Sixteen Poems | Page 7

monk came forward,
in Irish tongue spake he:
'Thou wearest
the holy Augustine's dress,
and who hath given it to thee?'
'I wear
the Augustine's dress,
and Cormac is my name,
The Abbot of this
good Abbey
by grace of God I am.
I went forth to pray, at the dawn
of day;
and when my prayers were said,
I hearken'd awhile to a
little bird,
that sung above my head.'
The monks to him made
answer,
'Two hundred years have gone o'er,
Since our Abbot
Cormac went through the gate,
and never was heard of more.

Matthias now is our Abbot,
and twenty have pass'd away.
The
stranger is lord of Ireland;
we live in an evil day.'
'Days will come
and go,' he said,
'and the world will pass away,
In Heaven a day is a
thousand years,
a thousand years are a day.'
'Now give me
absolution;
for my time is come,' said he.
And they gave him
absolution,
as speedily as might be.
Then, close outside the window,

the sweetest song they heard
That ever yet since the world began

was utter'd by any bird.
The monks look'd out and saw the bird,
its
feathers all white and clean;
And there in a moment, beside it,

another white bird was seen.
Those two they sang together,
waved
their white wings, and fled;
Flew aloft, and vanish'd;
but the good
old man was dead.
They buried his blessed body
where lake and
green-sward meet;
A carven cross above his head,

a holly-bush at
his feet;
Where spreads the beautiful water
to gay or cloudy skies,

And the purple peaks of Killarney
from ancient woods arise.
THE RUINED CHAPEL
By the shore, a plot of ground
Clips a ruin'd chapel round,

Buttress'd with a grassy mound;
Where Day and Night and Day go by,

And bring no touch of human sound.
Washing of the lonely seas,
Shaking of the guardian trees,
Piping of
the salted breeze;
Day and Night and Day go by
To the endless tune
of these.

Or when, as winds and waters keep
A hush more dead than any sleep,

Still morns to stiller evenings creep,
And Day and Night and Day
go by;
Here the silence is most deep.
The empty ruins, lapsed again
Into Nature's wide domain,
Sow
themselves with seed and grain
As Day and Night and Day go by;

And hoard June's sun and April's rain.
Here fresh funeral tears were shed;
Now the graves are also dead;

And suckers from the ash-tree spread,
While Day and Night and Day
go by;
And stars move calmly overhead.
Here end sixteen poems, written by William Allingham, and
selected
for re-printing by William Butler Yeats. Printed
upon paper made in
Ireland, and published by Elizabeth Corbet Yeats at the Dun Emer
Press, in the house of Evelyn Gleeson at Dundrum, in the county of
Dublin, Ireland, finished on the fifteenth day of September, in the year
1905.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sixteen Poems, by William
Allingham
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