The Mountainy Singer

I wish and I wish
And I wish I were
A golden bee
In the blue of the air,
Winging my way
At the mouth of day
To the honey marges
Of Loch-ciuin-ban;
Or a little green drake,
Or a silver swan,
Floating upon
The stream of Aili,
And I to be swimming
Gaily, gaily!

I AM THE MAN-CHILD

I am the man-child. From a virgin womb,
Begot among the hills of virgin loins,
The generation of a hundred kings,
I come. I am the man-child glorious,
The love-son of the second birth foretold
By western bards, the fruit of form and strength
By nature’s prophylactic forethought joined
In marriage with their kind, the crown, the peak,
The summit of the scheme of things, the pride
And glory of the hand of God.

Behold!
Where in the spaces of the morning world
The sunrise shines my harbinger, the hills
Leap up, the young winds sing, the rivers dance,
The leaving forests laugh, the eagles scream;
For I am one with them, a mate, a brother,
Bound by nature to the human soul
That thro’ the accidents of nature runs.
And wherefore do they leap and laugh and sing,
And dance like vestals on a holyday?
Because their hearts are glad, and mænad-like,
They fain would share the frenzied cup they drink
With me, the man-child glorious.

I am he,
Even he, the master-mould, the paragon!
Behold me in my nonage, child and man:
The ripest grape on beauty’s procreant vine,
The reddest apple of ingathering:
Perfect in form, of peerless strength, and free
As Caoilte when he roamed the primal hills
(Those “wildernesses rich with liberty”),
A hero that the shocks of chance might strike,
But never tame, a giant druid-ringed,
A god-like savage of the golden days
Ere service shackled action: free itself
As Oisin when he strayed in Doire-cairn,
His hand upon the mountain top, his feet
Fixt in the flowing sea, his holy head
Crowned by a flight of birds, acclaiming him
The singer of the dawn.

FRAGMENT

I stand upon the summit now:
The falcon, flying from the heath,
Trails darkly o’er the mountain brow
And drops into the gloom beneath.
Night falls, and with it comes the wind
That blew on Fionn time out of mind,
When weary of love-feasts and wars
He left his comrades all behind
To dream upon the quiet stars.
Here on the lonely mountain height
Is ecstasy and living light —
The living inner light that burns
With magic caught from those white urns
That wander thro’ the trackless blue
Forever, touching those they know
With beauty, and the things that come
Of beauty. Earth lies at my feet,
A dumb, vast shadow, vast as dumb.

AT THE WHITENING OF THE DAWN

At the whitening of the dawn,
As I came o’er the windy water,
I saw the salmon-fisher’s daughter,
Nuala ni Cholumain.
Nuala ni Cholumain,
Nuala ni Cholumain,
Palest lily of the dawn
Is Nuala ni Cholumain.

In the dark of evendown
I went o’er the quiet water,
Dreaming of the fisher’s daughter
And her bothy in the town.
And I made this simple rann
Ere the whitening of the dawn,
Singing to the beauty wan
Of Nuala ni Cholumain.