D'ye mind me now, the song at night is mortial hard to raise,
The girls are heavy-goin' here, the boys are ill to plase;
When ones't I'm out this workin' hive, 'tis I'll be back again--
Aye, Corrymeela in the same soft rain.
Here, too, should be named Jane Barlow, whose poems and stories are
faithful imaginative transcripts of the face of nature and the hearts
of men as she knew them in Connemara. Finally there is William Butler
Yeats, who, on the whole, is the representative man of the Revival.
Except in the translator's sphere, his writings have given him a
place in almost all the activities of this movement. As a lyric poet,
he has expressed the moods of peasant and patriot, of mystic,
symbolist, and quietist, and it is safe to say that in lyric poetry
no one of his generation writing in English is his superior. We
cannot resist the pleasure of quoting here from his "Innisfree",
which won the praise of Robert Louis Stevenson, and which, if not the
high mark of Yeats's achievement, is still a flawless thing in its
way:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnets' wings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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