I
ON the grey rock of Cashel the mind’s eye | |
| Has called up the cold spirits that are born | |
| When the old moon is vanished from the sky | |
| And the new still hides her horn. | |
| |
| Under blank eyes and fingers never still | 5 |
| The particular is pounded till it is man, | |
| When had I my own will? | |
| Oh, not since life began. | |
| |
| Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent | |
| By these wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood, | 10 |
| Themselves obedient, | |
| Knowing not evil and good; | |
| |
| Obedient to some hidden magical breath. | |
| They do not even feel, so abstract are they, | |
| So dead beyond our death, | 15 |
| Triumph that we obey. | |
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II
On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw | |
| A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw, | |
| A Buddha, hand at rest, | |
| Hand lifted up that blest; | 20 |
| |
| And right between these two a girl at play | |
| That it may be had danced her life away, | |
| For now being dead it seemed | |
| That she of dancing dreamed. | |
| |
| Although I saw it all in the mind’s eye | 25 |
| There can be nothing solider till I die; | |
| I saw by the moon’s light | |
| Now at its fifteenth night. | |
| |
| One lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon | |
| Gazed upon all things known, all things unknown, | 30 |
| In triumph of intellect | |
| With motionless head erect. | |
| |
| That other’s moonlit eyeballs never moved, | |
| Being fixed on all things loved, all things unloved, | |
| Yet little peace he had | 35 |
| For those that love are sad. | |
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| Oh, little did they care who danced between, | |
| And little she by whom her dance was seen | |
| So that she danced. No thought, | |
| Body perfection brought, | 40 |
| |
| For what but eye and ear silence the mind | |
| With the minute particulars of mankind? | |
| Mind moved yet seemed to stop | |
| As ’twere a spinning-top. | |
| |
| In contemplation had those three so wrought | 45 |
| Upon a moment, and so stretched it out | |
| That they, time overthrown, | |
| Were dead yet flesh and bone. | |
| |
III
I knew that I had seen, had seen at last | |
| That girl my unremembering nights hold fast | 50 |
| Or else my dreams that fly, | |
| If I should rub an eye, | |
| |
| And yet in flying fling into my meat | |
| A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat | |
| As though I had been undone | 55 |
| By Homer’s Paragon | |
| |
| Who never gave the burning town a thought; | |
| To such a pitch of folly I am brought, | |
| Being caught between the pull | |
| Of the dark moon and the full, | 60 |
| |
| The commonness of thought and images | |
| That have the frenzy of our western seas. | |
| Thereon I made my moan, | |
| And after kissed a stone, | |
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| And after that arranged it in a song | 65 |
| Seeing that I, ignorant for so long, | |
| Had been rewarded thus | |
| In Cormac’s ruined house. | |
