By Still Waters | Page 6

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.
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