Ban and Arriere Ban: A Rally of Fugitive Rhymes

Far thou sleepest from home,
From the tears of the Northern skies,
In the secular dust of Rome.

* * *

A city of death and the dead,
But thither a pilgrim came,
Wearing on weary head
The crowns of years and fame:
Little the Lucrine lake
Or Tivoli said to him,
Scarce did the memories wake
Of the far-off years and dim.
For he stood by Avernus’ shore,
But he dreamed of a Northern glen
And he murmured, over and o’er,
‘For Charlie and his men:’
And his feet, to death that went,
Crept forth to St. Peter’s shrine,
And the latest Minstrel bent
O’er the last of the Stuart line.

FROM OMAR KHAYYAM

RHYMED FROM THE PROSE VERSION OF

MR. JUSTIN HUNTLY M‘CARTHY

The Paradise they bid us fast to win
Hath Wine and Women; is it then a sin
To live as we shall live in Paradise,
And make a Heaven of Earth, ere Heaven begin?

The wise may search the world from end to end,
From dusty nook to dusty nook, my friend,
And nothing better find than girls and wine,
Of all the things they neither make nor mend.

Nay, listen thou who, walking on Life’s way,
Hast seen no lovelock of thy love’s grow grey
Listen, and love thy life, and let the Wheel
Of Heaven go spinning its own wilful way.

Man is a flagon, and his soul the wine,
Man is a lamp, wherein the Soul doth shine,
Man is a shaken reed, wherein that wind,
The Soul, doth ever rustle and repine.

Each morn I say, to-night I will repent,
Repent! and each night go the way I went —
The way of Wine; but now that reigns the rose,
Lord of Repentance, rage not, but relent.

I wish to drink of wine – so deep, so deep —
The scent of wine my sepulchre shall steep,
And they, the revellers by Omar’s tomb,
Shall breathe it, and in Wine shall fall asleep.

Before the rent walls of a ruined town
Lay the King’s skull, whereby a bird flew down
‘And where,’ he sang, ‘is all thy clash of arms?
Where the sonorous trumps of thy renown?’

ÆSOP

He sat among the woods, he heard
The sylvan merriment: he saw
The pranks of butterfly and bird,
The humours of the ape, the daw.

And in the lion or the frog —
In all the life of moor and fen,
In ass and peacock, stork and dog,
He read similitudes of men.

‘Of these, from those,’ he cried, ‘we come,
Our hearts, our brains descend from these.’
And lo! the Beasts no more were dumb,
But answered out of brakes and trees:

‘Not ours,’ they cried; ‘Degenerate,
If ours at all,’ they cried again,
‘Ye fools, who war with God and Fate,
Who strive and toil: strange race of men.

‘For we are neither bond nor free,
For we have neither slaves nor kings,
But near to Nature’s heart are we,
And conscious of her secret things.

‘Content are we to fall asleep,
And well content to wake no more,
We do not laugh, we do not weep,
Nor look behind us and before;

‘But were there cause for moan or mirth,
’Tis we, not you, should sigh or scorn,
Oh, latest children of the Earth,
Most childish children Earth has borne.’