September 1913

What need you, being come to sense, / But fumble in a greasy till / And add the halfpence to the pence / And prayer to shivering prayer, until / You have dried the marrow from the bone? / For men were born to pray and save: / Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave. // Yet they were of a different kind, / The names that stilled your childish play, / They have gone about the world like wind, / But little time had they to pray / For whom the hangman’s rope was spun, / And what, God help us, could they save? / Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave. // Was it for this the wild geese spread / The grey wing upon every tide; / For this that all that blood was shed, / For this Edward Fitzgerald died, / And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, / All that delirium of the brave? / Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave. // Yet could we turn the years again, / And call those exiles as they were / In all their loneliness and pain, / You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair / Has maddened every mother’s son’: / They weighed so lightly what they gave. / But let them be, they’re dead and gone, / They’re with O’Leary in the grave. // And you would murmur tender words, / Forgiving me, because you were dead: / Nor would you rise and hasten away, / Though you have the will of the wild birds, / But know your hair was bound and wound / About the stars and moon and sun: / O would, beloved, that you lay / Under the dock-leaves in the ground, / While lights were paling one by one.