George William Russell (1867 – 1935)
Irish nationalist, critic, poet, and painter who often wrote under the pseudonym ?.
Not unremembering we pass our exile from the starry ways:
One timeless hour in time we caught from the long night of endless days.
Its edges foamed with amethyst and rose,
Withers once more the old blue flower of day:
There where the ether like a diamond glows
Its petals fade away.
The conception of yourselves as altogether virtuous and wronged is, I assure you, not at all the one which onlookers hold of you. No doubt, you have rights on your side. No doubt, some of you suffered without just cause. But nothing which has been done to you cries aloud to Heaven for condemnation as your own actions.
Here's to you, men I never met,
Yet hope to meet behind the veil,
Thronged on some starry parapet,
That looks down upon Innisfail,
And sees the confluence of dreams
That clashed together in our night,
One river, born from many streams,
Roll in one blaze of blinding light.
On the laugh of a child I am borne to the joy of the King.
I remember once quarreling with Yeats who was walking around the room with a sword in one hand muttering spells to ward off evil spirits, and I noticed that every time he passed a plate of plums he put down his unoccupied hand and took a plum and I said, 'Yeats, you cannot evoke great spirits and eat plums at the same time."
In ancient shadows and twilights
Where childhood had strayed,
The world’s great sorrows were born
And its heroes were made.
In the lost boyhood of Judas
Christ was betrayed.
I must endure the torturing ray,
And, with all beauty, all desire.
Ah, time-long must the effort be,
And far the way that I must go
To bring my spirit unto thee,
Behind the glass, within the glow.
Who would think this quiet breather
From the world had taken flight?
Yet within the form we see there
Wakes the golden King to-night.
Here the wild will woke within her lighting up her flying dreams,
Round and round the planets whirling break in woods and flowers and streams,
And the winds are shaken from them as the leaves from off the rose,
And the feet of earth go dancing in the way that beauty goes,
And the souls of earth are kindled by the incense of her breath
As her light alternate lures them through the gates of birth and death.
Love's immortality so blind
Dreams that all things with it conjoined
Must share with it immortal day:
But not of this—but not of this—
The touch, the eyes, the laugh, the kiss,
Fall from it and it goes its way.
Though the dream of love may tire,
In the ages long agone
There were ruby hearts of fire —
Ah, the daughters of the dawn!
Now when the spirit in us wakes and broods,
Filled with home yearnings, drowsily it flings
From its deep heart high dreams and mystic moods,
Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things;
Clothing the vast with a familiar face;
Reaching its right hand forth to greet the starry race.
A young man who had been troubling society with impalpable doctrines of a new civilization which he called "the Kingdom of Heaven" had been put out of the way; and I can imagine that believer in material power murmuring as he went homeward, "it will all blow over now." Yes. The wind from the Kingdom of Heaven has blown over the world, and shall blow for centuries yet.
When the lips I breathed upon
Asked for such love as equals claim
I looked where all the stars were gone
Burned in the day's immortal flame.
"Come thou like yon great dawn to me
From darkness vanquished, battles done:
Flame unto flame shall flow and be
Within thy heart and mine as one.".
We must pass like smoke or live within the spirit's fire;
For we can no more than smoke unto the flame return
If our thought has changed to dream, our will unto desire,
As smoke we vanish though the fire may burn.
We deem our love so infinite
Because the Lord is everywhere,
And love awakening is made bright
And bathed in that diviner air.
Seek on earth what you have found in heaven.
I thought, beloved, to have brought to you
A gift of quietness and ease and peace,
Cooling your brow as with the mystic dew
Dropping from twilight trees.
Homeward I go not yet; the darkness grows;
Not mine the voice to still with peace divine:
From the first fount the stream of quiet flows
Through other hearts than mine.
Yet of my night I give to you the stars,
And of my sorrow here the sweetest gains,
And out of hell, beyond its iron bars,
My scorn of all its pains.
The hope lives on age after age,
Earth with its beauty might be won
For labor as a heritage,
For this has Ireland lost a son.