A Lament for Moira McCavendish

Through the midlands of Ireland I journeyed by diesel

    And bright in the sun shone the emerald plain;

Though loud sang the birds on the thorn-bush and teasel

    They could not be heard for the sound of the train.

The roll of the railway made musing creative:

    I thought of the colleen I soon was to see

With her wiry black hair and grey eyes of the native,

    Sweet Moira McCavendish, acushla machree.

Her brother’s wee cabin stands distant from Tallow

    A league and a half, where the Blackwater flows,

And the musk and potato, the mint and the mallow

    Do grow there in beauty, along with the rose.

’Twas smoothly we raced through the open expansion

    Of rush-covered levels and gate-lodge and gate

And the ruined demesne and the windowless mansion

    Where once the oppressor had revelled in state.

At Castletownroche, as the prospect grew hillier,

    I saw the far mountains to Moira long-known

Till I came to the valley and townland familiar

    With the Protestant church standing locked and alone.

O vein of my heart! upon Tallow Road Station

    No face was to greet me, so freckled and white;

As the diesel slid out, leaving still desolation,

    The McCavendish ass-cart was nowhere in sight.

For a league and a half to the Blackwater river

    I tramped with my bundle her cabin to see

And herself by the fuchsias, her young lips a-quiver

    Half-smiling, half-weeping a welcome to me.

Och Moira McCavendish! the fangs of the creeper

    Have struck at the thatch and thrust open the door;

The couch in the garden grows ranker and deeper

    Than musk and potato which bloomed there before.

Flow on, you remorseless and salmon-full waters!

    What care I for prospects so silvery fair?

The heart in me’s dead, like your sweetest of daughters,

    And I would that my spirit were lost on the air.