I
The Swallows sang
ALIEN to us are
Your fields, and your cotes, and your glebes;
Secret our nests are
Although they be built in your eaves;
Un-eaten by us are
The grains that grow in your fields.

The Weathercock on the barn answered
Not alien to ye are
The powers of un-earthbound beings:
Their curse ye would bring
On our cotes, and our glebes, and our fields,
If aught should befall
The brood that is bred in the eaves.

The Swallows answered
If aught should befall
Our brood that's not travelled the seas,
Your temples would fall,
And blood ye would milk from your beeves:
Against them the curse we would bring
Of un-earthbound beings!

II
I saw the wind to-day:
I saw it in the pane
Of glass upon the wall:
A moving thing 'twas like
No bird with widening wing,
No mouse that runs along
The meal bag under the beam.
I think it like a horse,
All black, with frightening mane.
That springs out of the earth,
And tramples on his way.
I saw it in the glass,
The shaking of a mane:
A horse that no one rides!

III
Meet for a town where pennies have few pairs
In children's pockets, this toyshop and its wares:
Jew's-harps and masks and kites
And paper lanterns with their farthing lights,
All in a dim lit window to be seen:
Within-
The walls that have the patches of the damp,
The counter where there burns the murky lamp,
And then, the counter and the shelf between,
The dame,
Meagre, grey-polled, lame.

And here she's been since times are legendary,
For Miler Dowdall whom we used to see
Upon the hoarding with deft hands held up
To win the champion's belt or silver cup-
Would come in here to buy a ball or top-
That Miler Dowdall, the great pugilist
Who had the world once beneath his fist!
Now Miler's is a name that's blown by!

How's custom? Bad enough! She had not sold
Kites for ten boys along the street to hold-
She sold them by the gross in times agone:
Wasn't it poor, the town
Where boys
Would count their mort of marbles, saving them
In crock or jar till round the season came,
And buy no more to handsel in first game?
And toys
The liveliest were stiffened like herself,
The brightest were grown drab upon her shelf!

But she's not tragical no, not a whit :
She laughs as she talks to you that is it
As paper lantern's farthing candle light
Her eyes are bright,
Her lame, spare frame upborne
A paper kite held by a string that's worn;
And like a jew's-harp when you strike its tongue
That way her voice goes on

Recalling long ago. And she will hop
The inches of her crib, this narrow shop,
When you step in to be her customer:
A bird of little worth, a sparrow, say,
Whose crib's in such neglected passageway
That one's left wondering who brings crumbs to her.

How strange to think that she is still inside
After so many turns of the tide
Since this lit window was a dragon's eye
To turn us all to wonder coming nigh
Since this dim window was a dragon's eye!

IV
Down a street that once I lived in
You used to pass, a honey-seller,
And the town in which that street was
Was the shabbiest of all places;
You were different from the others
Who went by to barter meanly:
Different from the man with colored
Windmills for the children's pennies;
Different from the drab purveyor
With her paper screens to fill up
Chill and empty fireplaces.

You went by, a man upstanding,
On your head a wide dish, holding
Dark and golden lumps of honey;
You went slowly, like an old horse
That's not driven any longer,
But that likes to take an amble.

No one ever bought your honey,
No one ever paid a penny
For a single comb of sweetness;
Every house was grim unto you
With foregone desire of eating
Bread whose taste had sweet of honey.

Yet you went, a man contented
's though you had a king to call on
Who would take you to his parlour,
And buy all your stock of honey.
On you went, and in a sounding

Voice, just like the bell of evening,
Told us of the goods you carried,
Told us of the dark and golden
Treasure dripping on your wide dish.
You went by, and no one named you!

V
The crows still fly to that wood, and out of the wood she comes,
Carrying her load of sticks, a little less now than before,
Her strength being less; she bends as the hoar rush bends in the wind;
She will sit by the fire, in the smoke, her thoughts on root and the living branch no more.

The crows still fly to that wood, that wood that is sparse and gapped;
The last one left of the herd makes way by the lane to the stall,
Lowing distress as she goes; the great trees there are all down;
No fiddle sounds in the hut to-night, and a candle only gives light to the hall.

The trees are gapped and sparse, yet a sapling spreads on the joints
Of the wall, till the castle stones fall down into the moat:
The last one who minds that our race once stood as a spreading tree,
She goes, and thorns are bare, where the blackbird, his summer songs done, strikes one metal note.

VI
The Mountain Thrush I say,
But I am thinking of her, Nell the Rambler:
She'd come down to our houses bird-alone,
From some haunt that was hers, and we would see her
Drawing the water from the well one day,
For one house or another, or we'd hear her
Garrulous with the turkeys down the street,
We children.

From neighbour's house to neighbour's house she'd go
Until one day we'd see
Her worn cloak hanging behind our door;
And then, that night, we'd hear
Of Earl Gerald: how he rides abroad,
His horse's hooves shod with the weighty silver,
And how he'll ride all roads till those silver shoes
Are worn thin;
As thin as the cat's ears before the fire,
Upraised in such content before the fire,
And making little lanterns in the firelight.

The Mountain Thrush, when every way's a hard one,
Hops on in numbness till a patch of sunlight,
Falling, will turn her to a wayside song;
So it was with her, Rambler Nell, a shelter,
A bit upon the board, and she flowed on
With rambler's discourse tales, and rhymes, and sayings,
With child's light in her worn eyes, and laughter
To all her words.

The lore she had-
'Twas like a kingly robe, on which long rains
Have fallen and fallen, and parted
The finely woven web, and have washed away
The kingly colours, but have left some threads
Still golden, and some feathers still as shining
As the kingfisher's. While she sat there, not spinning,
Not weaving anything but her own fancies,
We ate potatoes out of the ash, and thought them
Like golden apples out of Tiprobane.

When winter's over-long, and days that famish
Come one upon another like snowflakes,
The Mountain Thrush makes way down to our houses:
Hops round for crumbs, and stays a while, a comer
Upon our floors.

She did not think
Bread of dependence bitter; three went with her
Hunger, Sorrow, and Loneliness and they
Had crushed all that makes claims, though they'd not bent her,
Nor emptied her of trust what was it led her
From house to house, but that she always looked for
A warmer welcome at the hearth ahead?

So she went on until it came one day
The Mountain Thrush's heart-stop on the way.

VII
An old man said, 'I saw
The chief of the things that are gone;
A stag with head held high,
A doe, and a fawn;

'And they were the deer of Ireland
That scorned to breed within bound:
The last; they left no race
Tame on a pleasure-ground.

'A stag, with his hide all rough
With the dew, and a doe and a fawn;
Nearby, on their track on the mountain,
I watched them, two and one,

'Down to the Shannon going-
Did its waters cease to flow
When they passed, they that carried the swiftness
And the pride of long ago?

'The last of the troop that had heard
Finn's and Oscar's cry;
A doe and a fawn, and before,
A stag with head held high!'

VIII
'A Stranger you came to me over the Sea,
But welcome I made you, Seumas-a-ree,
And shelter I gave you, my sons set to ward you,
Red war I faced for you, Seumas-a-ree.

'Now a craven you go from me over the Sea,
But my best sons go with you, Seumas-a-ree;
Foreign graves they will gam, and for those who remain
The black hemp is sown och, Seumas-a-ree!

'But the Boyne shall flow back fr