Translated from the Gaelic of Sorley MacLean
Girl of the gold-yellow hair,
Indifferent, to you, is my desire:
Girl of the gold-yellow hair,
Indifferent, to you, this patient fire.
Tonight on the floods of Ratharsair,
My distant hand rests on the tiller.
Not languid is the wind that shakes the sails.
Languid my heart because your music fails.
Becalmed my sea where no large wind prevails.
Round dark Dùn Cana soundless mists are creeping.
Angry the grasses on the mountains sloping.
The western wind across the sea unsleeping.
This is the death of dreaming and of hoping.
Around the masts the barren winds are shrieking.
Before the boat the whitening waves are breaking.
But let the wind be fierce and masts be creaking,
What do I care for battles of their making?
Girl of the gold-yellow hair,
Indifferent, to you, is my desire:
Girl of the gold-yellow hair,
Indifferent, to you, this patient fire.
And if our language says that love
And reason are the same
She’s lying.
When first your beauty struck my eyes
They did not learn to be wise,,
They weren’t scholars of such terms.
When first I heard your voice, my clay
Was not sundered in this way,
Not the first time.
The assault was more indirect
Against my heart and intellect.
Later, the storm grew strong.
With all I had of prudence
I fought in my defence.
I used sagacious eloquence.
And from my ancient wisdom I
Spoke from the chaos of my sky:
‘I do not want you here nor yet away.’
My love was on the inside,
My wisdom remained outside,
That thin partition was destroyed.
And reason spoke to my love thus:
‘How foolish is this doubleness.
Love is the reason we possess.’
Never was I so tormented
or troubled in my clay
by Christ’s wanderings on the earth,
or the millions of the sky:
and I gave no heed to that silly dream –
the woods of a far air –
as my stiff heart melted in the power
of her laughter and golden hair.
And her beauty laid a shadow on
poverty and our bitter birth,
on Lenin’s intellectual world,
his patience and his wrath.
Girl of the yellow, heavy-yellow, gold-yellow hair,
the tune of your lips and Europe’s pain together.
Lustrous, ringletted, joyful, beautiful lass,
our time’s shame would not infect your kiss.
Can the music of your beauty hide from me
the ominous discord in this harmony?
The rampant thief and brute at Europe’s head,
the ancient songs, your lips so proud and red.
Can a body’s whiteness and a forehead’s sun
conceal that impudent treachery from my brain –
spite of the bourgeoisie, poison of its creed,
a dismal Scotland, feeble and weak-kneed?
Can beauty and the mendacity of verse
deceive the patient with its transient cures
or hide the Spanish miner from his doom,
his soul going down without delirium?
What is your kiss, electrical and proud,
when valued by each drop of precious blood
that fell on the frozen mountain-sides of Spain
when men were dying in their bitter pain?
What is each ringlet of your golden hair
when weighed against that poverty and fear
which Europe’s people bear and still must bear
from the first slave-ship to slavery entire?
The innocent and the beautiful
have no enemy but time.
W.B. Yeats
I thought I understood from you
that these lines were exact and true,
nor did I think that I would find
their falsehood bitter in my mind.
But that plausible epigram
proved itself another dream
when on that Monday I saw with dread
the steel helmet on your golden head.
Often walking quite alone
Edinburgh’s grey sunless stone
it would flash with your sudden rays
white-starred, uniquely precious.
Poet struggling under strain,
corruption of gifts and the cheap chain
which has enticed so many men:
surely not I, not I, would cry:
Surrender gives relief from pain.
But I have said (this isn’t new)
that I would sell my soul for you
(not false to love though to the rest untrue.)
Yet that was blasphemy, I see it now,
that was a heresy love led me to.
Forgive me therefore for that sordid thought
that you, my dear, could possibly accept
a wretch dishonoured and dispirited:
that you could watch, indifferent, the sale
for even your love of honesty and wit.
And therefore I will say it yet again:
I’d sell my soul for you, my heart’s queen
not once but twice: the first time for your keen
beauty: and the second time because
you would not take a soul so small and mean.
Tumultuous plenty in the heavens,
gold-sieve of a million stars,
cold, distant, blazing, splendid,
silent and callous in their course.
Fullness of knowledge in their going,
an empty, chartless, ignorant plain.
A universe in soundless motion.
A brooding intellect alone.
It was not they who woke my thinking
It was not the miracle of their grave
fearful procession, but your face,
a naked universe of love.
Now that the ivory towers are down
and my desire is but a thin
shade of a tale that’s dead and gone,
there is only: Let me strengthen
my own spirit against pain.
For I have watched while Spain, struck dead,
salted the eyes within my head
and slowed my wheels of pride and blood,
with thoughts of nothingness and death
and heroes who have lost their breath.
And now we see on every side
heart-break and the death of pride,
the nothingness that will deride
every generous thought we nursed
to satisfy the spirit’s thirst.
Cornford in his heroic day
prayed that his love would not betray
Spain and her cross of agony –
Cornford afraid his love was near,
Cornford afraid of his fear.
What of my fear? Can I sustain
the torments that will pierce my brain
now that I’ve heard the storms begin?
They say that nightmares now annoy
and deadly famine strangles joy,
that hunger walks about the earth
with solemn ghosts of thirst and dearth
cropping our tender lives at birth
and forcing to the low grave
all our arrogance and love.
And do you think that I will pray
against the terrors of my way?
(Stopping of heart and blinded eye)
That you, my love, be wrenched and torn
from the bitter roots where you were born?
That thus I might be purified
from the infirmity in my side.
Or should I pray for a soul arrayed
in blood and battle, proudly dressed
like Dimitrov, Connolly and the rest?
Today I clearly understand
the gulf that cracks across the mind,
strife on behalf of human-kind,
the choice that catches at our breath,
immortal dying or a living death.
Mine is a hopeless death alive
because I did not force my love
out of my splendid private grove,
because when History strode by
I loved a woman in my secret sky.
I saw blood beating like a pulse,
the spirit’s lightning on the hills,
the poor world shedding all its ills,
I understood with a heart impure
the language of the wounded deer.
He whose heart is cleansed and pure
will walk unswerving through the fire,
will climb huge hills and never tire,
but mine is not the hero’s part,
who lives with a corrupted heart.
And this, the prayer you hear me pray,
is vain and blasphemous and dry,
corrupt and crooked and awry,
a prayer to pray and nothing more,
the shadow of a false fire.
I’ve heard about the death which comes
to terrify deceit and dreams
with thirst and famine in its arms.
How can I face their cruel charge
with a heart I could not learn to purge?
For when the heart is purged and clean
it can confront most bitter pain
and will not faint or suffer stain.
But who will say my white love
suffers the laughter of the grave?
There’s no need for a catechist
to tell my prayer is but a ghost,
a shadowy figure in the mist,
to show me that my spirit is not
as hard and lucid as my thought.
And since the gods cannot be blamed –
being but wishes we have dreamed,
and Christ a man who walked unarmed –
I cannot worship or extol
Nature which made my intellect whole,
the single mind and the divided soul.
I gave you eternity
and what did you give me?
Only the bitter arrows
of your hurting beauty.
You pierced me with hard onset,
you made my days sorry
with vinegar of the spirit,
the sore gleam of glory.
Yet the eternity I gave you
was born from you and to you belongs,
you taught my five senses
to put their brilliance in my songs:
and though you almost ruined me
for our hard historical campaign
I’d still receive, if I could have,
more of your weakening gifts again.
If I could see you standing now
on the calm plains of the Land of Youth,
I in forgetfulness of ruin,
you in your white glittering cloth,
I’d wish these days to return
when my spirit struggled (though in vain)
and, rather than defeated peace,
the battle to begin again.
O most beautiful white girl,
you tore my intellect apart,
you made my journey crooked
and drew me from my single art.
Yet should I ever reach that wood
where poems burn along each leaf
you were the author of my songs
you made a bard of me with grief.
I’ve built you a tall monument
on the crumpling mountains of our time,
yet this is a memorial
that men will speak of when you’re dumb
and though I lose you, and another
enjoy you to his every wish
you’ll blaze and glitter in my songs
after the setting of your flesh.