held a sword whose shine
    No centuries could dim, and a word ran
    Thereon in Ogham letters, ‘Manannan’;
    That sea-god’s name, who in a deep content
    Sprang dripping, and, with captive demons sent
    Out of the sevenfold seas, built the dark hall
    Rooted in foam and clouds, and cried to all
    The mightier masters of a mightier race;
    And at his cry there came no milk-pale face
    Under a crown of thorns and dark with blood,
    But only exultant faces.
Niamh stood
    With bowed head, trembling when the white blade shone,
    But she whose hours of tenderness were gone
    Had neither hope nor fear. I bade them hide
    Under the shadows till the tumults died
    Of the loud-crashing and earth-shaking fight,
    Lest they should look upon some dreadful sight;
    And thrust the torch between the slimy flags.
    A dome made out of endless carven jags,
    Where shadowy face flowed into shadowy face,
    Looked down on me; and in the self-same place
    I waited hour by hour, and the high dome,
    Windowless, pillarless, multitudinous home
    Of faces, waited; and the leisured gaze
    Was loaded with the memory of days
    Buried and mighty. When through the great door
    The dawn came in, and glimmered on the floor
    With a pale light, I journeyed round the hall
    And found a door deep sunken in the wall,
    The least of doors; beyond on a dim plain
    A little runnel made a bubbling strain,
    And on the runnel’s stony and bare edge
    A dusky demon dry as a withered sedge
    Swayed, crooning to himself an unknown tongue:
    In a sad revelry he sang and swung
    Bacchant and mournful, passing to and fro
    His hand along the runnel’s side, as though
    The flowers still grew there: far on the sea’s waste
    Shaking and waving, vapour vapour chased,
    While high frail cloudlets, fed with a green light,
    Like drifts of leaves, immovable and bright,
    Hung in the passionate dawn. He slowly turned:
    A demon’s leisure: eyes, first white, now burned
    Like wings of kingfishers; and he arose
    Barking. We trampled up and down with blows
    Of sword and brazen battle-axe, while day
    Gave to high noon and noon to night gave way;
    And when he knew the sword of Manannan
    Amid the shades of night, he changed and ran
    Through many shapes; I lunged at the smooth throat
    Of a great eel; it changed, and I but smote
    A fir-tree roaring in its leafless top;
    And thereupon I drew the livid chop
    Of a drowned dripping body to my breast;
    Horror from horror grew; but when the west
    Had surged up in a plumy fire, I drave
    Through heart and spine; and cast him in the wave
    Lest Niamh shudder.
Full of hope and dread
    Those two came carrying wine and meat and bread,
    And healed my wounds with unguents out of flowers
    That feed white moths by some De Danaan shrine;
    Then in that hall, lit by the dim sea-shine,
    We lay on skins of otters, and drank wine,
    Brewed by the sea-gods, from huge cups that lay
    Upon the lips of sea-gods in their day;
    And then on heaped-up skins of otters slept.
    And when the sun once more in saffron stept,
    Rolling his flagrant wheel out of the deep,
    We sang the loves and angers without sleep,
    And all the exultant labours of the strong.
    But now the lying clerics murder song
    With barren words and flatteries of the weak.
    In what land do the powerless turn the beak
    Of ravening Sorrow, or the hand of Wrath?
    For all your croziers, they have left the path
    And wander in the storms and clinging snows,
    Hopeless for ever: ancient Oisin knows,
    For he is weak and poor and blind, and lies
    On the anvil of the world.
S. Patrick.                     Be still: the skies
    Are choked with thunder, lightning, and fierce wind,
    For God has heard, and speaks His angry mind;
    Go cast your body on the stones and pray,
    For He has wrought midnight and dawn and day.
Oisin. Saint, do you weep? I hear amid the thunder
    The Fenian horses; armour torn asunder;
    Laughter and cries. The armies clash and shock,
    And now the daylight-darkening ravens flock.
    Cease, cease, O mournful, laughing Fenian horn!
    We feasted for three days. On the fourth morn
    I found, dropping sea-foam on the wide stair,
    And hung with slime, and whispering in his hair,
    That demon dull and unsubduable;
    And once more to a day-long battle fell,
    And at the sundown threw him in the surge,
    To lie until the fourth morn saw emerge
    His new-healed shape; and for a hundred years
    So warred, so feasted, with nor dreams nor fears,
    Nor languor nor fatigue: an endless feast,
    An endless war.
The hundred years had ceased;
    I stood upon the stair: the surges bore
    A beech-bough to me, and my heart grew sore,
    Remembering how I had stood by white-haired Finn
    Under a beech at Almhuin and heard the thin
    Outcry of bats.
And then young Niamh came
    Holding that horse, and sadly called my name;
    I mounted, and we passed over the lone
    And drifting greyness, while this monotone,
    Surly and distant, mixed inseparably
    Into the clangour of the wind and sea.
    ‘I hear my soul drop down into decay,
    And Manannan’s dark tower, stone after stone,
    Gather sea-slime and fall the seaward way,
    And the moon goad the waters night and day,
    That all be overthrown.
    ‘But till the moon has taken all, I wage
    War on the mightiest men under the skies,
    And they have fallen or fled, age after age.
    Light is man’s love, and lighter is man’s rage;
    His purpose drifts and dies.’
    And then lost Niamh murmured, ‘Love, we go
    To the Island of Forgetfulness, for lo!
    The Islands of Dancing and of Victories
    Are empty of all power.’
‘And which of these
    Is the Island

  By PanEris using Melati.

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