The Fairies

UP the airy mountain

Down the rushy glen,

We daren't go a-hunting,

For fear of little men;

Wee folk, good folk,

Trooping all together;

Green jacket, red cap,

And white owl's feather.

Down along the rocky shore

Some make their home,

They live on crispy pancakes

Of yellow tide-foam;

Some in the reeds

Of the black mountain-lake,

With frogs for their watch-dogs,

All night awake.

High on the hill-top

The old King sits;

He is now so old and gray

He's nigh lost his wits.

With a bridge of white mist

Columbkill he crosses,

On his stately journeys

From Slieveleague to Rosses;

Or going up with music,

On cold starry nights,

To sup with the Queen,

Of the gay Northern Lights.

They stole little Bridget

For seven years long;

When she came down again

Her friends were all gone.

They took her lightly back

Between the night and morrow;

They thought she was fast asleep,

But she was dead with sorrow.

They have kept her ever since

Deep within the lake,

On a bed of flag leaves,

Watching till she wake.

By the craggy hill-side,

Through the mosses bare,

They have planted thorn trees

For pleasure here and there.

Is any man so daring

As dig them up in spite?

He shall find the thornies set

In his bed at night.

Up the airy mountain

Down the rushy glen,

We daren't go a-hunting,

For fear of little men;

Wee folk, good folk,

Trooping all together;

Green jacket, red cap,

And white owl's feather.

William Allingham

Writing

A MAN who keeps a diary, pays

Due toll to many tedious days;

But life becomes eventful--then

His busy hand forgets the pen.

Most books, indeed, are records less

Of fulness than of emptiness.

William Allingham

Meadowsweet

THROUGH grass, through amber'd cornfields, our slow Stream--

Fringed with its flags and reeds and rushes tall,

And Meadowsweet, the chosen of them all

By wandering children, yellow as the cream

Of those great cows--winds on as in a dream

By mill and footbridge, hamlet old and small

(Red roofs, gray tower), and sees the sunset gleam

On mullion'd windows of an ivied Hall.

There, once upon a time, the heavy King

Trod out its perfume from the Meadowsweet,

Strown like a woman's love beneath his feet,

In stately dance or jovial banqueting,

When all was new; and in its wayfaring

Our Streamlet curved, as now, through grass and wheat.

William Allingham

An Evening

A SUNSET'S mounded cloud;

A diamond evening-star;

Sad blue hills afar;

Love in his shroud.

Scarcely a tear to shed;

Hardly a word to say;

The end of a summer day;

Sweet Love dead.

William Allingham