While still I may, I write for you The love I lived, the dream I knew. From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye; And we, our singing and our love, The mariners of night above, And all the wizard things that go About my table to and fro, Are passing on to where may be, In truth’s consuming ecstasy, No place for love and dream at all; For God goes by with white foot-fall. I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, May know how my heart went with them After the red-rose-bordered hem._ EARLY POEMS III _THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN_ ‘_Give me the world if Thou wilt, but grant me an asylum for my affections._’ TULKA. TO EDWIN J. ELLIS BOOK I THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN S. PATRIC. YOU who are bent, and bald, and blind, With a heavy heart and a wandering mind, Have known three centuries, poets sing, Of dalliance with a demon thing. OISIN. Sad to remember, sick with years, The swift innumerable spears, The horsemen with their floating hair, And bowls of barley, honey, and wine, And feet of maidens dancing in tune, And the white body that lay by mine; But the tale, though words be lighter than air, Must live to be old like the wandering moon. Caolte, and Conan, and Finn were there, When we followed a deer with our baying hounds, With Bran, Sgeolan, and Lomair, And passing the Firbolgs’ burial mounds, Came to the cairn-heaped grassy hill Where passionate Maeve is stony still; And found on the dove-gray edge of the sea A pearl-pale, high-born lady, who rode On a horse with bridle of findrinny; And like a sunset were her lips, A stormy sunset on doomed ships; A citron colour gloomed in her hair, But down to her feet white vesture flowed, And with the glimmering crimson glowed Of many a figured embroidery; And it was bound with a pearl-pale shell That wavered like the summer streams, As her soft bosom rose and fell. S. PATRIC. You are still wrecked among heathen dreams. OISIN. ‘Why do you wind no horn?’ she said. ‘And every hero droop his head? The hornless deer is not more sad That many a peaceful moment had, More sleek than any granary mouse, In his own leafy forest house Among the waving fields of fern: The hunting of heroes should be glad.’ ‘O pleasant maiden,’ answered Finn, ‘We think on Oscar’s pencilled urn, And on the heroes lying slain, On Gavra’s raven-covered plain; But where are your noble kith and kin, And into what country do you ride?’ ‘My father and my mother are Aengus and Edain, and my name Is Niamh, and my land where tide And sleep drown sun and moon and star.’ ‘What dream came with you that you came To this dim shore on foam-wet feet? Did your companion wander away From where the birds of Aengus wing?’