If you could think of Sween's dread day—
No! vain that memory passed away!—
When fell the eight hundred and three, and my sword
In the narrow pass drank of their blood as it poured!
When prisoned in the Rowan Hold,
Of gratitude your words once told,
When the white teeth were wounding your limbs, and your breath
Came quick, for the fray brought you near unto death.
And yet again your friend was I
In Tara when the strife waxed high,
Not vainly you sought in that hour for a friend,
I fought for thee, king, making Enmity bend;
And Innse's sons, the three, the brave,
From lands far hidden by the wave:
I killed them for thee, who oppressest me sore;
Hard died they, O ruthless one, washed in their gore!
Remember Connell! see again
Carbúi front thee with his men,
To the host of the Feinne see how threatening their gaze:
Ah, Gulban, I burn, as I look on thy braes.
If known to Oigé's women fair
How snared and trapped I here despair,
Their mourning would rise, and their men would lament
The friend whose sad eyes on Ben Gulban are bent.
I, Diarmid of Newry named,
Of Connaught, of Béura famed—
Foster son to that Angus of Broá whose stride
Revealed the best man on the far mountain side:—
"The Eagle of the Red Cascade"—
"The blue-eyed Hawk whom no man stayed"—
They called me—"the strongest of all who could throw
The stone, or the spear, at our game or our foe."
Then knew he, as his strength grew less
That death would end his sore distress;
The Feinne stood around, and they pitied the man
So weak, once the strongest who fought in their van.
They searched for water, and they found
A spring, clear-eyed, in mossy ground,
But cup had they none, and their hands, as they went,
Let fall every drop ere o'er Diarmid they bent.
In bitterness of soul he thought,
"They mock me, now that I am naught,
Your kind hands all leak! of your deed men shall tell,
The 'spring of holed palms' shall they name yonder well.