[1] This poem is based on an Irish original in “The Courtship of Etain.” See Leahy’s Heroic Romances of Ireland, vol. i., p. 26.
[THE SPELL-STRUCK]
She walks as she were moving
Some mystic dance to tread,
So falls her gliding footstep,
So leans her list’ning head;
For once to fairy harping
She danced upon the hill,
And through her brain and bosom
The music pulses still.
Her eyes are bright and tearless,
But wide with yearning pain:
She longs for nothing earthly,
But oh, to hear again
The sound that held her breathless
Upon her moonlit path—
The golden fairy music
That filled the lonely rath!
Her lips have felt strange kisses
And drunk the wine of death,
Nor earthly love nor laughter
Shall stir their tender breath.
She’s dead to all things living
Since that November Eve,
And when They call her earthward,
No living thing will grieve.
[COIS NA TEINEADH]
Where glows the Irish hearth with peat
There lives a subtle spell—
The faint blue smoke, the gentle heat
The moorland odours tell
Of white roads winding by the edge
Of bare untamèd land,
Where dry stone wall or ragged hedge
Runs wide on either hand