George William Russell

"The mountain was filled with the hosts of the Tuatha de Dannan."
--Old Celtic Poem


See where the auras from the olden fountain
    Starward aspire;
The sacred sign upon the holy mountain
    Shines in white fire:
Waving and flaming yonder o'er the snows
    The diamond light
Melts into silver or to sapphire glows
    Night beyond night;
And from the heaven of heavens descends on earth
    A dew divine.
Come, let us mingle in the starry mirth
    Around the shrine!
Enchantress, mighty mother, to our home
    In thee we press,
Thrilled by the fiery breath and wrapt in some
    Vast tenderness
The homeward birds uncertain o'er their nest
    Wheel in the dome,
Fraught with dim dreams of more enraptured rest,
    Wheel in the ...

I have wept a million tears:
Pure and proud one, where are thine,
What the gain though all thy years
In unbroken beauty shine?

All your beauty cannot win
Truth we learn in pain and sighs:
You can never enter in
To the circle of the wise.

They are but the slaves of light
Who have never known the gloom,
And between the dark and bright
Willed in freedom their own doom.

Think not in your pureness there,
That our pain but follows sin:
There are fires for those who dare
Seek the throne of might to win.

Pure one, from your pride refrain:
Dark and lost amid the strife
I am myriad years of pain
Nearer to the fount of life.

When defiance fierce is thrown
At the God to whom you bow,
Rest the lips of the Unknown<...

A laughter in the diamond air, a music in the trembling grass;
And one by one the words of light as joydrops through my being pass.
I am the sunlight in the heart, the silver moonglow in the mind;
My laughter runs and ripples through the wavy tresses of the wind.
I am the fire upon the hills, the dancing flame that leads afar
Each burning-hearted wanderer, and I the dear and homeward star.
A myriad lovers died for me, and in their latest yielded breath
I woke in glory giving them immortal life though touched by death.
They knew me from the dawn of time: if Hermes beats his rainbow wings,
If Angus shakes his locks of light, or golden-haired Apollo sings,
It matters not the name, the land; my joy in all the gods abides:
Even in the cricket in the grass some dimness of me smiles and hide...

In the wet dusk silver-sweet,
Down the violet scented ways,
As I moved with quiet feet
I was met by mighty days.

On the hedge the hanging dew
Glassed the eve and stars and skies;
While I gazed a madness grew
Into thundered battle cries.

Where the hawthorn glimmered white,
Flashed the spear and fell the stroke--
Ah, what faces pale and bright
Where the dazzling battle broke!

There a hero-hearted queen
With young beauty lit the van.
Gone! the darkness flowed between
All the ancient wars of man.

While I paced the valley's gloom
Where the rabbits pattered near,
Shone a temple and a tomb
With the legend carven clear:

'Time put by a myriad fates
That her day might dawn in glory.
Death made wide a million ga...

A cabin on the mountain side hid in a grassy nook
Where door and windows open wide that friendly stars may look.
The rabbit shy can patter in, the winds may enter free,
Who throng around the mountain throne in living ecstasy.

And when the sun sets dimmed in eve and purple fills the air,
I think the sacred Hazel Tree is dropping berries there
From starry fruitage waved aloft where Connla's Well o'erflows;
For sure the enchanted waters pour through every wind that blows.

I think when night towers up aloft and shakes the trembling dew
How every high and lonely thought that thrills my being through
Is but a ruddy berry dropped down through the purple air,
And from the magic tree of life the fruit falls everywhere.

'Sinend daughter of Lodan Lucharglan, son of Lir, out of the
Land of Promise went to Connlas' Well which is under the
sea, to behold it. That is a well at which are the hazels of
wisdom and inspiration that is, the hazels of the science of
poetry; and in the same hour their fruit and their blossom &
their foliage break forth, and then fall upon the well in
the same shower, which raises upon the water a royal surge
of purple.'

Two small sweet lives together
    From dawn till the dew falls down,
They danced over rock and heather
    Away from the dusty town.

Dark eyes like stars set in pansies,
    Blue eyes like a hero's bold--
Their thoughts were all pearl-light fancies,
    Their hearts in the age of gold.

They crooned o'er many a fable
    And longed for the bright-capped elves,
The faery folk who are able
    To make us faery ourselves.

A hush on the children stealing
    They stood there hand in hand,
For the elfin chimes were pealing
    Aloud in the underland.

And over the grey rock sliding,
    A fiery colour ran,
And out of its thickness gliding
    The twinkling mist of a man--

To-day for the children had fled to
    ...

The skies from black to pearly grey
Had veered without a star or sun;
Only a burning opal ray
Fell on your brow when all was done.

Aye, after victory, the crown;
Yet through the fight no word of cheer;
And what would win and what go down
No word could help, no light make clear.

A thousand ages onward led
Their joys and sorrows to that hour;
No wisdom weighed, no word was said,
For only what we were had power.

There was no tender leaning there
Of brow to brow in loving mood;
For we were rapt apart, and were
In elemental solitude.

We knew not in redeeming day
Whether our spirits would be found
Floating along the starry way,
Or in the earthly vapours drowned.

Brought by the sunrise-coloured flame
To earth, un...

'The soul is its own witness and its own refuge'


Unto the deep the deep heart goes,
It lays its sadness nigh the breast:
Only the Mighty Mother knows
The wounds that quiver unconfessed.

It seeks a deeper silence still;
It folds itself around with peace,
Where thoughts alike of good or ill
In quietness unfostered cease.

It feels in the unwounding vast
For comfort for its hopes and fears:
The Mighty Mother bows at last;
She listens to her children's tears.

Where the last anguish deepens--there
The fire of beauty smites through pain:
A glory moves amid despair,
The Mother takes her child again.

    "Those who there take refuge nevermore return."--Bhagavad Gita


Ere I lose myself in the vastness and drowse myself with the peace,
While I gaze on the light and beauty afar from the dim homes of men,
May I still feel the heart-pang and pity, love-ties that I would not release,
May the voices of sorrow appealing call me back to their succour again.

Ere I storm with the tempest of power the thrones and dominions of old,
Ere the ancient enchantment allures me to roam through the star- misty skies,
I would go forth as one who has reaped well what harvest the earth may unfold:
May my heart be o'erbrimmed with compassion, on my brow be the crown of the wise.

I would go as the dove from the ark sent forth with wishes and prayers
To return with the paradise-blossoms tha...

One thing in all things have I seen:
    One thought has haunted earth and air;
Clangour and silence both have been
    Its palace chambers.    Everywhere

I saw the mystic vision flow,
    And live in men, and woods, and streams,
Until I could no longer know
    The dream of life from my own dreams.

Sometimes it rose like fire in me,
    Within the depths of my own mind,
And spreading to infinity,
    It took the voices of the wind.

It scrawled the human mystery,
    Dim heraldry--on light and air;
Wavering along the starry sea,
    I saw the flying vision there.

Each fire that in God's temple lit
    Burns fierce before the inner shrine,
Dimmed as my fire grew near to it,
    And darkened at the light of mine.

The wonder of the world is o'er:
The magic from the sea is gone:
There is no unimagined shore,
No islet yet to venture on.
The Sacred Hazels' blooms are shed,
The Nuts of Knowledge harvested.

Oh, what is worth this lore of age
If time shall never bring us back
Our battle with the gods to wage
Reeling along the starry track.
The battle rapture here goes by
In warring upon things that die.

Let be the tale of him whose love
Was sighed between white Deirdre's breasts,
It will not lift the heart above
The sodden clay on which it rests.
Love once had power the gods to bring
All rapt on its wild wandering.

We shiver in the falling dew,
And seek a shelter from the storm:
When man these elder brothers knew
He found the mother ...

I pitied one whose tattered dress
Was patched, and stained with dust and rain;
He smiled on me; I could not guess
The viewless spirit's wide domain.

He said, 'The royal robe I wear
Trails all along the fields of light:
Its silent blue and silver bear
For gems the starry dust of night.'

'The breath of joy unceasingly
Waves to and fro its folds starlit,
And far beyond earth's misery
I live and breathe the joy of it.'

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 mad...

The twilight fleeted away in pearl on the stream,
And night, like a diamond dome, stood still in our dream.
Your eyes like burnished stones or as stars were bright
With the sudden vision that made us one with the night.

We loved in infinite spaces, forgetting here
The breasts that were lit with life and the lips so near;
Till the wizard willows waved in the wind and drew
Me away from the fulness of love and down to you.

Our love was so vast that it filled the heavens up:
But the soft white form I held was an empty cup,
When the willows called me back to earth with their sigh,
And we moved as shades through the deep that was you and I.

They sat with hearts untroubled,
    The clear sky sparkled above,
And an ancient wisdom bubbled
    From the lips of a youthful love.

They read in a coloured history
    Of Egypt and of the Nile,
And half it seemed a mystery,
    Familiar, half, the while.

Till living out of the story
    Grew old Egyptian men,
And a shadow looked forth Rory
    And said, "We meet again!"

And over Aileen a maiden
    Looked back through the ages dim:
She laughed, and her eyes were laden
    With an old-time love for him.

In a mist came temples thronging
    With sphinxes seen in a row,
And the rest of the day was a longing
    For their homes of long ago.

"We'd go there if they'd let us,"
    They said with wounded pride:...

The grey road whereupon we trod became as holy ground:
The eve was all one voice that breathed its message with no sound:
And burning multitudes pour through my heart, too bright, too blind,
Too swift and hurried in their flight to leave their tale behind.
Twin gates unto that living world, dark honey-coloured eyes
The lifting of whose lashes flushed the face with paradise--
Beloved, there I saw within their ardent rays unfold
The likeness of enraptured birds that flew from deeps of gold
To deeps of gold within my breast to rest or there to be
Transfigured in the light, or find a death to life in me.
So love, a burning multitude, a seraph wind which blows
From out the deep of being to the deep of being goes:
And sun and moon and starry fires and earth and air and sea
Are cre...

It was the fairy of the place,
Moving within a little light,
Who touched with dim and shadowy grace
The conflict at its fever height.

It seemed to whisper 'Quietness,'
Then quietly itself was gone:
Yet echoes of its mute caress
Were with me as the years went on.

It was the warrior within
Who called 'Awake, prepare for fight:
Yet lose not memory in the din:
Make of thy gentleness thy might:

'Make of thy silence words to shake
The long-enthroned kings of earth:
Make of thy will the force to break
Their towers of wantonness and mirth.'

It was the wise all-seeing soul
Who counselled neither war nor peace:
'Only be thou thyself that goal
In which the wars of time shall cease.'