The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats. Volume 1 of 8. Poems Lyrical and Narrative. Yeats William Butler

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      ‘But the gods long ago decreed

      No waiting maid should ever spread

      Baile and Aillinn’s marriage bed,

      For they should clip and clip again

      Where wild bees hive on the Great Plain.

      Therefore it is but little news

      That put this hurry in my shoes.’

      And hurrying to the south, he came

      To that high hill the herdsmen name

      The Hill Seat of Leighin, because

      Some god or king had made the laws

      That held the land together there,

      In old times among the clouds of the air.

      That old man climbed; the day grew dim;

      Two swans came flying up to him,

      Linked by a gold chain each to each,

      And with low murmuring laughing speech

      Alighted on the windy grass.

      They knew him: his changed body was

      Tall, proud and ruddy, and light wings

      Were hovering over the harp-strings

      That Etain, Midhir’s wife, had wove

      In the hid place, being crazed by love.

      What shall I call them? fish that swim,

      Scale rubbing scale where light is dim

      By a broad water-lily leaf;

      Or mice in the one wheaten sheaf

      Forgotten at the threshing place;

      Or birds lost in the one clear space

      Of morning light in a dim sky;

      Or, it may be, the eyelids of one eye,

      Or the door pillars of one house,

      Or two sweet blossoming apple-boughs

      That have one shadow on the ground;

      Or the two strings that made one sound

      Where that wise harper’s finger ran.

      For this young girl and this young man

      Have happiness without an end,

      Because they have made so good a friend.

      They know all wonders, for they pass

      The towery gates of Gorias,

      And Findrias and Falias,

      And long-forgotten Murias,

      Among the giant kings whose hoard,

      Cauldron and spear and stone and sword,

      Was robbed before earth gave the wheat;

      Wandering from broken street to street

      They come where some huge watcher is,

      And tremble with their love and kiss.

      They know undying things, for they

      Wander where earth withers away,

      Though nothing troubles the great streams

      But light from the pale stars, and gleams

      From the holy orchards, where there is none

      But fruit that is of precious stone,

      Or apples of the sun and moon.

      What were our praise to them? they eat

      Quiet’s wild heart, like daily meat;

      Who when night thickens are afloat

      On dappled skins in a glass boat,

      Far out under a windless sky;

      While over them birds of Aengus fly,

      And over the tiller and the prow,

      And waving white wings to and fro

      Awaken wanderings of light air

      To stir their coverlet and their hair.

      And poets found, old writers say,

      A yew tree where his body lay;

      But a wild apple hid the grass

      With its sweet blossom where hers was;

      And being in good heart, because

      A better time had come again

      After the deaths of many men,

      And that long fighting at the ford,

      They wrote on tablets of thin board,

      Made of the apple and the yew,

      All the love stories that they knew.

      Let rush and bird cry out their fill

      Of the harper’s daughter if they will,

      Beloved, I am not afraid of her.

      She is not wiser nor lovelier,

      And you are more high of heart than she,

      For all her wanderings over-sea;

      But I’d have bird and rush forget

      Those other two; for never yet

      Has lover lived, but longed to wive

      Like them that are no more alive.