Snavel
O WHAT can ail you, Blogg? These days you sit
Here with your pint as mum as a dead rat,
And sick-faced too. Like an old man you look.
The harvest’s in, the moon’s up, girls are out;
What’s got you, man?
Blogg Strange fleering things
Are working in my blood. I’ll tell you this:
The other night I went down Magger’s Lane,
And saw a woman there. Stood still she was,
Eating out of a paper cold wet tripe,
And drinking from a bottle. When I came
Close up to her, the clouds slid from the moon;
I saw her plain. Her greasy shawl slipt back:
Skinny and small she was. Her matted hair
Hung down about her face, but her two eyes
Burnt through like forest fires. She had a look
Of foreign parts, wild lands where witches thrive—
Snavel
O crimini! These are the tales for me.
Blogg
She lookt at me, shook back her hair and smiled.
The tripe slid noiselessly out of the paper—
A sudden gleam and it was gone. She paid
No heed, but held the bottle out to me
And spoke. Her foreign tongue made fiddlers’ tunes
Not words to me; but then all women’s words
At sometime are but tunes to fill their men
With moonlit madness. By now the chill air
To me came more like warmed old ale: my head
Was humming round. I grabbed the bottle neck
And drank deep, while the woman smiled and smiled,
But spoke no word. It was a witches’ brew.
We plunged into the night that now was lit
With dancing fires, and roared like a great sea—
Etc., Etc.
THE LATER MANNER OF
MR W. B. YEATS
BECAUSE the fairies died in ’Ninety-nine
A queen or two, a beggar or a fool
Now serve the turn of this slow craft of mine;
Old Paudeen’s rags cover the three-legged stool
Of ancient prophecy. A host of faces,
Foolish as dust, now mouth the reed-born song
At Clooth-na-bare and other windy places
Of three quaint syllables. It is a wrong
Not to be borne. What poet shall put the blame
Upon me that I now love best to sing
And dream my dream of him that had no name
Yet suddenly confronted the High King,
And cried: Sisters and brothers have I none,
Yet this man’s father is my father’s son?
A SONG: NOT IN THE COLLECTED
POEMS OF MR ALFRED NOYES
FAIRIES in the Forest, now the moon is mellow,
Dancing as they never danced through all the dreams of men;
While I sit in the firelight, like any other fellow,
Writing little lyrics with a fountain-pen:
Poetry like a paint-box, red and blue and yellow;
Songs about the Homeland: God save the King!