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IRISH SONGS AND LYRICS 405 |
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Thankless is the soil: men trench, and delve, and labor Black and spongy peat amid barren knowes of stone :
Then to win a living overseas they travel,
And their women gather, if God pleases, what was sown.
Harvesters, a-homing from the golden tilth of England, Where they sweat to cope with increase of teeming years,
Find too oft returning, sick with others' plenty, Sunless autumn dank upon green and spindling ears.
Or a tainted south wind brings upon the root-crop Stench of rotting fibre and green leaf turning black :
Famine, never distant,, stalks nearer now and nearer, Bids them rake like crows amid mussel-beds and wrack.
Bleak and gray to man is the countenance of Nature;
Bleak her soil below him, bleak her sky above; Wherefore, then, by man is her rare smile so cherished ?
Paid her niggard bounty with so lavish love ?
Not the slopes of Rhine with such yearning are remembered ;
Not your Kentish orchards, not your Devon lanes. 'Tis as though her sons for that ungentle mother
Knew a mother's tenderness, felt a mother's pains.
Many an outward-bound, as the ship heads under Tory, Clings with anguished eyes to the barren Fanad shore. |
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