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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=537302" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Wanderings of Oisin: Book II</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Now, man of croziers, shadows called our names<br>And then away, away, like whirling flames;<br>And now fled by, mist-covered, without sound,<br>The youth and lady and the deer and hound;<br>'Gaze no more on the phantoms,' Niamh said,<br>And kissed my eyes, and, swaying her bright head<br>And her bright body, sang of faery and man<br>Before God was or my old line began;<br>Wars shadowy, vast, exultant; faeries of old<br>Who wedded men with rings of Druid gold;<br>And how those lovers never turn their eyes<br>Upon the life that fades and flickers and dies,<br>Yet love and kiss on dim shores far away<br>Rolled round with music of the sighing spray:<br>Yet sang no more as when, like a brown bee<br>That has drunk full, she crossed the misty sea<br>With me in her white arms a hundred years<br>Before this day; for now the fall of tears<br>Troubled her song.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I do not know if days<br>Or hours passed by, yet hold the morning rays<br>Shone many times among the glimmering flowers<br>Woven into her hair, before dark towers<br>Rose in the darkness, and the white surf gleamed<br>About them; and the horse of Faery screamed<br>And shivered, knowing the Isle of Many Fears,<br>Nor ceased until white Niamh stroked his ears<br>And named him by sweet names.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A foaming tide<br>Whitened afar with surge, fan-formed and wide,<br>Burst from a great door matred by many a blow<br>From mace and sword and pole-axe, long ago<br>When gods and giants warred. We rode between<br>The seaweed-covered pillars; and the green<br>And surging phosphorus alone gave light<br>On our dark pathway, till a countless flight<br>Of moonlit steps glimmered; and left and right<br>Dark statues glimmered over the pale tide<br>Upon dark thrones. Between the lids of one<br>The imaged meteors had flashed and run<br>And had disported in the stilly jet,<br>And the fixed stars had dawned and shone and set,<br>Since God made Time and Death and Sleep: the other<br>Stretched his long arm to where, a misty smother,<br>The stream churned, churned, and churned - his lips apart,<br>As though he told his never-slumbering heart<br>Of every foamdrop on its misty way.<br>Tying the horse to his vast foot that lay<br>Half in the unvesselled sea, we climbed the stair<br>And climbed so long, I thought the last steps were<br>Hung from the morning star; when these mild words<br>Fanned the delighted air like wings of birds:<br>'My brothers spring out of their beds at morn,<br>A-murmur like young partridge: with loud horn<br>They chase the noontide deer;<br>And when the dew-drowned stars hang in the air<br>Look to long fishing-lines, or point and pare<br>An ashen hunting spear.<br>O sigh, O fluttering sigh, be kind to me;<br>Flutter along the froth lips of the sea,<br>And shores the froth lips wet:<br>And stay a little while, and bid them weep:<br>Ah, touch their blue-veined eyelids if they sleep,<br>And shake their coverlet.<br>When you have told how I weep endlessly,<br>Flutter along the froth lips of the sea<br>And home to me again,<br>And in the shadow of my hair lie hid,<br>And tell me that you found a man unbid,<br>The saddest of all men.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A lady with soft eyes like funeral tapers,<br>And face that seemed wrought out of moonlit vapours,<br>And a sad mouth, that fear made tremulous<br>As any ruddy moth, looked down on us;<br>And she with a wave-rusted chain was tied<br>To two old eagles, full of ancient pride,<br>That with dim eyeballs stood on either side.<br>Few feathers were on their dishevelled wings,<br>For their dim minds were with the ancient things.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'I bring deliverance,' pearl-pale Niamh said.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Neither the living, nor the unlabouring dead,<br>Nor the high gods who never lived, may fight<br>My enemy and hope; demons for fright<br>Jabber and scream about him in the night;<br>For he is strong and crafty as the seas<br>That sprang under the Seven Hazel Trees,<br>And I must needs endure and hate and weep,<br>Until the gods and demons drop asleep,<br>Hearing Acdh touch thc mournful strings of gold.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Is he so dreadful?'<br>'Be not over-bold,<br>But fly while still you may.'<br>And thereon I:<br>'This demon shall be battered till he die,<br>And his loose bulk be thrown in the loud tide.'<br>'Flee from him,' pearl-pale Niamh weeping cried,<br>'For all men flee the demons'; but moved not<br>My angry king-remembering soul one jot.<br>There was no mightier soul of Heber's line;<br>Now it is old and mouse-like. For a sign<br>I burst the chain: still earless, neNeless, blind,<br>Wrapped in the things of the unhuman mind,<br>In some dim memory or ancient mood,<br>Still earless, netveless, blind, the eagles stood.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And then we climbed the stair to a high door;<br>A hundred horsemen on the basalt floor<br>Beneath had paced content: we held our way<br>And stood within: clothed in a misty ray<br>I saw a foam-white seagull drift and float<br>Under the roof, and with a straining throat<br>Shouted, and hailed him: he hung there a star,<br>For no man's cry shall ever mount so far;<br>Not even your God could have thrown down that hall;<br>Stabling His unloosed lightnings in their stall,<br>He had sat down and sighed with cumbered heart,<br>As though His hour were come.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">We sought the part<br>That was most distant from the door; green slime<br>Made the way slippery, and time on time<br>Showed prints of sea-born scales, while down through it<br>The captive's journeys to and fro were writ<br>Like a small river, and where feet touched came<br>A momentary gleam of phosphorus flame.<br>Under the deepest shadows of the hall<br>That woman found a ring hung on the wall,<br>And in the ring a torch, and with its flare<br>Making a world about her in the air,<br>Passed under the dim doorway, out of sight,<br>And came again, holding a second light<br>Burning between her fingers, and in mine<br>Laid it and sighed: I held a sword whose shine<br>No centuries could dim, and a word ran<br>Thereon in Ogham letters, 'Manannan';<br>That sea-god's name, who in a deep content<br>Sprang dripping, and, with captive demons sent<br>Out of the sevenfold seas, built the dark hall<br>Rooted in foam and clouds, and cried to all<br>The mightier masters of a mightier race;<br>And at his cry there came no milk-pale face<br>Under a crown of thorns and dark with blood,<br>But only exultant faces.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Niamh stood<br>With bowed head, trembling when the white blade shone,<br>But she whose hours of tenderness were gone<br>Had neither hope nor fear. I bade them hide<br>Under the shadowS till the tumults died<br>Of the loud-crashing and earth-shaking fight,<br>Lest they should look upon some dreadful sight;<br>And thrust the torch between the slimy flags.<br>A dome made out of endless carven jags,<br>Where shadowy face flowed into shadowy face,<br>Looked down on me; and in the self-same place<br>I waited hour by hour, and the high dome,<br>Windowless, pillarless, multitudinous home<br>Of faces, waited; and the leisured gaze<br>Was loaded with the memory of days<br>Buried and mighty. When through the great door<br>The dawn came in, and glimmered on the floor<br>With a pale light, I journeyed round the hall<br>And found a door deep sunken in the wall,<br>The least of doors; beyond on a dim plain<br>A little mnnel made a bubbling strain,<br>And on the runnel's stony and bare edge<br>A dusky demon dry as a withered sedge<br>Swayed, crooning to himself an unknown tongue:<br>In a sad revelry he sang and swung<br>Bacchant and mournful, passing to and fro<br>His hand along the runnel's side, as though<br>The flowers still grew there: far on the sea's waste<br>Shaking and waving, vapour vapour chased,<br>While high frail cloudlets, fed with a green light,<br>Like drifts of leaves, immovable and bright,<br>Hung in the passionate dawn. He slowly turned:<br>A demon's leisure: eyes, first white, now burned<br>Like wings of kingfishers; and he arose<br>Barking. We trampled up and down with blows<br>Of sword and brazen battle-axe, while day<br>Gave to high noon and noon to night gave way;<br>And when he knew the sword of Manannan<br>Amid the shades of night, he changed and ran<br>Through many shapes; I lunged at the smooth throat<br>Of a great eel; it changed, and I but smote<br>A fir-tree roaring in its leafless top;<br>And thereupon I drew the livid chop<br>Of a drowned dripping body to my breast;<br>Horror from horror grew; but when the west<br>Had surged up in a plumy fire, I drave<br>Through heart and spine; and cast him in the wave<br>Lest Niamh shudder.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Full of hope and dread<br>Those two came carrying wine and meat and bread,<br>And healed my wounds with unguents out of flowers<br>That feed white moths by some De Danaan shrine;<br>Then in that hall, lit by the dim sea-shine,<br>We lay on skins of otters, and drank wine,<br>Brewed by the sea-gods, from huge cups that lay<br>Upon the lips of sea-gods in their day;<br>And then on heaped-up skins of otters slept.<br>And when the sun once more in saffron stept,<br>Rolling his flagrant wheel out of the deep,<br>We sang the loves and angers without sleep,<br>And all the exultant labours of the strong.<br>But now the lying clerics murder song<br>With barren words and flatteries of the weak.<br>In what land do the powerless turn the beak<br>Of ravening Sorrow, or the hand of Wrath?<br>For all your croziers, they have left the path<br>And wander in the storms and clinging snows,<br>Hopeless for ever: ancient Oisin knows,<br>For he is weak and poor and blind, and lies<br>On the anvil of the world.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">S. Patrick. Be still: the skies<br>Are choked with thunder, lightning, and fierce wind,<br>For God has heard, and speaks His angry mind;<br>Go cast your body on the stones and pray,<br>For He has wrought midnight and dawn and day.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Oisin. Saint, do you weep? I hear amid the thunder<br>The Fenian horses; atmour torn asunder;<br>Laughter and cries. The armies clash and shock,<br>And now the daylight-darkening ravens flock.<br>Cease, cease, O mournful, laughing Fenian horn!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">We feasted for three days. On the fourth morn<br>I found, dropping sea-foam on the wide stair,<br>And hung with slime, and whispering in his hair,<br>That demon dull and unsubduable;<br>And once more to a day-long battle fell,<br>And at the sundown threw him in the surge,<br>To lie until the fourth morn saw emerge<br>His new-healed shape; and for a hundred years<br>So watred, so feasted, with nor dreams nor fears,<br>Nor languor nor fatigue: an endless feast,<br>An endless war.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The hundred years had ceased;<br>I stood upon the stair: the surges bore<br>A beech-bough to me, and my heart grew sore,<br>Remembering how I had stood by white-haired Finn<br>Under a beech at Almhuin and heard the thin<br>Outcry of bats.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And then young Niamh came<br>Holding that horse, and sadly called my name;<br>I mounted, and we passed over the lone<br>And drifting greyness, while this monotone,<br>Surly and distant, mixed inseparably<br>Into the clangour of the wind and sea.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'I hear my soul drop down into decay,<br>And Mananna's dark tower, stone after stone.<br>Gather sea-slime and fall the seaward way,<br>And the moon goad the waters night and day,<br>That all be overthrown.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'But till the moon has taken all, I wage<br>War on the mightiest men under the skies,<br>And they have fallen or fled, age after age.<br>Light is man's love, and lighter is man's rage;<br>His purpose drifts and dies.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And then lost Niamh murmured, 'Love, we go<br>To the Island of Forgetfulness, for lo!<br>The Islands of Dancing and of Victories<br>Are empty of all power.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'And which of these<br>Is the Island of Content?'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'None know,' she said;<br>And on my bosom laid her weeping head.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=William+Butler+Yeats">William Butler Yeats</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=537302" data-title="The Wanderings of Oisin: Book II de William Butler Yeats" data-description="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,..."></div>
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