| PARDON, old fathers, if you still remain | |
| Somewhere in ear-shot for the story’s end, | |
| Old Dublin merchant ‘free of ten and four’ | |
| Or trading out of Galway into Spain; | |
| And country scholar, Robert Emmet’s friend, | 5 |
| A hundred-year-old memory to the poor; | |
| Traders or soldiers who have left me blood | |
| That has not passed through any huxter’s loin, | |
| Pardon, and you that did not weigh the cost, | |
| Old Butlers when you took to horse and stood | 10 |
| Beside the brackish waters of the Boyne | |
| Till your bad master blenched and all was lost; | |
| You merchant skipper that leaped overboard | |
| After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay, | |
| You most of all, silent and fierce old man | 15 |
| Because you were the spectacle that stirred | |
| My fancy, and set my boyish lips to say | |
| ‘Only the wastful virtues earn the sun’; | |
| Pardon that for a barren passion’s sake, | |
| Although I have come close on forty-nine | 20 |
| I have no child, I have nothing but a book, | |
Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.
January 1914. | |
