Poets with whom I learned my trade.
Companions of the Cheshire Cheese,
Here’s an old story I’ve remade,
Imagining ’twould better please
Your ears than stories now in fashion.
Though you may think I waste my breath
Pretending that there can be passion
That has more life in it than death,
Though at the bottling of your wine
The bow-legged Goban had no say;
The moral’s yours because it’s mine.
When cups went round at close of day
Is not that how good stories run?
Somewhere within some hollow hill,
If books speak truth, in Slievenamon
But let that be—the gods were still
And sleepy having had their meal:
And smoky torches made a glare
On painted pillars, on a deal
Of old stringed instruments, hung there
By the ancient holy hands that brought them
From murmuring Murias; on cups
Old Goban hammered them and wrought them,
And put his pattern round their tops
To hold the wine they buy of him.
But from the juice that made them wise
All those had lifted up the dim
Imaginations of their eyes;
For one that was like woman made
Before their sleepy eyelids ran,
And trembling with her passion said:
“Come out and dig for a dead man,
Who’s burrowing somewhere in the ground;
And mock him to his face, and then
Hollo him on with horse and hound,
For he is the worst of all dead men.”
We should be dared and terror struck
If we but saw in dreams that room
And those fierce eyes, and curse our luck
That emptied all our days to come.
I knew a woman none could please
Because she dreamed when but a child
Of men and women made like these;
And after, when her blood ran wild,
Had ravelled her own story out,
And said, “In two or in three years
I need must marry some poor lout,”
And having said it burst in tears.
Since, tavern comrades, you have died
Maybe your images have stood,
Mere bone and muscle thrown aside,
Before that roomful or as good.
“’Twas wine or women or some curse
But never made a boorer song
That you might have a heavier purse;
Nor gave loud service to a cause
That you might have a troop of friends.
You kept the Muses’ sterner laws
And unrepenting faced your ends;
And therefore earned the right
and yet
Dowson and Tohnson most I praise
To troop with those the world’s forgot,
And copy their proud steady gaze.”
“The Danish troop was driven put
Between the dawn and dusk,” she said;
“Although the event was long in doubt,
Although the King of Ireland’s dead
And half his kings, before sundown
All was accomplished.”
When this day
Murrough the King of Ireland’s son
Foot after foot was giving way,
He and his best troops back to back
Had perished there, but the Danes ran
Stricken with panic from the attack,
The shouting of an unseen man;
And, being thankful, Murrough found,
Led by a foot-sole dipped in blood
That had made prints upon the ground,
Where by old thorn trees that man stood;
And though when he gazed here and there
He had but gazed on thorn trees, spoke:
“Who is the friend that seems but air
And yet could give so fine a stroke?”
Thereon a young man met his eye
Who said, “Because she held me in
Her love and would not have me die,
Rock-nurtured Aoife took a pin
And pushing it into my shirt
Promised that for a pin’s sake
No man should see to do me hurt;
But there it’s gone; I will not take
The fortune that had been my shame,
Seeing, King’s son, what wounds you have.
’Twas roundly spoke, but when night came
He had betrayed me to his grave,
For he and the King’s son were dead.
I’d promised him two hundred years,
And when, for all I’d done or said
And these immortal eyes shed tears
He claimed his country’s need was most.
I’d saved his life, yet for the sake
Of a new friend he has turned a ghost.
What does he care if my heart break?
I call for spade and horse and hound
That we may harry him.” Thereon
She cast herself upon the ground
And rent her clothes and made her moan:
“Why are they faithless when their might
Is from the holy shades that rove
The grey rock and the windy light?
Why should the faithfulest heart most love
The bitter sweetness of false faces?
Why must the lasting love what passes?
Why are the gods by men betrayed!”
But thereon every god stood up
With a slow smile and without sound,
And, stretching forth his arm and cup
To where she moaned upon the ground,
Suddenly drenched her to the skin;
And she with Goban’s wine adrip,
No more remembering what had been,
Stared at the gods with laughing lip.
I have kept my faith, though faith was tried,
To that rock-born, rock-wandering foot;
And the world’s altered since you died,
And I am in no good repute
With the loud host before the sea,
That think sword strokes were better meant
Than lover’s music:—let that be,
So that the wandering foot’s content.