And we rode on the plains of the sea’s edge—the sea’s edge barren and gray,
Gray sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away
Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.
But the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark;
Dropping—a murmurous dropping—old silence and that one sound;
For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark—
Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground.
And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night,
For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and the sun,
Ceased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,
And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was one.”
Often, too, there occur in his verse new and striking imagery, as in the superb epithetical value of the fourth line in the concluding stanza of “The Madness of King Goll,” one of the most beautiful of his poems—
“And now I wander in the woods
When summer gluts the golden bees,
Or in autumnal solitudes
Arise the leopard-coloured trees;
Or when along the wintry strands
The cormorants shiver on their rocks;
I wander on, and wave my hands,
And sing, and shake my heavy locks.
The gray wolf knows me; by one ear
I lead along the woodland deer;
The hares ran by me growing bold.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter
round me, the beech leaves old.”
Indeed, through all his work, “They will not hush; the leaves a-flutter, the beech leaves old”—the mystic leaves of life, touched by the wind of old romance. We can imagine him hearing often that fairy lure which his “Stolen Child” listed and yielded to—
“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a fairy, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than
you can understand.”
For him always there is the Beauty of Beauty, the Passion of Passion: the “Rose of the World.”
“Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna’s children died.
We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men’s souls, that waver and give place,
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.”