'The voice of the winds and the tide,
And the long battle of the mighty war;
The sea, the earth, the skies, the blowing of the winds.
Oh! there was loneliness in all of them together.'
Here is a verse from another poem of loneliness:—
'It is dark the night is; I do not see one star at all;
And it is dark and heavy my thoughts are that are scattered and straying.
There is no sound about but of the birds going over my head—
The lapwing striking the air with long-drawn, weak blows
And the plover, that comes like a bullet, cutting the night with its whistle;
And I hear the wild geese higher again with their rough screech.
But I do not hear any other sound, it is that increases my grief—
Not one other cry but the cry and the call of the birds on the bog.'
Here is another, in which the storm outside and the storm within answer to one another:—
'The heavy clouds are threatening,
And it's little but they'll take the roof off the house;
The heavy thunder is answering
To every flash of the yellow fire.
I, by myself, within in my room,
That is narrow, small, warm, am sitting,
I look at the surly skies,
And I listen to the wind.
'I was light, airy, lively,
On the young morning of yesterday;
But when the evening came,
I was like a dead man!
I have not one jot of hope
But for a bed in the clay;
Death is the same as life to me
From this out, from a word I heard yesterday.'
The next is very simple, and puts into more homely words the feeling of 'lonesomeness' that is looked upon as almost the worst of evils by the Irish countryman, as we see by his proverb: 'It is better to be quarreling than to be lonesome.' 'I would be lonesome in it,' is often the reason given for a refusal to go from bog or mountain cabin to some crowded place 'where there is not heed for one or love.'
'Oh! if there were in this world
Any nice little place,
To be my own, my own for ever,
My own only,
I would have great joy—great ease—
Beyond what I have,
Without a place in the world where I can say:
"This is my own."
It's a pity for a man to know,
And it's a pain,
That there is no place in the world
Where there is heed for him or love;
That there is not in the world for him
A heart or a hand
To give help to him
To the mering of the next world.
'It is hard and it is bitter,
And a sharp grief,
It is woe and it is pity,
To be by oneself.
It is nothing the way you are,
To anyone at all.
It is nothing the way you are,
To yourself at last!'