By Still Waters | Page 6

the tale of him whose love
Was sighed between white
Deirdre's breasts,
It will not lift the heart above
The sodden clay on
which it rests.
Love once had power the gods to bring
All rapt on its
wild wandering.
We shiver in the falling dew,
And seek a shelter from the storm:

When man these elder brothers knew
He found the mother nature
warm,
A hearth fire blazing through it all,
A home without a
circling wall.
We dwindle down beneath the skies,
And from ourselves we pass
away:
The paradise of memories
Grows ever fainter day by day.

The shepherd stars have shrunk within,
The world's great night will
soon begin.
Will no one, ere it is too late,
Ere fades the last memorial gleam,

Recall for us our earlier state?
For nothing but so vast a dream
That
it would scale the steeps of air
Could rouse us from so vast despair.
The power is ours to make or mar
Our fate as on the earliest morn,

The Darkness and the Radiance are
Creatures within the spirit born.

Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might
Forget how we imagined
light.
Not yet are fixed the prison bars:
The hidden light the spirit owns
If
blown to flame would dim the stars
And they who rule them from
their thrones:
And the proud sceptred spirits thence
Would bow to
pay us reverence.

Oh, while the glory sinks within
Let us not wait on earth behind,

But follow where it flies, and win
The glow again, and we may find

Beyond the Gateways of the Day
Dominion and ancestral sway.
THE DREAM
I did not deem it half so sweet
To feel thy gentle hand,
As in a
dream thy soul to greet
Across wide leagues of land,
Untouched more near to draw to you
Where, amid radiant skies,

Glimmered thy plumes of iris hue,
My Bird of Paradise.
Let me dream only with my heart,
Love first, and after see:
Know
thy diviner counterpart
Before I kneel to thee.
So in thy motions all expressed
Thy angel I may view:
I shall not
on thy beauty rest,
But Beauty's ray in you.
THE PARTING OF WAYS
The skies from black to pearly grey
Had veered without a star or sun;

Only a burning opal ray
Fell on your brow when all was done.
Aye, after victory, the crown;
Yet through the fight no word of cheer;

And what would win and what go down
No word could help, no
light make clear.
A thousand ages onward led
Their joys and sorrows to that hour;

No wisdom weighed, no word was said,
For only what we were had
power.
There was no tender leaning there
Of brow to brow in loving mood;

For we were rapt apart, and were
In elemental solitude.
We knew not in redeeming day
Whether our spirits would be found

Floating along the starry way,
Or in the earthly vapours drowned.

Brought by the sunrise-coloured flame
To earth, uncertain yet, the
while
I looked at you, there slowly came,
Noble and sisterly, your
smile.
We bade adieu to love the old;
We heard another lover then,
Whose
forms are myriad and untold,
Sigh to us from the hearts of men.
SONG
Dusk its ash-grey blossoms sheds on violet skies,
Over twilight
mountains where the heart songs rise,
Rise and fall and fade away
from earth to air.
Earth renews the music sweeter. Oh, come there.

Come, acushla, come, as in ancient times
Rings aloud the underland
with faery chimes.
Down the unseen ways as strays each tinkling
fleece
Winding ever onward to a fold of peace,
So my dreams go
straying in a land more fair;
Half I tread the dew-wet grasses, half
wander there.
Fade your glimmering eyes in a world grown cold;

Come, acushla, with me to the mountains old.
There the bright ones
call us waving to and fro--
Come, my children, with me to the ancient
go.
THE VIRGIN MOTHER
Who is that goddess to whom men should pray
But her from whom
their hearts have turned away,
Out of whose virgin being they were
born,
Whose mother nature they have named in scorn
Calling its
holy substance common clay.
Yet from this so despised earth was made
The milky whiteness of
those queens who swayed
Their generations with a light caress,

And from some image of whose loveliness
The heart built up high
heaven when it prayed.
Lover, your heart, the heart on which it lies,
Your eyes that gaze, and
those alluring eyes,
Your lips, the lips they kiss, alike had birth


Within this dark divinity of earth,
Within this mother being you
despise.
Ah, when I think this earth on which we tread
Hath borne these
blossoms of the lovely dead,
And made the living heart I love to beat,

I look with sudden awe beneath my feet
As you with erring
reverence overhead.
Here ends By Still Waters, Lyrical Poems Old & New by A.E., printed
upon paper made in Ireland, and published by
Elizabeth C. Yeats at
the Dun Emer Press, in the house of Evelyn Gleeson at Dundrum in the
County of Dublin, Ireland, finished on All Soul's Eve, in the year 1906.
End of Project Gutenberg's By Still Waters, by George William Russell
0. END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BY STILL
WATERS