| |
| WHAT miracle was it that made this grey Rathgar | |
| Seem holy earth, a leaping-place from star to star? | |
| I know I strode along grey streets disconsolate, | |
| Seeing nowhere a glimmer of the Glittering Gate, | |
| My vision baffled amid many dreams, for still | 5 |
| The airy walls rose up in fabulous hill on hill. | |
| The stars were fortresses upon the dizzy slope | |
| And one and all were unassailable by hope. | |
| And then I turned and looked beyond high Terenure | |
| Where the last jewel breath of twilight floated pure, | 10 |
| As if god Angus there, with his enchanted lyre, | |
| Sat swaying his bright body and hair of misty fire, | |
| And smote the slumber-string within the heavenly house | |
| That eve might lay upon the earth her tender brows, | |
| Her moth-dim tresses, and lip’s invisible bloom, | 15 |
| And eye’s light shadowed under eyelids of the gloom, | |
| Till all that dark divine pure being, breast to breast, | |
| Lay cool upon the sleepy isle from east to west. | |
| Then I took thought remembering many a famous tale | |
| Told of those heavenly adventurers the Gael, | 20 |
| Ere to a far-brought alien worship they inclined, | |
| And that its sorceries had left them shorn and blind, | |
| Crownless and sceptreless, while yet their magic might | |
| Could bow the lordly pillars of the day and night, | |
| And topple in one golden wreckage stars and sun, | 25 |
| And mix their precious fires till heaven and earth were one. | |
| Then god and hero mingled, and the veil was rent | |
| That hid the fairy turrets in the firmament, | |
| The lofty god-uplifted cities that flash on high | |
| Dense with the silver-radiant deities of sky, | 30 |
| And the gay populace that under ocean bide | |
| Unknowing of the flowing of the ponderous tide, | |
| And worlds where Time is full, where all with one accord | |
| Turn the flushed beauty of their faces to the Lord, | |
| Where the last ecstasy lights up each hill and glade | 35 |
| And love is not remembered between man and maid, | |
| For lips laugh there at beauty the heart imagineth, | |
| And feet dance there at the holy Bridal of Love and Death. | |
| And as, with heart upborne and speedier footsteps, I | |
| Strode on my way, that twilight-burnished sky | 40 |
| Seemed to heave up as from a mystic fountain thrown. | |
| And world on world those magic voyagers had known | |
| Glowed in the vast with burning hill and glittering stream, | |
| And all their shining folk, till earth was as a dream, | |
| A memory fleeting moth-like in the light to be | 45 |
| Scorched by the fiery Dreamer of Eternity. | |
| And the bright host swept by me like a blazing wind | |
| O’er the dark churches where the blind mislead the blind. | |
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