The Western edges

I

Here on the old world's western edges,
the finistères, the ambivalent ends,
where the Atlantic, ominous,
from the black rocks whose gull-whitened ledges
break the sheer plunge to the curdled foam,
stretches away to the strange Americas
(a world outside our known allegiance)—
here an ancient people find a home.

So easy it is to weave the false fabric
of imagined romance and an age seen gold,
a sunset rosy in mists of ignorance,
a too-sweet fairy tale re-told:
the Celts iridescent in sentiment's bubbles—
Taliesin makes good in the local Eisteddfod,
Ossian shares the sorrows of Werther,
Cúchulainn carries a gun in the troubles.

Yet still these remnants within the folding
mountain fringes of their lost empires
keep the traditions of old civilities.
Though how long the time, the distance
from Cunobelin holding
court at Camulodunum
or Vercingetorix at sad Alesia
as the legions marched by singing
the storm-trooper chorus as they pass—
ecce Caesar nunc triumphat
qui subjegit Gallias—
the too-emphatic rhythm that
we seek to break who know it
and have felt its boot-beats bruise our lives—
yet the older thing survives.

II

Faintly the old truths are sighed and whispered
in the salt wind blowing through the thorn-tree,
roots crook-wedged in the harsh grey cairn-stones,
turning a humped back to the sea:

here we may sense in half-glimpsed knowing
that the antique far-off graces remain
as the slender facets of the spade-cut peat-face
catch the thin clear light of sunset after rain.

Or we may drink, and watching, listen,
to talk making gossip into epic fable
in the steamy lamp-light of the crowded bar,
and between the flour-sacks and the pushed-back tables
the patterning feet to the shrilling fiddle
trace out, weave round a magic story—
(so once anciently was mimed
the circled myth in the Trojan Dancing)—
now in the half-sets, Walls of Limerick,
Siege of Ennis and The Waves of Tory.

August 1946