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If you have revisited the town, thin Shade,
Whether to look upon your monument
(I wonder if the builder has been paid)
Or happier-thoughted when the day is spent
To drink of that salt breath out of the sea
When grey gulls flit about instead of men,
And the gaunt houses put on majesty:
Let these content you and be gone again;
For they are at their old tricks yet.
A man
Of your own passionate serving kind who had brought
In his full hands what, had they only known,
Had given their children's children loftier thought,
Sweeter emotion, working in their veins
Like gentle blood, has been driven from the place,
And instilt heaped upon him for his pains,
And for his open-handedness, disgrace;
Your enemy, an old fotil mouth, had set
The pack upon him.
Go, unquiet wanderer,
And gather the Glasnevin coverlet
About your head till the dust stops your ear,
The time for you to taste of that Salt breath
And listen at the corners has not come;
You had enough of sorrow before death --
Away, away! You are safer in the tomb.
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Copyright © 2003-2008 Gunnar Bengtsson, Poetry Connection. All Rights Reserved.
The lines,
Go, unquiet wanderer,
And gather the Glasnevin coverlet
About your head till the dust stops your ear,
have long struck me as among the most moving in the language. The rhythmic stresses on "dust stops . . . ear" are a wonderful aural accompaniment of the poet's wish for the ghost not to listen: the three hard sounds perfectly italicize the words' meaning. Of course, it's the interplay between these adjacent stresses and the the surrounding lines ("gather the Glasnevin coverlet," "to drink of that salt breath/And listen at the corners") that really sets this aural effect off.
Joe Styles from United States