A Month with Yeats: Day Sixteen

As promised, today’s quote has been bumped up the list to correspond with the poem I wrote yesterday—one of the perks of running the challenge. We often see deer at the bottom near the stream or along the hedge to the west, but yesterday, a young male deer trotted right under the window of the study. I felt honoured. They are timid, keep well away from houses and usually bolt at the slightest sound or movement. He must have felt he had nothing to fear from us.

I’m linking this to the dverse open link night because I like it.

From ‘He Mourns for the Change That Has Come Upon Him and Longs for the End of the World’

‘Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns?’—W.B. Yeats

 

The deer in the meadow

 

In the mists of early morning,

The frost lay on the ground,

And the songbirds in the garden

Flew by without a sound.

 

As I watched the mist light swirling

On the meadow, frosty pale,

A deer, horns newly budded,

Stepped through the broken veil.

 

He stepped across the meadow,

His ears he turned to hear,

If the sound of my sighing,

Was a sound that he should fear.

 

He stepped up to my window,

With eyes so wild and deep,

As the sea that covers your bed,

Leaving me alone to weep.