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Home  »  Modern British Poetry  »  I Am the Mountainy Singer

Louis Untermeyer, ed. (1885–1977). Modern British Poetry. 1920.

Joseph Campbell (Seosamh MacCathmhaoil)1879–1944

I Am the Mountainy Singer

I AM the mountainy singer—

The voice of the peasant’s dream,

The cry of the wind on the wooded hill,

The leap of the fish in the stream.

Quiet and love I sing—

The carn on the mountain crest,

The cailin in her lover’s arms,

The child at its mother’s breast.

Beauty and peace I sing—

The fire on the open hearth,

The cailleach spinning at her wheel,

The plough in the broken earth.

Travail and pain I sing—

The bride on the childing bed,

The dark man laboring at his rhymes,

The eye in the lambing shed.

Sorrow and death I sing—

The canker come on the corn,

The fisher lost in the mountain loch,

The cry at the mouth of morn.

No other life I sing,

For I am sprung of the stock

That broke the hilly land for bread,

And built the nest in the rock!