'Twas I that stood to greet you on the churchyard pave—
(O fire o' my heart's grief, how could you never see?)
You smiled in pleasant dreaming as you crossed my grave
And crooned a little love-song where they buried me!
—— The House of Ghosts.
Out from the House of Ghosts I fled
Lest I should turn and see
The child I had been lift her head
And stare aghast at me.
Yeats, William Butler. The Ballad of Father Gilligan. (In Burton Stevenson's The Home Book of Verse.)
How an angel obligingly took upon itself the form and performed the duties of Father Gilligan while the father was asleep at his post.
—— The Host of the Air.
Based upon a scrap of folklore in "The Celtic Twilight" and apparently among the simplest of his poems, nothing he has ever done shows a greater mastery of atmosphere, or a greater metrical mastery.—Forrest Reid.
He heard, while he sang and dreamed,
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.