The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Read online

  ‘Another and another and another …’

  JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN (1803–49)

  The Young Parson’s Dream

  ‘My heart is a monk’

  Relic of Prince Bayazeed, Son of Suleiman (d.1561)

  Twenty Golden Years Ago

  The Ride Round the Parapet

  Khidder

  Siberia

  Dark Rosaleen

  The Nameless One

  SAMUEL FERGUSON (1810–86)

  The Forging of the Anchor

  Lament for Thomas Davis

  The Burial of King Cormac

  Deirdre’s Lament for the Sons of Usnach

  Willy Gilliland: An Ulster Ballad

  AUBREY DE VERE (1814–1902)

  The Little Black Rose

  SHERIDAN LE FANU (1814–73)

  from The Legend of the Glaive

  ‘Through the woods of Morrua and over its root-knotted flooring …’

  THOMAS DAVIS (1814–45)

  Fontenoy, 1745

  O’Connell’s Statue

  JAMES MCCARROLL (1814–91)

  The Irish Wolf

  MOTHER OF DIARMAID MAC CÁRTHAIGH (fl. 1850)

  A Lament for Diarmaid Mac Cárthaigh of Ráth Dubháin, Who Was a Butter-Merchant in Cork

  MORIAN SHEHONE (fl. c.1850?)

  Lament of Morian Shehone for Miss Mary Bourke

  WILLIAM ALLINGHAM (1824–89)

  from Invitation to a Painter (Sent from the West of Ireland)

  I: ‘Flee from London, good my Walter! …’

  V: ‘Now I’ve thought of something! …’

  VI: ‘Ere we part at winter’s portal, I shall row you of a night …’

  The Abbot of Inisfalen (A Killarney Legend)

  from Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland

  from Chapter II: Neighbouring Landlords

  ‘Unlike this careful management …’

  from Chapter V: Ballytullagh

  ‘Old Father Flynn and his plain chapel walls …’

  from Chapter VII: Tenants at Will

  ‘But Pigot’s ruddy cheek and sharp black eye …’

  from Chapter IX: The Fair

  ‘Crowds push through Lisnamoy, shop, street, and lane …’

  In Snow

  from Blackberries

  ‘Not men and women in an Irish street …’

  ‘The Poet launched a stately fleet: it sank …’

  JANE FRANCESCA ELGEE (LADY WILDE) (1826–96)

  A Supplication

  JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY (1844–90)

  A White Rose

  VI: REVIVAL: 1881–1921 SAMUEL FERGUSON

  At the Polo-Ground

  JOHN TODHUNTER (1839–1916)

  Under the Whiteboy Acts, 1800: An Old Rector’s Story

  EMILY LAWLESS (1845–1913)

  Clare Coast

  A Retort

  WILLIAM LARMINIE (1849–1900)

  from Fand

  ‘Heed her not, O Cuhoolin, husband mine …’

  THOMAS GIVEN (1850–1917)

  A Song for February

  OSCAR WILDE (1854–1900)

  from Poems in Prose

  The Artist

  The Disciple

  T. W. ROLLESTON (1857–1920)

  The Dead at Clonmacnois

  KATHARINE TYNAN (1861–1931)

  Sheep and Lambs

  Waiting

  WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865–1939)

  The Madness of King Goll

  Fergus and the Druid

  The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland

  The Song of Wandering Aengus

  Adam’s Curse

  A Drinking Song

  Introductory Rhymes to Responsibilities

  Her Praise

  Easter 1916

  Reprisals

  JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE (1871–1909)

  Queens

  Patch-Shaneen

  In Kerry

  THOMAS MACDONAGH (1878–1916)

  Dublin Tramcars

  The Night Hunt

  The Man Upright

  JOSEPH CAMPBELL (1879–1944)

  The Newspaper-Seller

  Raven’s Rock

  JAMES STEPHENS (1880?–1950)

  The Red-haired Man’s Wife

  The Street Behind Yours

  O Bruadair

  PADRAIC COLUM (1881–1972)

  A Drover

  The Poor Girl’s Meditation

  The Poet

  JAMES JOYCE (1882–1941)

  from Chamber Music

  XXXVI: I hear an army charging upon the land

  Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba

  FRANCIS LEDWIDGE (1887–1917)

  The Death of Ailill

  The Wife of Llew

  Thomas MacDonagh

  The Blackbirds

  VII: THE SEA OF DISAPPOINTMENT: 1922–70 WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  Meditations in Time of Civil War

  In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz

  Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931

  from Words for Music Perhaps

  VI: Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

  XX: ‘I am of Ireland’

  Lapis Lazuli

  High Talk

  Cuchulain Comforted

  JOSEPH CAMPBELL

  from Prison Poems

  Chesspieces

  New Year, 1923

  Country Sorrow

  Ad Limina

  BLANAID SALKELD (1880–1959)

  Role

  Art

  JAMES JOYCE

  Buy a book in brown paper

  from Finnegans Wake

  The Ondt and the Gracehoper

  AUSTIN CLARKE (1896–1974)

  The Lost Heifer

  The Planter’s Daughter

  The Straying Student

  Penal Law

  Martha Blake at Fifty-one

  A Strong Wind

  New Liberty Hall

  F. R. HIGGINS (1896–1941)

  Song for the Clatter-bones

  PATRICK MACDONOGH (1902–61)

  No Mean City

  O, Come to the Land

  PATRICK KAVANAGH (1904–67)

  Inniskeen Road: July Evening

  A Christmas Childhood

  from The Great Hunger

  I: ‘Clay is the word and clay is the flesh …’

  II: ‘Maguire was faithful to death …’

  XIII: ‘The world looks on …’

  XIV: ‘We may come out into the October reality, Imagination …’

  Threshing Morning

  Kerr’s Ass

  Innocence

  Come Dance with Kitty Stobling

  The Hospital

  The One

  PADRAIC FALLON (1905–74)

  A Flask of Brandy

  SAMUEL BECKETT (1906–89)

  from Six Poèmes 1947–1949

  ‘my way is in the sand flowing …’

  ‘what would I do without this world faceless incurious …’

  ‘I would like my love to die …’

  JOHN HEWITT (1907–87)

  The Colony

  LOUIS MACNEICE (1907–63)

  A Cataract Conceived as the March of Corpses

  Valediction

  from Autumn Journal

  IX: ‘Now we are back to normal …’

  Autobiography

  Neutrality

  Soap Suds

  The Taxis

  Charon

  The Introduction

  W. R. RODGERS (1909–69)

  The Net

  MÁIRTÍN Ó DIREÁIN (1910–88)

  End of an Era

  Sunday Memory

  Strong Beams

  SEÁN Ó RÍORDÁIN (1917–77)

  Switch

  Despair

  Claustrophobia

  Fever

  MÁIRE MHAC AN TSAOI (b.1922)

  Mary Hogan’s Quatrains

  PEARSE HUTCHINSON (b.1927)

  Petition to Release

  RICHARD
MURPHY (b.1927)

  Sailing to an Island

  Girl at the Seaside

  THOMAS KINSELLA (b.1928)

  Chrysalides

  First Light

  from Nightwalker

  2: ‘The human taste grows faint …’

  5: ‘A pulse hisses in my ear …’

  JOHN MONTAGUE (b.1929)

  The Trout

  All Legendary Obstacles

  What a View

  SEAMUS HEANEY (b.1939)

  Death of a Naturalist

  The Peninsula

  Requiem for the Croppies

  Bogland

  MICHAEL LONGLEY (b.1939)

  In Memoriam

  MICHAEL HARTNETT (1941–99)

  For My Grandmother, Bridget Halpin

  Bread

  from Notes on My Contemporaries

  1: The Poet Down

  DEREK MAHON (b.1941)

  Glengormley

  Ecclesiastes

  EAVAN BOLAND (b.1944)

  From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin

  VIII: TRANSFORMATIONS: 1971–2009 AUSTIN CLARKE

  from Tiresias

  from II: ‘ “Strolling one day, beyond the Kalends, on Mount Cyllene …” ’

  RICHARD MURPHY

  Seals at High Island

  Stormpetrel

  Morning Call

  THOMAS KINSELLA

  38 Phoenix Street

  His Father’s Hands

  Tao and Unfitness at Inistiogue on the River Nore

  At the Western Ocean’s Edge

  The Design

  JOHN MONTAGUE

  Windharp

  Herbert Street Revisited

  Mount Eagle

  She Cries

  BRENDAN KENNELLY (b.1936)

  from The Book of Judas

  prades

  from The Man Made of Rain

  21: ‘There’s no edge, only a new place with …’

  SEAMUS HEANEY

  Broagh

  The Tollund Man

  The Strand at Lough Beg

  Song

  The Harvest Bow

  from Sweeney Redivivus

  The Cleric

  The Scribes

  Hailstones

  from Settings

  XIV: ‘One afternoon I was seraph on gold leaf …’

  XV: ‘And strike this scene in gold too, in relief …’

  A Sofa in the Forties

  Postscript

  Perch

  The Blackbird of Glanmore

  MICHAEL LONGLEY

  Wounds

  The Linen Industry

  Between Hovers

  The Butchers

  Form

  The Campfires

  Ceasefire

  The Evening Star

  Overhead

  Above Dooaghtry

  Sleep & Death

  Whalsay

  MICHAEL HARTNETT

  Lament for Tadhg Cronin’s Children

  from Inchicore Haiku

  8: ‘My English dam bursts …’

  18: ‘I push in a plug …’

  37: ‘What do bishops take …’

  78: ‘On Tyrconnell Road …’

  EAMON GRENNAN (b.1941)

  from The Quick of It

  ‘ because the body stops here because you can only reach out so far …’

  ‘When I see the quick ripple of a groundhog’s back above the grass …’

  ‘Casual, prodigal, these piss-poor opportunists, the weeds …’

  ‘Even under the rain that casts a fine white blanket over mountain and lake …’

  DEREK MAHON

  An Image from Beckett

  A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford

  Courtyards in Delft

  from The Yellow Book

  VII: An Bonnán Buí

  ‘Things’

  Biographia Literaria

  EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN (b.1942)

  Deaths and Engines

  MacMoransbridge

  Fireman’s Lift

  The Real Thing

  A Capitulary

  Gloss/Clós/Glas

  DOROTHY MOLLOY (1942–2004)

  Ghost Train

  Gethsemane Day

  JOHN F. DEANE (b.1943)

  The Instruments of Art

  EAVAN BOLAND

  Mise Eire

  PAUL DURCAN (b.1944)

  Ireland 1972

  Ireland 1977

  Give Him Bondi

  Ireland 2001

  Ireland 2002

  BERNARD O’DONOGHUE (b.1945)

  Casement on Banna

  Ter Conatus

  TREVOR JOYCE (b.1947)

  all that is the case

  now then

  FRANK ORMSBY (b.1947)

  The Gate

  The Whooper Swan

  CIARAN CARSON (b.1948)

  Dresden

  A Date Called Eat Me

  from The Twelfth of Never

  The Rising Sun

  from Breaking News

  Trap

  Wake

  from For All We Know

  from Part One: The Fetch

  from Part Two: The Fetch

  TOM PAULIN (b.1949)

  A Written Answer

  The Road to Inver

  MEDBH MCGUCKIAN (b.1950)

  The Seed-Picture

  The Sitting

  Monody for Aghas

  She is in the Past, She has this Grace

  PETER FALLON (b.1951)

  The Company of Horses

  PAUL MULDOON (b.1951)

  The Electric Orchard

  Cuba

  Anseo

  from Immram

  ‘I was just about getting things into perspective …’

  Aisling

  They that Wash on Thursday

  Third Epistle to Timothy

  The Breather

  Turkey Buzzards

  KERRY HARDIE (b.1951)

  Ship of Death

  Seal Morning

  NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL (b.1952)

  The Shannon Estuary Welcomes the Fish

  The Language Issue

  My Father’s People

  The Hair Market

  Mermaid with Parish Priest

  MAURICE SCULLY (b.1952)

  from Over & Through

  Sound

  Liking the Big Wheelbarrow

  from DEF

  Lullaby

  MAURICE RIORDAN (b.1953)

  The Sloe

  from The Idylls

  2: ‘Another day when they were sitting on the headland …’

  DENNIS O’DRISCOLL (b.1954)

  from Churchyard View: The New Estate

  ‘Taking it all with us …’

  THOMAS MCCARTHY (b.1954)

  Ellen Tobin McCarthy

  The Standing Trains

  RITA ANN HIGGINS (b.1955)

  Black Dog in My Docs Day

  CATHAL Ó SEARCAIGH (b.1956)

  A Runaway Cow

  Lament

  GREG DELANTY (b.1958)

  The Cure

  To My Mother, Eileen

  PETER MCDONALD (b.1962)

  The Hand

  COLETTE BRYCE (b.1970)

  Self-Portrait in the Dark (with Cigarette)

  The Poetry Bug

  DAVID WHEATLEY (b.1970)

  Sonnet

  Drift

  SINÉAD MORRISSEY (b.1972)

  Pilots

  ALAN GILLIS (b.1973)

  12th October, 1994

  Progress

  CAITRÍONA O’REILLY (b.1973)

  A Lecture Upon the Bat

  Heliotrope

  LEONTIA FLYNN (b.1974)

  By My Skin

  Drive

  NICK LAIRD (b.1975)

  Pedigree

  IX: SONGS AND BALLADS SINCE 1801 THOMAS MOORE

  from Irish Melodies

  War Song: Remember the Glories of Brien the Brave

  The Song of Fionnuala

  S
he is Far from the Land

  ’Tis the Last Rose of Summer

  Dear Harp of My Country

  Shall the Harp Then be Silent

  from National Melodies

  Then, Fare Thee Well

  LOVE

  ANONYMOUS

  I Know My Love

  The Dawning of the Day

  The Drinan Dhun (The Sloe Tree)

  The Butcher Boy

  ANTOINE Ó RAIFTEIRÍ

  Mary Hynes

  Brídín Vesey

  GERALD GRIFFIN (1803–40)

  Eileen Aroon

  WILLIAM ALLINGHAM

  Lovely Mary Donnelly

  ALFRED PERCEVAL GRAVES (1846–1931)

  My Love’s an Arbutus

  PERCY FRENCH (1854–1920)

  McBreen’s Heifer

  WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  Down by the Salley Gardens

  JOSEPH CAMPBELL

  My Lagan Love

  PADRAIC COLUM

  She Moved through the Fair

  PATRICK KAVANAGH

  On Raglan Road

  DOMINIC BEHAN (1928–90)

  Liverpool Lou

  MACDARA WOODS (b .1942)

  The Dark Sobrietee

  WAR, POLITICS, PRISON

  ANONYMOUS

  Blarney Castle

  The Relief of Derry, 1 August (old style) 1689

  The Cow Ate the Piper

  A Lament for Kilcash

  Johnny, I Hardly Knew You

  Arthur MacBride

  The Peeler and the Goat

  The Recruiting Sergeant

  By Memory Inspired

  JEREMIAH JOSEPH CALLANAN

  Wellington’s Name

  THOMAS DAVIS

  Clare’s Dragoons

  DION BOUCICAULT (1820–90)

  The Wearing of the Green

  ‘CARROLL MALONE’ (WILLIAM MCBURNEY) (182?–92)

  The Croppy Boy

  JOHN KELLS INGRAM (1823–1907)

  The Memory of the Dead

  JOHN TODHUNTER

  Aghadoe

  OSCAR WILDE

  from The Ballad of Reading Gaol

  ‘He did not wear his scarlet coat …’

  CANON CHARLES O’NEILL (1887–1941)

  The Foggy Dew

  PATRICK MACGILL (1890–1963)

  La Bassée Road

  The Guns

  BRENDAN BEHAN (1923–64)

  from The Quare Fellow

  The Ould Triangle

  from The Hostage

  The Captains and the Kings

  DOMINIC BEHAN

  The Patriot Game

  SEAMUS HEANEY

  Craig’s Dragoons

  SOCIETY

  ANONYMOUS

  In Praise of the City of Mullingar

  The Nightcap

  Nell Flaherty’s Drake

  The Galway Races

  Brian O’Linn

  Molly Malone

  The Bag of Nails

  William Bloat

  Paddy on the Railway

  Finnegan’s Wake

  CHARLES O’FLAHERTY (c.1794–c.1828)

  The Humours of Donnybrook Fair

  ‘FATHER PROUT’ (JOHN SYLVESTER O’MAHONY) (1804–66)

  The Town of Passage

  CECIL FRANCES ALEXANDER (1818–95)

  All Things Bright and Beautiful

  Once in Royal David’s City

  ALFRED PERCEVAL GRAVES

  Herring is King

  JOHNNY TOM GLEESON (1853–1924)