.....
Sorrow and death I sing—
The canker come on the corn,
The fisher lost in the mountain loch,
The cry at the mouth of morn.
No other life I sing,
For I am sprung of the stock
That broke the hilly land for bread,
And built the nest in the rock!
That comes directly out of life, and the confidence and sincerity of it are a result. The poet, become aware of the prompting of genius, loyally follows its leading through the common and familiar things of human experience. And partly because of his loyalty to himself; partly because he happens to be in touch with the land—quite literally the oldest and commonest thing of all, except the sea—there comes into his poetry a sense of natural dignity and strength. His themes are simple and touched with universal significance. Thus there is the song of ploughing:
I will go with my father a-ploughing
To the green field by the sea,
And the rooks and the crows and the seagulls
Will come flocking after me.
I will sing to the patient horses
With the lark in the white of the air,
And my father will sing the plough-song
That blesses the cleaving share.
One finds, too, a song of reaping, and one of winter, and one of night.
There is a love-song, pretty and tender, and fresh with the suggestion of breezes and blue skies, which begins like this:
My little dark love is a wineberry,
As swarth and as sweet, I hold;
But as the dew on the wineberry
Her heart is a-cold.
There is a piece, in Irishry, which tells of the wonder of childhood, and another in the same book which reverently touches the thought of motherhood and old age:
As a white candle
In a holy place,
So is the beauty
Of an agèd face.