Inscriptions : V.
--Winter is dead! Hark, hark, upon our hills
The voices for whose coming thou didst yearn!
Hail Spring! O Life, with happy Spring return!
O Love, revive! Joy's laugh the dawntide fills,
--I shall not see him coming, Joy the vernal,
Joy the heart-wakener, with his songs and roses:
To thee the Spring: to me Death, who discloses
The splendour of another Joy, eternal!
poem by Thomas MacDonagh
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The Coming-In Of Summer
Yesterday a swallow
Cuckoo-song to-day,
And anon will follow
All the flight of May,
For Summer is a-coming in.
Corncrake's ancient sorrow
Pains the evening hush,
But the dawn to-morrow
Gladdens with the thrush--
And Summer is a-coming in.
Oh! laburnum yellow,
Lilac and the rose,
Chestnut shadow mellow
In my garden-close,
And Summer, Summer coming in!
Lo, with shield and arrow,
Burnished helm and spear,
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poem by Thomas MacDonagh
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Averil
I love thee, April! for thou art the Spring
When Spring is Summer; and thy wayward showers,
Sudden and short, soothly do bring May flowers,
Thus making thee a harbinger, whose wing
Bright jewels, Nature's rarest choice, doth fling
O'er dewy-glistening brakes and banks and bowers,
To ravish loving eyes through longer hours
When Winter is a dead forgotten thing.
Such promise dost thou give of Summer bloom;--
But thine own sunshine hast thou, thine own light;
And fair are April flowers, April leaves--
Fairer to eyes aching from Winter's gloom
Than late-blown joys of May, that greet the sight
When drunk with gladness it from thee receives.
poem by Thomas MacDonagh
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The Night Hunt
In the morning, in the dark,
When the stars begin to blunt,
By the wall of Barna Park
Dogs I heard and saw them hunt
All the parish dogs were there,
All the dogs for miles around,
Teeming up behind a hare,
In the dark, without a sound.
How I heard I scarce can tell--
'Twas a patter in the grass--
And I did not see them well
Come across the dark and pass;
Yet I saw them and I knew
Spearman's dog and Spellman's dog
And, beside my own dog too,
Leamy's from the Island Bog.
In the morning when the sun
Burnished all the green to gorse,
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poem by Thomas MacDonagh
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Introit : V. Litany Of Beauty
Joy, if the Soul or aught immortal be,
How may this Beauty know mortality?
O Beauty, perfect child of Light,
Sempiternal spirit of delight!
White and set with gold like the gold of the night,
The gold of the stars in quiet weather,--
White and shapely and pure!--
O lily-flower from stain secure,
With life and virginity dying together!
One lily liveth so,
Liveth for ever unstained, immortal, a mystic flower:
Perfectly wrought its frame,
Gold inwrought and eternal white,
White more white than cold of the snow,
For never, never, near it came,
Never shall come till the end of all,
Hurtful thing in wind or shower,
Worm or stain or blight;
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poem by Thomas MacDonagh
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Introit : VIII. The Golden Joy
What has the poet but a glorious phrase
And the heart's wisdom? -- Oh, a Joy of gold!
A Joy to mint and squander on the Kind,--
Pure gold coined current for eternity,
Giving dear wealth to men for a long age,
And after, lost to sight and touch of hands,
Leaving a memory that will bud and bloom
And blossom all into a lyric phrase--
The glorious phrase again on other lips,
The heritage of Joy, the heart again,
Wisdom anew that ages not but lives
To Sappho-sing the Poet else forgot.
O Joy! O secret transport of mystic vision,
Who hold'st the keys of Ivory and Horn,
Who join'st the hands of Earth and Faerie!
Thou art the inmate of the hermit soul
That shuns the touch of every street-worn wind
Sweet to all else, the shuns doctrine and doubt,
To wait in trembling quietness for thee.
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poem by Thomas MacDonagh
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