upon some dreadful sight;

And thrust the torch between the slimy flags.

A dome made out of endless carven jags,

Where shadowy face flowed into shadowy face,

Looked down on me; and in the self-same place

I waited hour by hour, and the high dome

Windowless, pillarless, multitudinous home

Of faces, waited; and the leisured gaze

Was loaded with the memory of days

Buried and mighty: when through the great door

The dawn came in, and glimmered on the floor

With a pale light, I journeyed round the hall

And found a door deep sunken in the wall,

The least of doors; beyond on a dim plain

A little runnel made a bubbling strain,

And on the runnel’s stony and bare edge

A dusky demon dry as a withered sedge

Swayed, crooning to himself an unknown tongue:

In a sad revelry he sang and swung

Bacchant and mournful, passing to and fro

His hand along the runnel’s side, as though

The flowers still grew there: far on the sea’s waste;

Shaking and waving, vapour vapour chased,

While high frail cloudlets, fed with a green light,

Like drifts of leaves, immovable and bright,

Hung in the passionate dawn. He slowly turned:

A demon’s leisure: eyes, first white, now burned

Like wings of kingfishers; and he arose

Barking. We trampled up and down with blows

Of sword and brazen battle-axe, while day

Gave to high noon and noon to night gave way;

But when at withering of the sun he knew

The Druid sword of Mananan, he grew

To many shapes; I lunged at the smooth throat

Of a great eel; it changed, and I but smote

A fir-tree roaring in its leafless top;

And I but held a corpse, with livid chop

And dripping and sunken shape, to face and breast,

When I tore down that tree; but when the west

Surged up in plumy fire, I lunged and drave

Through heart and spine, and cast him in the wave,

Lest Niamh shudder.

Full of hope and dread

Those two came carrying wine and meat and bread,

And healed my wounds with unguents out of flowers,

That feed white moths by some De Danaan shrine;

Then in that hall, lit by the dim sea-shine,

We lay on skins of otters, and drank wine,

Brewed by the sea-gods, from huge cups that lay

Upon the lips of sea-gods in their day;

And then on heaped-up skins of otters slept.

But when the sun once more in saffron stept,

Rolling his flagrant wheel out of the deep,

We sang the loves and angers without sleep,

And all the exultant labours of the strong:

But now the lying clerics murder song

With barren words and flatteries of the weak.

In what land do the powerless turn the beak

Of ravening Sorrow, or the hand of Wrath?

For all your croziers, they have left the path

And wander in the storms and clinging snows,

Hopeless for ever: ancient Oisin knows,

For he is weak and poor and blind, and lies

On the anvil of the world.

S. PATRIC.

Be still: the skies

Are choked with thunder, lightning, and fierce wind,

For God has heard, and speaks His angry mind;

Go cast your body on the stones and pray,

For He has wrought midnight and dawn and day.

OISIN.

Saint, do you weep? I hear amid the thunder

The Fenian horses; armour torn asunder;

Laughter and cries: the armies clash and shock;

All is done now; I see the ravens flock;

Ah, cease, you mournful, laughing Fenian horn!

We feasted for three days. On the fourth morn

I found, dropping sea-foam on the wide stair,

And hung with slime, and whispering in his hair,

That demon dull and unsubduable;

And once more to a day-long battle fell,

And at the sundown threw him in the surge,

To lie until the fourth morn saw emerge

His new healed shape: and for a hundred years

So warred, so feasted, with nor dreams, nor fears

Nor languor nor fatigue: an endless feast,

An endless war.

The hundred years had ceased;

I stood upon the stair: the surges bore

A beech bough to me, and my heart grew sore,

Remembering how I stood by white-haired Finn

While the woodpecker made a merry din,

The hare leaped in the grass.

Young Niamh came

Holding that horse, and sadly called my name;

I mounted, and we passed over the lone

And drifting grayness, while this monotone,

Surly and distant, mixed inseparably

Into the clangour of the wind and sea:

‘I hear my soul drop down into decay,

And Mananan’s dark tower, stone by stone,

Gather sea-slime and fall the seaward way,

And the moon goad the waters night and day,

That all be overthrown.

‘But till the moon has taken all, I wage

War on the mightiest men under the skies,

And they have fallen or fled, age after age:

Light is man’s love, and lighter is man’s rage;

His purpose drifts and dies.’

And then lost Niamh murmured, ‘Love, we go

To the Island of Forgetfulness, for lo!

The Islands of Dancing and of Victories

Are empty of all power.’

‘And which of these

Is the Island of Content?’

‘None know,’ she said;

And on my bosom laid her weeping head.