And when I saw her large blue eyes,
What was the pain that went through me?
Why did I think on Southern skies
And ships upon the sea?
I think this is as near as Ledwidge ever comes to organic perfection, though two freaks of phrasing fleck its very real beauty and success.
"And Gwydion said to Math, when it was Spring:
'Come now and let us make a wife for Llew.'
And so they broke broad boughs yet moist with dew
And in a shadow made a perfect ring:
They took the violet and the meadow-sweet
To form her pretty face, and for her feet
They built a mound of daisies on a wing.
And for her voice they made a linnet sing
In the wide poppy blowing for her mouth.
And over all they chanted twenty hours.
And Llew came singing from the azure south
And bore away his wife of birds and flowers."
If the success of this is smoother, there is to my mind a suspicion of the happy moment of a professor of poetry in its well-worn theme and the refurbished stock images of the Celtic Muse. The Death of Aillil, the most successful of his attempts at narrative, fails for me in the same way. Songs of the Fields, his first volume, rewards the reader far better than Songs of Peace, in good part written since the war began. Yet his soldiering in Greece gives us this:
THE HOME-COMING OF THE SHEEP
The sheep are coming home in Greece,
Hark the bells on every hill!
Flock by flock, and fleece by fleece,
Wandering wide a little piece
Thro' the evening red and still,
Stopping where the pathways cease,
Cropping with a hurried will.
