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329

Sonnets.

IRISH COLONIZATION.

WRITTEN DURING IRELAND'S ‘GREAT FAMINE.’

I

Fell the tall pines. Thou nobler Argo, leap
Wide-winged deliverer, on the ocean floods;
And westward waft the astonished multitudes
That rot inert and hideous Sabbath keep
Or, stung to madness, guiltier ruin heap
On their own heads. No longer fabled Gods
Subdue vext waves with tridents and pearl rods;
Yet round that bark heroic, Gods shall sweep
And guard an infant Nation. Hope shall flush
With far Hesperean welcome billows hoary:
Valour and virtue, love and joy, and glory
A storm-borne Iris, shall before you rush;
And there descending, where your towers shall stand
Look back full faced and shout, ‘Britannia, land!’

II

I heard, in deep prophetic trance immersed,
The wave, keel-cut kissing the ship's dark side:
Anon men shouted and the cliffs replied:
O what a vision from the darkness burst!
330

Europe so fair a city never nursed
As met me there! It clasped in crescent wide
The gulf, it crowned the isles, the subject tide
O'er-strode with bridges and with quays coerced.
In marble from unnumbered mountains robed,
With altar-shaped Acropolis and crest
There sat the queenly City throned and globed:
Full well that beaming countenance expressed
The soul of a great People. From its eye
Shone forth a second Britain's empery.

III

How looks a mother on her babe, a bard
On some life-laboured song? With humble pride
And self-less love and joy to awe allied:
So should a State that severed self regard,
Her child beyond the waves. Great Nature's ward,
And Time's, that child one day with God for guide,
Shall waft its parent's image far and wide;
Yea, and its Maker's if by sin unmarred.
Conquest I deem a vulgar pastime: trade
Shifts like the winds; and power but comes to go;
But this is glorious, o'er the earth to sow
The seed of Nations; darkness to invade
With light; to plant, where silence reigned and death
The thrones of British Law and towers of Christian Faith.
331

IV

England, magnanimous art thou in name:
Magnanimous in nature once thou wert;
But that which ofttimes lags behind desert
And crowns the dead, as oft survives it—fame.
Can she whose hand a merchant's pen makes tame
Or sneer of nameless scribe; can she whose heart
In camp or senate still is at the mart
A Nation's toils a Nation's honours claim?
Thy shield of old torn Poland twice and thrice
Invoked: thy help as vainly Ireland asks
Pointing with stark, lean finger, from the crest
Of western cliffs plague-stricken to the West
Grey-haired though young. When heat is sucked from ice,
Then shall a Firm discharge a Nation's tasks.
 

For the very large Private Charities of England during the Famine Years, Ireland has ever been grateful. Neither did the public policy then adopted lack liberality. But, in spite of the warnings of Ireland's wisest sons, grievous mistakes were made.

THE YEAR OF SORROW—IRELAND—1849.

I.—SPRING.

I

Once more, through God's high will, and grace
Of hours that each its task fulfils,
Heart-healing Spring resumes her place
The valley throngs and scales the hills;
332

II

In vain. From earth's deep heart o'ercharged
The exulting life runs o'er in flowers;
The slave unfed is unenlarged:
In darkness sleep a Nation's powers.

III

Who knows not Spring? Who doubts, when blows
Her breath, that Spring is come indeed?
The swallow doubts not; nor the rose
That stirs, but wakes not; nor the weed.

IV

I feel her near but see her not;
For these with pain uplifted eyes
Fall back repulsed, and vapours blot
The vision of the earth and skies.

V

I see her not: I feel her near,
As, charioted in mildest airs
She sails through yon empyreal sphere
And in her arms and bosom bears

VI

That urn of flowers and lustral dews
Whose sacred balm, o'er all things shed
Revives the weak, the old renews
And crowns with votive wreaths the dead.

VII

Once more the cuckoo's call I hear;
I know, in many a glen profound
The earliest violets of the year
Rise up like water from the ground.
333

VIII

The thorn I know once more is white;
And, far down many a forest dale
The anemones in dubious light
Are trembling like a bridal veil.

IX

By streams released that singing flow
From craggy shelf through sylvan glades
The pale narcissus, well I know,
Smiles hour by hour on greener shades.

X

The honeyed cowslip tufts once more
The golden slopes; with gradual ray
The primrose stars the rock and o'er
The wood-path strews its milky way.

XI

From ruined huts and holes come forth
Old men, and look upon the sky!
The Power Divine is on the earth:
Give thanks to God before ye die!

XII

And ye, O children worn and weak
Who care no more with flowers to play
Lean on the grass your cold, thin cheek,
And those slight hands, and whispering, say,

XIII

‘Stern Mother of a race unblest,
In promise kindly, cold in deed,
Take back, O Earth, into thy breast
The children whom thou wilt not feed.’
334

II.—SUMMER.

I

Approved by works of love and might
The Year, consummated and crowned,
Has scaled the zenith's purple height
And flings his robe the earth around.

II

Impassioned stillness—fervours calm—
Brood vast and bright o'er land and deep:
The warrior sleeps beneath the palm;
The dark-eyed captive guards his sleep.

III

The Iberian labourer rests from toil;
Sicilian virgins twine the dance;
Laugh Tuscan vales in wine and oil;
Fresh laurels flash from brows of France.

IV

Far off in regions of the North
The hunter drops his winter fur;
Sun-stricken babes their feet stretch forth;
And nested dormice feebly stir.

V

But thou, O land of many woes!
What cheer is thine? Again the breath
Of proved Destruction o'er thee blows
And sentenced fields grow black in death.
335

VI

In horror of a new despair
His blood-shot eyes the peasant strains
With hands clenched fast and lifted hair
Along the daily-darkening plains.

VII

Behold, O People! thou shalt die!
What art thou better than thy sires?
The hunted deer a weeping eye
Turns on his birthplace, and expires.

VIII

Lo! as the closing of a book
Or statue from its base o'erthrown
Or blasted wood or dried-up brook
Name, race, and nation, thou art gone.

IX

The stranger shall thy hearth possess;
The stranger build upon thy grave.
But know this also—he, not less
His limit and his term shall have.

X

Once more thy volume open cast
In thunder forth shall sound thy name;
Thy forest, hot at heart, at last
God's breath shall kindle into flame.

XI

Thy brook dried up a cloud shall rise
And stretch an hourly widening hand
In God's high judgement through the skies
And onward o'er the Invader's land.
336

XII

Of thine, one day, a remnant left
Shall raise o'er earth a Prophet's rod
And teach far coasts of Faith bereft
The names of Ireland, and of God.

III.—AUTUMN.

I

Then die, thou Year; thy work is done:
The work ill done is done at last;
Far off, beyond that sinking sun
Which sets in blood, I hear the blast

II

That sings thy dirge, and says, ‘Ascend,
And answer make amid thy peers
Since all things here must have an end,
Thou latest of the famine years!’

III

I join that voice. No joy have I
In all thy purple and thy gold
Nor in that nine-fold harmony
From forest on to forest rolled;

IV

Nor in that stormy western fire,
Which burns on ocean's gloomy bed,
And hurls as from a funeral pyre
A glare that strikes the mountain's head;
337

V

And writes on low-hung clouds its lines
Of cyphered flame with hurrying hand,
And flings amid the topmost pines
That crown the steep a burning brand.

VI

Make answer, Year, for all thy dead,
Who found not rest in hallowed earth,
The widowed wife, the father fled
The babe age-stricken from its birth.

VII

Make answer, Year, for virtue lost,
For courage proof 'gainst fraud and force
Now waning like a noontide ghost,
Affections poisoned at their source.

VIII

The labourer spurned his lying spade;
The yeoman spurned his useless plough;
The pauper spurned the unwholesome aid
Obtruded once exhausted now.

IX

Dread Power Unknown! Whom mortal years
Nor touch, nor tempt; Who sitt'st sublime
In night of night, O bid thy spheres
Resound at last a funeral chime!

X

Call up at last the afflicted race
Whose Sorrow nears its ending.—Sore,
For centuries, their strife: the place
That knew them once shall know no more!
338

IV.—WINTER.

I

Fall, snow, and cease not! Flake by flake
The decent winding-sheet compose:
Thy task is just and pious; make
An end of blasphemies and woes.

II

Fall flake by flake! by thee alone
Last friend, the sleeping draught is given:
Kind nurse, by thee the couch is strewn
The couch whose covering is from heaven.

III

Descend and clasp the mountain's crest;
Inherit plain and valley deep:
This night on thy maternal breast
A vanquished nation dies in sleep.

IV

Lo! from the starry Temple Gates
Death rides and bears the flag of peace:
The combatants he separates;
He bids the wrath of ages cease.

V

Descend, benignant Power! But O
Ye torrents, shake no more the vale,
Dark streams, in silence seaward flow:
Thou rising storm remit thy wail.
339

VI

Shake not, to-night, the cliffs of Moher
Nor Brandon's base, rough sea! Thou Isle,
The Rite proceeds! From shore to shore
Hold in thy gathered breath the while.

VII

Fall, snow! in stillness fall, like dew
On church's roof and cedar's fan;
And mould thyself on pine and yew
And on the awful face of man.

VIII

Without a sound, without a stir,
In streets and wolds, on rock and mound
O, omnipresent Comforter
By thee, this night, the lost are found!

IX

On quaking moor, and mountain moss
With eyes upstaring at the sky
And arms extended like a cross
The long-expectant sufferers lie.

X

Bend o'er them, white-robed Acolyte!
Put forth thine hand from cloud and mist!
And minister the last sad Rite,
Where altar there is none, nor priest.

XI

Touch thou the gates of soul and sense;
Touch darkening eyes and dying ears;
Touch stiffening hands and feet, and thence
Remove the trace of sins and tears.
340

XII

And ere thou seal those filmèd eyes
Into God's urn thy fingers dip,
And lay, 'mid eucharistic sighs,
The sacred wafer on the lip.

XIII

This night the Absolver issues forth:
This night the Eternal Victim bleeds:
O winds and woods! O heaven and earth!
Be still this night. The Rite proceeds!

WIDOWHOOD.

1848.
Not thou alone, but all things fair and good
Live here bereft in vestal widowhood
Or wane in radiant circlet incomplete.
Memory, in widow's weeds, with naked feet
Stands on a tombstone. Hope, with tearful eyes
Stares all night long on unillumined skies.
Virtue, an orphan, begs from door to door:
Beside a cold hearth on a stranger's floor
Sits exiled Honour. Song, a vacant type
Hangs on that tree, whose fruitage ne'er was ripe
Her harp, and bids the casual wind thereon
Lament what might be, fabling what is gone.
Our childhood's world of wonder melts like dew;
Youth's guardian genius bids our youth adieu
And oft the wedded is a widow too.
The best of bridals here is but a troth;
Only in heaven is ratified the oath:
341

There, there alone, is clasped in full fruition
That sacred joy which passed not Eden's gates,
For here the soul is mocked with dream and vision,
And outward sense, uniting, separates.
The Bride of Brides, a maid and widow here,
Invokes her Lord, and finds—a Comforter:
Her loftiest fane is but a visible porch
To sealed Creation's omnipresent Church.
Zealous that nobler gifts than earth's should live
Fortune I praise; but praise her, fugitive.
The Roman praised her permanent; but we
Have learned her lore, and paid a heavy fee,
Have tracked her promise to its brake of wiles,
And sounded all the shallows of her smiles.
Fortune not gives but sells, and takes instead
A heart made servile, and a discrowned head.
Too soon she comes, and drowns in swamps of sloth
The soul contemplative and active; both;
Or comes too late and, with malignant art
Leaps on the lance that rives the sufferer's heart
Showering her affluence on a breast supine.
Her best of gifts the usurer's seal and sign
Sustain, and pawn man's life to Destiny.
Ah! mightier things than man like man can die!
Between the ruin and the work half done
I sit: the raw wreck is the sorrier one.
Here drops old Desmond's Keep in slow decay:
There the unfinished Mole is washed away.
The moment's fickle promise, and the vast
And consummated greatness, both are past.
342

We sink, and none is better for our fall:
We suffer most: but suffering comes to all:
Our sighs but echoes are of earlier sighs;
And in our agonies we plagiarize.
O'er all the earth old States in ruin lie,
And new Ambitions topple from their sky:
Greatness walks lame while clad in mortal mould;
The good are weak: unrighteous are the bold.
Love by Self-love is murdered, or Distrust;
And earth-born Virtue has its ‘dust to dust.’
This Ireland knows. The famine years go by,
And each its ranks of carnage heaps more high:
What voice once manly and what hand once strong
Arraigns, resists, or mitigates the wrong?
The future shall be as the present hour:
The havoc past, again the slaves of Power
Shall boast because once more the harvest waves
In fraudulent brightness o'er a million graves.
Why weep for ties once ours, relaxed or broken?
If weep we must, our tears are all bespoken:
One thing is worthy of them, one alone—
A world's inherent baseness; and our own.
Type of my country, sad, and chaste, and wise!
Forgive the gaze of too regardful eyes:
I saw the black robe, and the aspect pale
And heard in dream that country's dying wail.
Like Night her form arose: as shades in night
Are lost thy sorrowing beauty vanished from my sight.
 

‘Laudo manentem.’—Horace.

343

THE LAST IRISH GAEL TO THE LAST IRISH NORMAN;

OR, THE LAST IRISH CONFISCATION.

A PREDICTION, 1848.

Your bark in turn is freighted. O'er the seas
You seek a refuge at the Antipodes.
Australia waits you. O my Lord, beware!
Australia! Floats not England's standard there?
Tyrconnell and Tyrone found rest more nigh:
Shrined on St. Peter's Mount their ashes lie.
Their cause is mine—and foes, till now, were we;
Now friends, ashamed were I thy shame to see.
Has Ruin no decorum? Grief no sense?
Shall England house thee? England drives thee hence!
O worker of thy sorrows with a vow
Bind thou that head reduced, and careful brow
Wholly to root that idol from thy heart:
Swear that thy race never shall have a part
In aught that England boasts, achieves, confers:
Her past is thine—thy future is not hers.
Loosed from the agony of fruitless strife
You stand, a lost man 'mid the wreck of life
And round you gaze. Sad Eva also gazed
All round that bridal field of blood, amazed;
Spoused to new fortunes. But your head is grey!
Beyond your castle droops the dying day;
344

And, drifting down loose gusts of wailing wind,
Night comes with rain before and frost behind.
Lean men that groped for sea-weeds on the shore
All day, now hide in holes on fen and moor.
The cliffs lean forth their brows to meet the scourge
Of blast on blast: around their base the surge
Welters in shades from iron headlands thrown:
Through chasm and cave subaqueous thunders moan—
That sound thou lov'st! Once more the Desmonds fall:
To-night old Wrongs shake hands in History's hall;
And, clashing through responsive vaults of Time,
Old peals funereal marry chime to chime.
Of such no more! Beside your fireless hearth
Sit one night yet: and, moody or in mirth
Compare the past and present, and record
The fortunes of your Order in a word.
England first used, then spurned it! Hour by hour,
For centuries her laws, her fame, her power
Hung on its hand. It gloried to sustain
High o'er the clouds that sweep the Atlantic main,
The banner with her blazonries enrolled:
Then came the change, and ye were bought and sold:
Then came the change, and ye received your due.
Sir, to your country had ye proved as true
As to your England, she had held by you:
Ruin ye might have proved; ye might have known
Even then, the scorn of others—not your own!
Pardon hard words. Your Race, not mine, is hard:
But wounds and work the hand too soft have scarred:
We are your elders—first-born in distress;
And century-seasoned woes grow pitiless.
345

Hierarchs are we in pain, where ye but learn:
We have an Unction, and our Rite is stern.
If on our brows still hang ancestral glooms,
Forgive the children of the Catacombs.
What have the dead to do with love or ruth?
I died; and live once more—I live for Truth:
Hope and delusion trouble me no more:
Therefore, expatriate on my native shore
Anguish and doubt shake other nerves, not mine:
I drop no tear into the bitter brine:
The world in which I move is masculine.
Why to Australia? Britain too was dear:
Must, then, the Britain of the southern sphere
Rack you in turn? Seek you once more to prove
The furies of a scorned, unnatural love
That cleaves to insult and on injury feeds
And, upon both cheeks stricken, burns and bleeds?
Son of the North, why seek you not once more
The coasts where sang the warrior Scald of yore?
If unhistoric regions you must tread,
Hallowed by no communion with the dead,
Never by saint, or sage, or hero trod;
Where never lifted fane upraised to God
In turn, the hearts of sequent generations,
Where never manly races rose to nations
Marshalled by knightly arm or kingly eye;
If with new fortunes a new earth you try,
Then seek, oh, seek her in her purity!
Drain not civilization's dregs and lees.
In many an island clipt by tropic seas,
Nature keeps yet a race by arts untamed,
Who live half-innocent and unashamed.
Ambition frets not them. In regions calm
346

Mid prairies vast, or under banks of palm,
They sing light wars and unafflicting loves
And vanish as the echo leaves the groves!
Smooth space divides their cradles and their graves:
What are they? Apparitions—casual waves
Heaved up in Time's successive harmony!
Brief smiles of nature followed by a sigh!
Why not with such abide awhile and die?
O, summoned ere thy death to that repose
The grave concedes to others! by thy foes
Franchised with that which friendship never gave;
A heart as free from tremors as the grave!
Last of a race whose helm and lance were known
In furthest lands—now exiled from thine own—
Give thanks! How many a sight is spared to thee
Which we, thy sires in suffering, saw and see!
Thou hast beheld thy country, by the shocks
Of sequent winters, driven upon the rocks
High and more high. Thou shalt not, day by day,
See her dismembered planks, the wrecker's prey
Abused without remorse to uses base:
Thou hast beheld the home of all thy race
Their lawns, their walks, and every grove and stream
Their very tombs—pass from thee like a dream
And leave thee bare. But thou shalt not behold
Thy woods devastated, nor gathering mould
Subdue the arms high hung and blight the bloom
Of pomps heraldic redd'ning scroll and tomb;
Nor the starred azure touched by mists cold-lipped
Till choir and aisle are black as vault and crypt,
Nor from the blazoned missal wane and faint
The golden age of martyr, maid, and saint,
347

Umbria's high pathos, and the Tuscan might
And all thy wondering childhood's world of light.
Thou shalt not see that Cross thou loved'st so well
From minster towers rock-built, and hermit's cell
Swept by the self-same blast that sent the hind
Shivering to caves, and struck a kingdom blind!
All that was thine, while seas between thee roll
And them, in some still cloister of thy soul
Shall live, as, in a mother's heart inisled
Lives on the painless memory of a child
Buried a babe. One image all shall make
Still as the gleam of sunset-lighted lake
Kenned from a tower o'er leagues of wood and lawn;
Or as perchance our planet looks, withdrawn
From some pure spirit that leaves her; to his sight
Lessening, not lost—a disk of narrowing light
Sole-hung in regions of pure space afar—
Of old the world he lived in, now a star!
But the wind swells yon sails. Why waste we breath?
My Lord, for thy soul's sake, and a good death
Forget the things a Gael's unmannered pen
For thee records not but for later men.
Since hope is gone, let peace be thine instead.
The snows which heap too soon that Norman head,
Should calm it, and a heart that bleeds for aye
Has less to lose, and less to feel, each day.
Seek not thy joys when on the desolate shore
The raked rocks thunder, and the caverns roar,
And the woods moan, while shoots the setting sun
Discords of angry lights o'er billows dun.
Make white thy thoughts as is a Vestal's sleep;
Bloodless: prolong, beside the murmuring deep,
348

Thy matutinal slumbers, till the bird
That tuned not broke them, is no longer heard.
The flowers the children of the Stranger bring
Indulgent take: permit their latest Spring
To lure from thee all bitterness and wrath:
Into Death's bosom, genial as a bath
Sink back absolved. Justice to God belongs:
Soul latest-stricken, leave with Him thy Wrongs!
Justice, o'er angels and o'er men supreme
Still in mid heaven sustains her balanced beam,
With whose vast scales, whether they sink or rise,
The poles of earth are forced to sympathize.
Unseen she rules, wrapped round in cloud and awe;
Her silence is the seal of mortal law;
Her voice the harmony of every sphere:
Most distant is she ever yet most near,
Most strong when least regarded. From her eyes
That light goes forth which cheers the brave and wise;
And in the arm that lifts aloft her sword
Whatever might abides on earth is stored.
Fret not thyself. Watch thou, and wait, her hand!
The thunder-drops fall fast. In every land
Humanity breathes quick, and coming storm
Looks through man's soul with flashes swift and warm:
The fiery trial and the shaken sieve
Shall prove the nations. What can live shall live.
Falsehood shall die; and falsehoods widest-based
Shall lie the lowest, though they fall the last.
Down from the mountain of their greatness hurled
What witness bear the Nations to the World?
349

Down rolled like rocks along the Alpine stairs
What warning voice is theirs, and ever theirs?
Their ears the Nations unsubverted close
For who would hear the voice whose words are Woes?
Woe to ancestral greatness, if the dower
Of knightly worth confirm no more its power.
Woe to commercial strength, if sensual greed
Heap up like waves its insolent gold, nor heed
What solid good rewards the poor man's toil.
Woe to the Monarch, if the unholy oil
Of smooth-tongued flattery be his balm and chrism.
Woe to the State cleft through by social schism.
Woe to Religion, when the birds obscene
Of Heresy from porch to altar-screen
Range free; while from the temple-eaves look down
Doubt's shadowy brood, ill-masked in cowl or gown.
Woe to the Rulers by the People ruled:
A People drowned in sense, and pride-befooled
Trampling were sages once, and martyrs, trod.
Ye Nations meet your doom, or serve at last your God!
 

St. Pietro in Montorio.

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