The rhyme scheme in this poem has a distinct fascination to the ear; there is music in the lucid words and in the rhythmic lines, climaxing in each stanza, and, moreover, every stanza is a picture, with a concrete relation to the whole. The poem illustrates several of Miss Guiney’s characteristics: first, the compactness of her verse. It is never pirouetting merely to show its grace; in other words, she does not let the unity of the idea escape in a profusion of imagery. She uses figure and symbol with an individual freshness of conception, but always that which is structural with the thought, so that one can rarely detach a stanza or even fugitive lines of her poems without a loss of value. She develops the theme without over-developing it, which is the restraint of the artist. The above poem illustrates, also, the white light which she throws upon her words when clarity and simplicity are demanded by the form; whereas, in sonnets, in her dramatic poem, “A Martyr’s Idyl,” and in other forms of verse, her work is sometimes lacking in that clear, swiftly communicative quality which poetry should possess; but in her lyric inspirations, where the form and melody condition the diction, one may note the perfect clarity and flexibility which she attains, without loss of the rare and picturesque word-feeling that belongs so inseparably to her. The stanzas to “Athassal Abbey,” the “Footnote To A Famous Lyric,” the delicate “Lilac Song,” and many others blend the finer qualities of word and metre. With the exception of the last poem, however, they have not the emotional warmth that imbues several other of her lyrics, as the two “Irish Peasant Songs,” which are inspirations of sheer beauty, especially the first, in its subtlety of race-temperament and personal mood, left unanalyzed,—for a further hint would destroy it,—but holding spring and tears and youth in its wistful word and measure: I knead and I spin, but my life is low the while, Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile, Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all, Why, from me that’s young, should the wild tears fall? The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams, They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams, And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall, It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall. The cabin door looks down a furze-lighted hill, And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still; But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin’s hedges call, The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall! It is not surprising that William Black should have quoted this poem in one of his volumes, for it is certainly one of the most exquisite and temperamental of folk-songs. The second is wholly different in note, brimming over with the exuberance of the Celtic imagination, and fresh as the breath of spring which inspires it: