**Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven**
[W. B. Yeats](https://poets.org/poet/w-b-yeats) \- 1865-1939
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four-foot box, a foot for every year.
When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
this is the right answer, although my poetry knowledge is limited to that which was on the syllabus in the 80’s. And the Irish language stuff always seems either childish or twee (probably catering for the students’ talents).
Would usually say your one, OP (it’s really beautiful) so I’ll go for my second choice:
The Planter’s Daughter (Austin Clarke)
When night stirred at sea,
And the fire brought a crowd in
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth.
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.
Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went —
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.
Requiem for the croppies by Séamus Heaney is one of my favourites but there are a few.
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley –
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp –
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching – on the hike –
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until, on Vinegar Hill, the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August the barley grew up out of our grave.
This classic poem is another of my favourites, telling the story of Thomas Russell, organiser for the United Irishmen, hanged in Downpatrick in 1803.
The man from God knows where, by Florence Mary Wilson..
Into our townlan’ on a night of snow
rode a man from God knows where;
None of us bade him stay or go,
nor deemed him friend, nor damned him foe,
but we stabled his big roan mare;
for in our townlan’ we’re decent folk,
and if he didn’t speak, why none of us spoke,
and we sat till the fire burned low.
We’re a civil sort in our wee place
so we made the circle wide
round Andy Lemon’s cheerful blaze,
and wished the man his length of days
and a good end to his ride.
He smiled in under his slouchy hat,
says he: ‘There’s a bit of a joke in that,
for we ride different ways.’
The whiles we smoked we watched him stare
from his seat fornenst the glow.
I nudged Joe Moore: ‘You wouldn’t dare
to ask him who he’s for meeting there,
and how far he has got to go?’
And Joe wouldn’t dare, nor Wully Scott,
And he took no drink – neither cold nor hot,
this man from God knows where.
It was closing time, and late forbye,
when us ones braved the air.
I never saw worse (may I live or die)
than the sleet that night, an’ I says, says I:
‘You’ll find he’s for stopping there.’
But at screek o’day, through the gable pane
I watched him spur in the peltin’ rain,
an’ I juked from his rovin’ eye.
Two winters more, then the Trouble year,
when the best that a man could feel
was the pike that he kept in hidin’s near,
till the blood o’ hate an’ the blood o’ fear
would be redder nor rust on the steel.
Us ones quet from mindin’ the farms
Let them take what we gave wi’ the weight o’ our arms
from Saintfield to Kilkeel.
In the time o’ the Hurry, we had no lead
we all of us fought with the rest
an’ if e’er a one shook like a tremblin’ reed,
none of us gave neither hint nor heed,
nor ever even’d we’d guessed.
We men of the North had a word to say,
an’we said it then, in our own dour way,
an’ we spoke as we thought was best.
All Ulster over, the weemin cried
for the stan’in’ crops on the lan’.
Many’s the sweetheart and many’s the bride
would liefer ha’ gone to where he died,
and ha’ mourned her lone by her man.
But us ones weathered the thick of it
and we used to dander along and sit
in Andy’s, side by side.
What with discourse goin’ to and fro,
the night would be wearin’ thin,
yet never so late when we rose to go
but someone would say: ‘do ye min’ thon’ snow,
an ‘the man who came wanderin’in?’
and we be to fall to the talk again,
if by any chance he was one o’ them
The man who went like the win’.
Well ’twas gettin’ on past the heat o’ the year
when I rode to Newtown fair;
I sold as I could (the dealers were near
only three pounds eight for the Innish steer,
an’ nothin’ at all for the mare!)
I met M’Kee in the throng o’ the street,
says he: ‘The grass has grown under our feet
since they hanged young Warwick here.’,
And he told me that Boney had promised help
to a man in Dublin town.
Says he: ‘If you’ve laid the pike on the shelf,
you’d better go home hot-fut by yourself,
an’ once more take it down.’
So by Comber road I trotted the grey
and never cut corn until Killyleagh
stood plain on the risin’ groun’.
For a wheen o’ days we sat waitin’ the word
to rise and go at it like men,
but no French ships sailed into Cloughey Bay
and we heard the black news on a harvest day
that the cause was lost again;
and Joey and me, and Wully Boy Scott,
we agreed to ourselves we’d as lief as not
ha’ been found in the thick o’ the slain.
By Downpatrick goal I was bound to fare
on a day I’ll remember, feth;
for when I came to the prison square
the people were waitin’ in hundreds there
an’ you wouldn’t hear stir nor breath!
For the sodgers were standing, grim an’ tall,
round a scaffold built there foment the wall,
an’ a man stepped out for death!
I was brave an’ near to the edge of the throng,
yet I knowed the face again,
an’ I knowed the set, an’ I knowed the walk
an’ the sound of his strange up-country talk,
for he spoke out right an’ plain.
Then he bowed his head to the swinging rope,
whiles I said ‘Please God’ to his dying hope
and ‘Amen’ to his dying prayer
that the wrong would cease and the right prevail,
for the man that they hanged at Downpatrick gaol
was the Man from God knows where!
My dad loved quoting this poem
“I watched them tearing a building down,
A gang of men in a busy town.
With a ho-heave-ho and a lusty yell,
They swung a beam, and the side wall fell.
I asked the foreman: “Are these skilled–
And the men you’d hire if you had to build?”
He gave me a laugh and said: “No, indeed!
Just common labour is all I need.
I can wreck in a day or two
What builders have taken a year to do.”
And I thought to myself as I went my way,
Which of these roles have I tried to play?
Am I a builder who works with care
Measuring life by a rule and square?
Am I shaping my deeds to a well made Plan,
Patiently doing the best I can?
Or am I a wrecker, who walks the town
Content with the labour of tearing down?”
Edgar Guest
Not my favourite poem, but one my Dad has quoted to me often – “Spraying the Potatoes” by Patrick Kavanagh:
The barrels of blue potato-spray
Stood on a headland in July
Beside an orchard wall where roses
Were young girls hanging from the sky.
The flocks of green potato stalks
Were blossom spread for sudden flight,
The Kerr’s Pinks in frivelled blue,
The Arran Banners wearing white.
And over that potato-field
A lazy veil of woven sun,
Dandelions growing on headlands, showing
Their unloved hearts to everyone.
And I was there with a knapsack sprayer
On the barrel’s edge poised. A wasp was floating
Dead on a sunken briar leaf
Over a copper-poisoned ocean.
The axle-roll of a rut-locked cart
Broke the burnt stick of noon in two.
An old man came through a cornfield
Remembering his youth and some Ruth he knew.
He turned my way. ‘God further the work’.
He echoed an ancient farming prayer.
I thanked him. He eyed the potato drills.
He said: ‘You are bound to have good ones there’.
We talked and our talk was a theme of kings,
A theme for strings. He hunkered down
In the shade of the orchard wall. O roses,
The old man dies in the young girl’s frown.
And poet lost to potato-fields,
Remembering the lime and copper smell
Of the spraying barrels he is not lost
Or till blossomed stalks cannot weave a spell.
Not a big fan of poetry if I’m honest, but this one has always stuck with me from school – “Child Of Our Time” by Eavan Boland. It was written in the wake of the Dublin-Monaghan bombings:
Yesterday I knew no lullaby
But you have taught me overnight to order
This song, which takes from your final cry
Its tune, from your unreasoned end its reason;
Its rhythm from the discord of your murder,
Its motive from the fact you cannot listen.
We who should have known how to instruct
With rhymes for your waking, rhythms for your sleep
Names for the animals you took to bed,
Tales to distract, legends to protect,
Later an idiom for you to keep
And living, learn, must learn from you, dead.
To make our broken images rebuild
Themselves around your limbs, your broken
Image, find for your sake whose life our idle
Talk has cost, a new language. Child
Of our time, our times have robbed your cradle.
Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.
hukles lament:
yeats was a bourgeoise charlatan poet
if anyone knew it, he know it
Yes Yeats, it was damned easy for you, protected
By the middle classes and the Big Houses
To talk about the sixty year old public protected
Man sheltered by the dim Victorian public muses.
The fact he wasn’t Irish and never wrote a line that
an ordinary Irish person would read is not against him.
I can quote a lot of Yeats from memory.
I know a lot of people are going to bring some Yeats
But this is one I always liked that is not Yeats
**A Mirror in February**
he day dawns, with scent of must and rain,
Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
Under the fading lamp, half dressed – my brain
Idling on some compulsive fantasy –
I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,
Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
A dry downturning mouth.
It seems again that it is time to learn,
In this untiring, crumbling place of growth
To which, for the time being, I return.
Now plainly in the mirror of my soul
I read that I have looked my last on youth
And little more; for they are not made whole
That reach the age of Christ.
Below my window the wakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities;
And how should the flesh not quail, that span for span
Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young, and not renewable, but man.
**Thomas Kinsella**
Arty Farty had a party.
All the farts were there.
Juicy fruity let a beauty.
And they all went out for air.
Dublin
by Louis MacNeice
Grey brick upon brick,
Declamatory bronze
On sombre pedestals –
O’Connell, Grattan, Moore –
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse.
This never was my town,
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades –
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.
The lights jig in the river
With a concertina movement
And the sun comes up in the morning
Like barley-sugar on the water
And the mist on the Wicklow hills
Is close, as close
As the peasantry were to the landlord,
As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,
As the killer is close one moment
To the man he kills,
Or as the moment itself
Is close to the next moment.
She is not an Irish town
And she is not English,
Historic with guns and vermin
And the cold renown
Of a fragment of Church latin,
Of an oratorical phrase.
But oh the days are soft,
Soft enough to forget
The lesson better learnt,
The bullet on the wet
Streets, the crooked deal,
The steel behind the laugh,
The Four Courts burnt.
Fort of the Dane,
Garrison of the Saxon,
Augustan capital
Of a Gaelic nation,
Appropriating all
The alien brought,
You give me time for thought
And by a juggler’s trick
You poise the toppling hour –
O greyness run to flower,
Grey stone, grey water,
And brick upon grey brick.
Yeats ‘No Second Troy’ is my favourite, but as it’s already been mentioned, I’ll have to go with my next favourite.
‘Stony Grey Soil’ – Patrick Kavanagh.
​
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
The laugh from my love you thieved;
You took the gay child of my passion
And gave me your clod-conceived.
You clogged the feet of my boyhood
And I believed that my stumble
Had the poise and stride of Apollo
And his voice my thick tongued mumble.
You told me the plough was immortal!
O green-life conquering plough!
The mandril stained, your coulter blunted
In the smooth lea-field of my brow.
You sang on steaming dunghills
A song of cowards’ brood,
You perfumed my clothes with weasel itch,
You fed me on swinish food
You flung a ditch on my vision
Of beauty, love and truth.
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
You burgled my bank of youth!
Lost the long hours of pleasure
All the women that love young men.
O can I stilll stroke the monster’s back
Or write with unpoisoned pen.
His name in these lonely verses
Or mention the dark fields where
The first gay flight of my lyric
Got caught in a peasant’s prayer.
Mullahinsa, Drummeril, Black Shanco-
Wherever I turn I see
In the stony grey soil of Monaghan
Dead loves that were born for me.
**Subh Milis by Seamús Ó’Neill**
“Bhí subh milis ar bháscrann an doras
ach mhúch mé an corraí
ionaim a d’éirigh
mar smaoinigh mé ar an lá
a bheadh an bháscrann glan
agus an lámh beag – ar iarraidh…”
—
“There was jam
On the doorhandle
But I suppressed the vexation
That rose up in me,
Because I thought of the day
That the doorhandle would be clean
And the little hand
Missing.”
I have a tattoo of the last line of this poem. I love yeats
Ceasefire by Michael Longley
But I study this area of history so I’m predisposed to like it.
I
Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.
II
Taking Hector’s corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old king’s sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.
III
When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
To stare at each other’s beauty as lovers might,
Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still
And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:
IV
‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’
Special shout out to the lake isle of innisfree by Yeats as well though.
Clearances (When all the others were away at Mass) by Seamus Heaney
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
I don’t know about favourite but I’ve always loved Hartnett’s work
> I am nothing new.
> I am not a lonely mouth
> trying to chew
> a niche for culture
> in the clergy-cluttered south.
—
> But I will not see
> great men go down
> who walked in rags
> from town to town
> finding English a necessary sin,
> the perfect language to sell pigs in.
—
> I have made my choice
> and leave with little weeping.
> I have come with meagre voice
> to court the language of my people.
The Lost Heifer by Austin Clarke
The Light of Other days by Thomas Moore
Oft, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me:
The smiles, the tears
Of boyhood’s years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimm’d and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Sad Memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
When I remember all
The friends, so link’d together,
I’ve seen around me fall
Like leaves in wintry weather,
I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me.
Sad Memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
I’ve posted this before but I really love this poem by Colm Mac Gearailt, it’s definitely one of my favourites
https://youtu.be/r3btkKOy-nE
**For Rita With Love – Pat Ingoldsby**
You came home from school
On a special bus
Full of people
Who look like you
And love like you
And you met me
For the first time
And you loved me.
You love everybody
So much that it’s not safe
To let you out alone.
Eleven years of love
And trust and time for you to learn
That you can’t go on loving like this.
Unless you are stopped
You will embrace every person you see.
Normal people don’t do that.
Some Normal people will hurt you
Very badly because you do.
​
Cripples don’t look nice
But you embrace them.
You kissed a wino on the bus
And he broke down and cried
And he said ‘Nobody has kissed me
For the last 30 years.
But you did.
You touched my face
With your fingers and said
‘I like you.’
​
The world will never
Be ready for you.
Your way is right
And the world will never be ready. We could learn everything
That we need to know
By watching you
Going to your special school
In your special bus
Full of people
Who look like you
And love like you
And it’s not safe
To let you out alone.
If you’re not normal
There is very little hope
For the rest of us.
Raglan Road by Kavanagh is great
On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay –
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.
I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May
On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay –
When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.
The Second Coming By Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I’m just wondering if anyone remebers the name of a poem in irish by Cathal Ó Searcaigh,
Wandering though the streets of a town in the dark and that spoke of Mary magdalen, and compared the TV ariels on houses to the crosses on the hill of calvaire.
I don’t know why but since i had to do it for the leaving (until we found out what Cathal was up to in Nepal). Its the one irish poem that has been stuck in my head.
I don’t suppose anyone knows what that poem is called.
I know it’s a bit of a Yeats-fest in here, but the first, blistering verse of September 1913:
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save;
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
The Second Coming by WB Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Digging by Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
**The Song of Wandering Aengus – W.B. Yeats**
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
–
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
–
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
–
The last two lines of this are carved into the back of the big stone in UL
An Irish Airman Forsees His Death.Learned this poem in 6th class and it has always stuck with me.Yeats was a genius.
WB Yeats – An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
_______________________________________________
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross
,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
Memory of My Father by Patrick Kavanagh
Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.
That man I saw in Gardiner Street
Stumble on the kerb was one,
He stared at me half-eyed,
I might have been his son.
And I remember the musician
Faltering over his fiddle
In Bayswater, London.
He too set me the riddle.
Every old man I see
In October-coloured weather
Seems to say to me
“I was once your father.”
A Tyrone Love Poem
I wish my love was a lump of wood
And I a burning coal
I’d jump right out of the fire
And roast his wee arsehole
Not my favourite. I love Seamus Heaney. But this always makes me laugh.
>Easter, 1916
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
>I have met them at close of day
>
>Coming with vivid faces
>
>From counter or desk among grey
>
>Eighteenth-century houses.
>
>I have passed with a nod of the head
>
>Or polite meaningless words,
>
>Or have lingered awhile and said
>
>Polite meaningless words,
>
>And thought before I had done
>
>Of a mocking tale or a gibe
>
>To please a companion
>
>Around the fire at the club,
>
>Being certain that they and I
>
>But lived where motley is worn:
>
>All changed, changed utterly:
>
>A terrible beauty is born.
>
>That woman’s days were spent
>
>In ignorant good-will,
>
>Her nights in argument
>
>Until her voice grew shrill.
>
>What voice more sweet than hers
>
>When, young and beautiful,
>
>She rode to harriers?
>
>This man had kept a school
>
>And rode our wingèd horse;
>
>This other his helper and friend
>
>Was coming into his force;
>
>He might have won fame in the end,
>
>So sensitive his nature seemed,
>
>So daring and sweet his thought.
>
>This other man I had dreamed
>
>A drunken, vainglorious lout.
>
>He had done most bitter wrong
>
>To some who are near my heart,
>
>Yet I number him in the song;
>
>He, too, has resigned his part
>
>In the casual comedy;
>
>He, too, has been changed in his turn,
>
>Transformed utterly:
>
>A terrible beauty is born.
>
>Hearts with one purpose alone
>
>Through summer and winter seem
>
>Enchanted to a stone
>
>To trouble the living stream.
>
>The horse that comes from the road,
>
>The rider, the birds that range
>
>From cloud to tumbling cloud,
>
>Minute by minute they change;
>
>A shadow of cloud on the stream
>
>Changes minute by minute;
>
>A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
>
>And a horse plashes within it;
>
>The long-legged moor-hens dive,
>
>And hens to moor-cocks call;
>
>Minute by minute they live:
>
>The stone’s in the midst of all.
>
>Too long a sacrifice
>
>Can make a stone of the heart.
>
>O when may it suffice?
>
>That is Heaven’s part, our part
>
>To murmur name upon name,
>
>As a mother names her child
>
>When sleep at last has come
>
>On limbs that had run wild.
>
>What is it but nightfall?
>
>No, no, not night but death;
>
>Was it needless death after all?
>
>For England may keep faith
>
>For all that is done and said.
>
>We know their dream; enough
>
>To know they dreamed and are dead;
>
>And what if excess of love
>
>Bewildered them till they died?
>
>I write it out in a verse—
>
>MacDonagh and MacBride
>
>And Connolly and Pearse
>
>Now and in time to be,
>
>Wherever green is worn,
>
>Are changed, changed utterly:
>
>A terrible beauty is born.
Seamus Heaney was a true genius. This was written in 1972 yet always comes to my mind whenever mother and baby homes or Magdalen laundries are in the news.
Limbo
Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon.
An illegitimate spawning,
A small one thrown back
To the waters. But I’m sure
As she stood in the shallows
Ducking him tenderly
Till the frozen knobs of her wrists
Were dead as the gravel,
He was a minnow with hooks
Tearing her open.
She waded in under
The sign of the cross.
He was hauled in with the fish.
Now limbo will be
A cold glitter of souls
Through some briny zone.
Even Christ’s palms, unhealed
Smart and cannot fish there.
Brilliant thread OP, thank you. Also a thread that you’d be hard-pressed to find an equivalent of on any other country’s subreddit. We are a great little nation.
Something for you OP, it hangs in my hallway.
https://wildgoosestudio.com/products/tread-softly
My own favourite would be Sailing to Byzantium.