A month with Yeats: Day Five

“And like a sunset were her lips,
A stormy sunset on doomed ships;
A citron colour gloomed in her hair,”

From The Wanderings of Oisin: Book One by W. B. Yeats.

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Where she walks, the roses wind,

And the green grass grows in the meadows lush,

The springs run sweet beneath her tread,

Where she treads light, young men lie dead.

Through red-rimmed eyes they watch her pass

With silent feet in the meadow grass,

As if she alone brought war and want

And fire from the heaven’s vault.

By sunset’s light, in daybreak’s dew,

The grasses broken shoot anew,

And in their cradles, new men clench

Their fists, as if the sun they’d quench.

 

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