Usheen

Saint, do you weep? I hear amid the thunderThe Fenian horses; armour torn asunder;Laughter and cries; the armies clash and shock;All is done now; I see the ravens flock;Ah, cease, you mournful, laughing Fenian horn!

We feasted for three days. On the fourth mornI 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 emergeHis new healed shape: and for a hundred yearsSo warred, so feasted, with nor dreams nor fears,Nor languor nor fatigue: and endless feast,An endless war.

The hundred years had ceased;I stood upon the stair: the surges boreA beech bough to me, and my heart grew sore,Remembering how I had stood by white-haired FinnUnder a beech at Emen and heard the thinOutcry of bats.

And then young Niam cameHolding that horse, and sadly called my name;I mounted, and we passed over the loneAnd drifting grayness, while this monotone,Surly and distant, mixed inseparablyInto the clangour of the wind and sea.

"I hear my soul drop down into decay,"And Mananan's dark tower, stone by 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 Niam 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 of Content?"

"None know," she said;And on my bosom laid her weeping head.