sunrise-coloured flame
To earth, uncertain yet, the while
I looked at you, there slowly came,
Noble and sisterly, your smile.

We bade adieu to love the old;
We heard another lover then,
Whose forms are myriad and untold,
Sigh to us from the hearts of men.

SONG

Dusk its ash-grey blossoms sheds on violet skies,
Over twilight mountains where the heart songs rise,
Rise and fall and fade away from earth to air.
Earth renews the music sweeter. Oh, come there.
Come, acushla, come, as in ancient times
Rings aloud the underland with faery chimes.
Down the unseen ways as strays each tinkling fleece
Winding ever onward to a fold of peace,
So my dreams go straying in a land more fair;
Half I tread the dew-wet grasses, half wander there.
Fade your glimmering eyes in a world grown cold;
Come, acushla, with me to the mountains old.
There the bright ones call us waving to and fro--
Come, my children, with me to the ancient go.

THE VIRGIN MOTHER

Who is that goddess to whom men should pray
But her from whom their hearts have turned away,
Out of whose virgin being they were born,
Whose mother nature they have named in scorn
Calling its holy substance common clay.

Yet from this so despised earth was made
The milky whiteness of those queens who swayed
Their generations with a light caress,
And from some image of whose loveliness
The heart built up high heaven when it prayed.

Lover, your heart, the heart on which it lies,
Your eyes that gaze, and those alluring eyes,
Your lips, the lips they kiss, alike had birth
Within this dark divinity of earth,
Within this mother being you despise.

Ah, when I think this earth on which we tread
Hath borne these blossoms of the lovely dead,
And made the living heart I love to beat,
I look with sudden awe beneath my feet
As you with erring reverence overhead.

Here ends By Still Waters, Lyrical Poems Old & New by A.E.,
printed upon paper made in Ireland, and published by
Elizabeth C. Yeats at the Dun Emer Press, in the house of
Evelyn Gleeson at Dundrum in the County of Dublin, Ireland,
finished on All Soul's Eve, in the year 1906.

End of Project Gutenberg's By Still Waters, by George William Russell

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BY STILL WATERS