A chill wind raging;
The sun low keeping,
Swift to set

O'er seas high sweeping.

Dull red the fern;

Shapes are shadows;
Wild geese mourn

O'er misty meadows.

Keen cold limes

Each weaker wing.

Icy times

Such I sing!

Take my tidings! 19

The direct descendant of the ancient nature poets is Francis Ledwidge, whose three books of verse brought out during the World War were later republished as one volume, together with the original Introductions by Lord Dunsany. In spite of the fact that many of the poems of Ledwidge were written while their author was on active service, in the Balkans, in Greece, and in Flanders, they nearly all express the poet's tender affection for "the silence of maternal hills" - hills he was never to see again, because he fell in action. In Ledwidge's work people play little part; landscape is everything. He excels not merely in giving the details of a scene, but in conveying its peculiar atmosphere. Since he has the secret of "natural magic," he is truly a national poet; he has carried on the great nature tradition of the Gaelic past.

A SONG OF APRIL

The censer of the eglantine was moved
By little lane winds, and the watching faces
Of garden flowerets, which of old she loved,
Peep shyly outward from their silent places.
But when the sun arose the flowers grew bolder,
And she will be in white, I thought, and she
Will have a cuckoo on her either shoulder,
And woodbine twines and fragrant wings of pea.

And I will meet her on the hills of South,
And I will lead her to a northern water,
My wild one, the sweet beautiful uncouth,
The eldest maiden of the Winter's daughter.
And down the rainbows of her noon shall slide
Lark music, and the little sunbeam people,
And nomad wings shall fill the river side,
And ground wings rocking in the lily's steeple.20

BEHIND THE CLOSED EYE

I walk the old frequented ways

That wind across the tangled braes,

I live again the sunny days

Ere I the city knew.

And scenes of old again are born,
The woodbine lassoing the thorn,
And drooping Ruth-like in the corn
The poppies weep the dew.

Above me in their hundred schools

The magpies bend their young to rules,

And like an apron full of jewels

The dewy cobweb swings.

And frisking in the stream below
The troutlets make the circles flow,

And the hungry crane doth watch them
As a smoker does his rings.

grow

Above me smokes the little town,

With its whitewashed walls and roofs of brown

And its octagon spire toned smoothly down

As the holy minds within.

And wondrous impudently sweet,
Half of him passion, half conceit,
The blackbird calls adown the street
Like the piper of Hamelin.

I hear him, and I feel the lure

Drawing me back to the homely moor,
I'll go and close the mountain's door
On the city's strife and din.21

There is now every indication that Irish poets have returned to the reinterpretation of the Gaelic past. Not long ago Austin Clarke based his Adventures of Fionn on ancient Irish stories, and James Stephens has lately retold Early Irish Fairy Tales; Ledwidge brought back the ancient Irish feeling for the countryside. More recently there has been the suggestion that Gaelic should supplant English as the language of all Irish literature; this, however, seems unnecessary, for the devices by which the old Irish writers gained their effects,-parallel structure, frequent use of the verb "to be," connotation,

can easily be employed in the more widely understood English tongue. The Irish sense of intimacy with Nature should long continue to enrich English literature.

As a result of modern scholarship, the enormous amount of prose and verse that is the heritage from

early Ireland is now accurately translated, and is far more easily accessible to laymen than it was in the closing decade of the last century; instruction in Gaelic literature is now offered by a number of universities in the English-speaking world. Irish poets have also been in the forefront of the recent attempt to rid poetry of useless conventions, of insipid prettiness; it is likely, therefore, that they will be able successfully to interpret for their generation the ancient literature of Ireland.

IX

SOME IRISH POETS OF THE ALLIED
CAUSE IN THE WORLD WAR

RELAND has long been distinguished for her soldiers and her singers. Throughout hundreds of years there has been hardly a war in which men of Irish blood have not played gallant parts. The bravery of Irish troops in Flanders in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and again in our own Civil War, was fully equalled by the bravery of Irish soldiers after Mons, in Serbia, and at Gallipoli.

During the early days of Irish history, armies were accompanied by poets, whose duty was to record and celebrate the valorous deeds of the clans to which each might be attached. Standish O'Grady, the historical writer (not to be confused with the author of Silva Gadelica), says that the poet went on a campaign as well mounted as a chief and as well attended. Though he himself wore no arms and never fought, he had men of war to wait on him; his function was not fighting, but the causing of others to fight well. "He went to the wars as an observer and watcher, and men feared him. Somewhere. . in the neighbourhood of the battle such bards,