Your eyes are with the eels, and your lips with the crabs; and your two white hands under the sharp rule of the salmon. Five pounds I would give to him that would find my true love. Ochone! it is you are a sharp grief to young Mary ni-Curtain!
[A Poem Written in Time of Trouble by an Irish Priest Who Had Taken Orders in France]
My thoughts, my grief! are without
strength
My spirit is journeying towards
death
My eyes are as a frozen sea
My tears my daily food;
There is nothing in life but only misery.
My poor heart is torn
And my thoughts are sharp wounds within me,
Mourning the miserable state of Ireland.
Misfortune has come upon us all together
The poor, the rich, the weak and the strong
The great lord by whom hundreds were main-
tained
The powerful strong man, and the man that
holds the plough;
And the cross laid on the bare shoulder of every
man.
Our feasts are without any voice of priests
And none at them but women lamenting
Tearing their hair with troubled minds
Keening miserably after the Fenians.
The pipes of our organs are broken
Our harps have lost their strings that were
tuned
That might have made the great lamentations of
Ireland.
Until the strong men come back across the sea
There is no help for us but bitter crying,
Screams, and beating of hands, and calling out.
I do not know of anything under the sky
That is friendly or favourable to the Gael
But only the sea that our need brings us to,
Or the wind that blows to the harbour
The ship that is bearing us away from Ireland;
And there is reason that these are reconciled
with us,
For we increase the sea with our tears
And the wandering wind with our sighs.
[The Heart of the Wood]
My hope and my love, we will go for a while into the wood, scattering the dew, where we will see the trout, we will see the blackbird on its nest; the deer and the buck calling, the little bird that is sweetest singing on the branches; the cuckoo on the top of the fresh green; and death will never come near us for ever in the sweet wood.