What were our praise to them: they eat Quiet's wild heart, like daily meat, Who when night thickens are afloat On dappled skins in a glass boat Far out under a windless sky, While over them birds of Aengus fly, And over the tiller and the prow And waving white wings to and fro Awaken wanderings of light air To stir their coverlet and their hair. And poets found, old writers say, A yew tree where his body lay, But a wild apple hid the grass With its sweet blossom where hers was; And being in good heart, because A better time had come again After the deaths of many men, And that long fighting at the ford, They wrote on tablets of thin board, Made of the apple and the yew, All the love stories that they knew. Let rush and bird cry out their fill Of the harper's daughter if they will, Beloved, I am not afraid of her She is not wiser nor lovelier, And you are more high of heart than she For all her wanderings over-sea; But I'd have bird and rush forget Those other two, for never yet Has lover lived but longed to wive Like them that are no more alive. THE ARROW. I thought of your beauty and this arrow Made out of a wild thought is in my marrow. There's no man may look upon her, no man, As when newly grown to be a woman, Blossom pale, she pulled down the pale blossom At the moth hour and hid it in her bosom. This beauty's kinder yet for a reason I could weep that the old is out of season. THE FOLLY OF BEING COMFORTED. One that is ever kind said yesterday: 'Your well beloved's hair has threads of grey And little shadows come about her eyes; Time can but make it easier to be wise Though now it's hard, till trouble is at an end; And so be patient, be wise and patient, friend.' But heart, there is no comfort, not a grain. Time can but make her beauty over again Because of that great nobleness of hers; The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs Burns but more clearly; O she had not these ways When all the wild summer was in her gaze. O heart, O heart, if she'd but turn her head, You'd know the folly of being comforted. THE WITHERING OF THE BOUGHS. I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds, 'Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will, I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words, For the roads are unending and there is no place to my mind.' The honey-pale moon lay low on the sleepy hill And I fell asleep upon lonely Echtge of streams; No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind, The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.