The country people see at times certain apparitions whom they name now ‘fallen angels’, now ‘ancient inhabitants of the country’, and describe as riding at whiles ‘with flowers upon the heads of the horses’. I have assumed in the sixth poem that these horsemen, now that the times worsen, give way to worse. My last symbol, Robert Artisson, was an evil spirit much run after in Kilkenny at the start of the fourteenth century. Are not those who travel in the whirling dust also in the Platonic Year?
TWO SONGS FROM A PLAY
These songs are sung by the Chorus in a play that has for its theme Christ’s first appearance to the Apostles after the Resurrection, a play intended for performance in a drawing-room or studio.
AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN
Stanza III
I have taken ‘the honey of generation’ from Porphyry’s essay on ‘The Cave of the Nymphs’, but find no warrant in Porphyry for considering it the ‘drug’ that destroys the ‘recollection’ of pre-natal freedom. He blamed a cup of oblivion given in the zodiacal sign of Cancer.
THE GIFT OF HARUN AL-RASHID
Part of an unfinished set of poems, dialogues and stories about John Ahern and Michael Robartes, Kusta ben Luka, a philosopher of Bagdad, and his Bedouin followers.
THE END
Printed in Great Britain by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.