Oh, love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away,
And the shadows eaten the moon;
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.

RESPONSIBILITIES

‘In dreams begins responsibility.’

OLD PLAY

‘How am I fallen from myself, for a long time now I have not seen the Prince of Chang in my dreams.’

KHOUNG-FOU-TSEU38

Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain
Somewhere in ear-shot for the story’s end,
Old Dublin merchant ‘free of ten and four’
Or trading out of Galway into Spain;
And country scholar, Robert Emmet‘s39 friend,
A hundred-year-old memory to the poor;
Traders or soldiers who have left me blood
That has not passed through any huxter’s loin,
Pardon, and you that did not weigh the cost,
Old Butlers when you took to horse and stood
Beside the brackish waters of the Boyne
Till your bad master blenched and all was lost;
And merchant skipper that leaped overboard
After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay;
You most of all, silent and fierce old man,
Because you were the spectacle that stirred
My fancy, and set my boyish lips to say,
‘Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun’ ;
Pardon that for a barren passion’s sake,
Although I have come close on forty-nine,
I have no child, I have nothing but a book,
Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.

January 1914

The Grey Rock

Poets with whom I learned my trade,
Companions of the Cheshire Cheese,40
Here’s an old story I’ve re-made,
Imagining ’twould better please
Your ears than stories now in fashion,
Though you may think I waste my breath
Pretending that there can be passion
That has more life in it than death,
And though at bottling of your wine
The bow-legged Goban41 had no say;
The moral’s yours because it’s mine.

When cups went round at close of day—
Is not that how good stories run?—
Somewhere within some hollow hill
If books speak truth, in Slievenamon,
But let that be, the gods were still
And sleepy, having had their meal,
And smoky torches made a glare
On painted pillars, on a deal
Of fiddles and of flutes hung there
By the ancient holy hands that brought them
From murmuring Murias, on cups—
Old Goban hammered them and wrought them,
And put his pattern round their tops
To hold the wine they buy of him.

But from the juice that made them wise
All those had lifted up the dim
Imaginations of their eyes,
For one that was like woman made
Before their sleepy eyelids ran
And trembling with her passion said,
‘Come out and dig for a dead man,
Who’s burrowing somewhere in the ground,
And mock him to his face and then
Hollo him on with horse and hound,
For he is the worst of all dead men.’