Miscellaneous Posts by fitzcoraldo

TO ORKNEY.

Land of the whirlpool,—torrent,—foam,
Where oceans meet in madd'ning shock;
The beetling cliff,—the shelving holm,—
The dark insidious rock.
Land of the bleak,—the treeless moor,—
The sterile mountain, sered and riven,—
The shapeless cairn, the ruined tower,
Scathed by the bolts of heaven,—
The yawning gulf,—the treacherous sand,—
I love thee still, MY NATIVE LAND.

Land of the dark,—the Punic rhyme,—
The mystic ring,—the cavern hoar,—
The Scandinavian seer, sublime
In legendary lore.
Land of a thousand sea-kings' graves,—
Those tameless spirits of the past,
Fierce as their subject arctic waves,
Or hyperborean blast,—
Though polar billows round thee foam,
I love thee!—thou wert once my home.

With glowing heart and island lyre,
Ah! would some native bard arise,
To sing, with all a poet's fire,
Thy stern sublimities,—
The roaring flood,—the rushing stream,—
The promontory wild and bare,—
The pyramid, where sea-birds scream,
Aloft in middle air,—
The Druid temple on the heath,
Old even beyond tradition's birth.

Though I have roamed through verdant glades,
In cloudless climes, 'neath azure skies,
Or pluck'd from beauteous orient meads,
Flowers of celestial dies,—
Though I have laved in limpid streams,
That murmur over golden sands,
Or basked amid the fulgid beams
That flame o'er fairer lands,
Or stretched me in the sparry grot,—
My country! THOU wert ne'er forgot.

By David Vedder 'The sailor-poet of Orkney'

Taken from
The Voyage of the Betsey by Hugh Miller.

Mark the concentered hazels that enclose
Yon old grey Stone, protected from the ray
Of noontide suns:-and even the beams that play
And glance, while wantonly the rough wind blows,
Are seldom free to touch the moss that grows
Upon that roof, amid embowering gloom,
The very image framing of a Tomb,
In which some ancient Chieftain finds repose
Among the lonely mountains.- Live, ye trees!
And thou, grey Stone, the pensive likeness keep
Of a dark chambers where the Mighty sleep:
For more tan fancy to the influence bends
Where solitary Nature condescends
To mimic Times forlorn humanities.

William Wordsworth
Miscellaneous Sonnets
Published 1815.

The Valley of The Black Pig
THE dews drop slowly and dreams gather:unknown spears
Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes,
And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries
Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.
We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore,
The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew,
Being weary of the world's empires, bow down to you,
Master of the still stars and of the flaming door.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)