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Double you be Yeats
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Hi Littlestone,

I've searched my way down and I don't think that you have this couple. I may have missed them in the crowd though, so my apologies if that's the case:

'In the Seven Woods' (August 1902)

I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods
Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees
Hum in the lime-tree flowers; and put away
The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness
That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile
Tara uprooted, and new commonness
Upon the throne and crying about the streets
And hanging its paper flowers from post to post,
Because it is alone of all things happy.
I am contented, for I know that Quiet
Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart
Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer,
Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs
A cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-Lee.

Over a century old and it could have just been written.


Lines 13 to 30 from 'The Wanderings of Oisin' (1889)

Caoilte, and Conan, and Finn were there,
When we followed a deer with our baying hounds,
With Bran, Sceolan, and Lomair,
And passing the Firbolgs' burial-mounds,
Came to the cairn-heaped grassy hill
Where passionate Maeve is stony-still;
And found on the dove-grey edge of the sea
A pearl-pale, high-born lady, who rode
On a horse with bridle of findrinny;
And like a sunset were her lips,
A stormy sunset on doomed ships;
A citron colour gloomed in her hair,
But down to her feet white vesture flowed,
And with the glimmering crimson glowed
Of many a figured embroidery;
And it was bound with a pearl-pale shell
That wavered like the summer streams,
As her soft bosom rose and fell.

Slightly running past the antiquarian content there, but Niamh's enchantment is worth the extra lines it works from! Yeats put it quite bluntly, looking back in 'The Circus Animals' Desertion':
"But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride."


P.S. Having read Nigel Swift's Ozymandias contribution, I thought of this, read straight rather than as an image:

V, lines 1 to 5, 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen'

Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.

g


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gjrk
Posted by gjrk
18th January 2008ce
01:03

In reply to:

Megalithic Poems (Littlestone)

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Re: Double you be Yeats (Littlestone)
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