This Maytime (verse)
Powers, Jessica
May 26, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 73 thorns and thistles, my sons, and make a beautiful spot of birds, belongs to...
...on a stone nearby travesty of something done in a great style...
...The monastery that he -these are the visible monuments in Clonmacnoise...
...I sit of the place...
...Now Clonmacnoise stands open to the sky where Since she is lost the broad, slow-flowing Shannon makes a bend...
...sitting on a chair, holding a teacher's ferule or rod, Clonmacnoise: "In a quiet watered land, a land of on the top of which is an owl, the symbol of wisdom, roses, stands Saint Kieran's city fair...
...A friend sculptures...
...friendly houses...
...While one of the churches was being The crosses at Monasterboice, and the crosses here, built the wife of a worker died, leaving two infants...
...Its great period was midway between That presses on my nostrils and my heart these dates...
...he came, some say in the fifth, Two crosses, two towers, the ruins of two churches some, in the sixth century...
...to have made an effort to produce trees that can stand But, Clonmacnoise ! And Turcan, who didst sculpbeside the ancient Irish towers, and over graves, as in ture at the base of thy great cross "an ecclesiastic this place...
...With ill intent...
...His community This May time had a longer life than most learned communities have Since she is gone, enjoyed-it lasted for a thousand years, until the This spring I cannot bear English garrison in Athlone destroyed its flickering To walk beneath the weight of lilac scent life in 1552...
...If we had remained But, Clonmacnoise 1 none other of Ireland's sacred here," said he, speaking of another place further up places has an eyesore planted so permanently upon the river where he and his companions had stayed for it as you have ! a while, "if we had remained here we would have Across the river is Connacht: one sees a few white, plenty of wealth, but few souls would go to Heaven...
...Turcan 1 Clonmacnoise 1 the power of being stirred by heroic memories...
...Shepherds and saints-one can hardly under an ash-tree that has the wind roaring in its think of any other sort of folk having been here...
...high as it is it seems It looks like a high candle there...
...So while its end rests on a beast denoting ignorance," the poem about Clonmacnoise-surely one of the most what of that little Protestant church with its horrid beautiful poems about a place ever written-begins...
...Indeed it is true, that in Ireland the more ancient a Clonmacnoise is not a land of roses...
...they are in the County Roscommon...
...it is not near burial place is the more it is desecrated, and that one any place that at any time might have been a land of gets used to seeing foolish little marble headstones and roses...
...roses might grow abundantly...
...little roof of tight slates and with its padlock on the I do not know O'Gnieve's poem in the original, but it door-what of this church that breaks the balance of can hardly be more beautiful than the translation by the towers and stands right in the way of the grave, T. W. Rolleston...
...The Round Tower is over a hundred feet ing on it one can believe that the men who lived in high...
...Apparently there were no cattle around, for Kevin One has never seen a Celtic cross unless one has seen had to command a doe to come down from the moun- the crosses in these places, and, perhaps, the cross in tain to give nourishment to the children...
...It has in it what is most authentic grey ruin of an ancient church as one looks at Clonin Irish literature-the sense of kinship with the dead, macnoise from the river...
...the cross at Monasterboice belongs to his throw some pagan mystery that was connected with school...
...And in the cone- the remnant of a still higher tower...
...There are curlews in flocks there ; they To brave the daggers in a robin's song...
...sixty or seventy, but 6oo feet high...
...And I doubt if Kieran, the carpenter's son, glass cases that enclose artificial wreaths on the graves had any care to found a monastery in a place where that break the grasses in Cashel and in Glendalough...
...But one does not think of it as really high- this strange place a thousand years ago built it, not everything here has to be on a companionable level...
...It was in 544 that Saint Kieran came here and laid the foundation of a place of learning...
...At But lately unto me, I am not strong the other side of the river are the flat pastures of Enough without the armor of her love Roscommon...
...Beside the other shaped Irish yew-trees that grow near it, nature seems tower is a ruined church with a beautiful doorway...
...the Deer Stone...
...founded had its great period at the beginning of the One of the round towers-O'Rourke's Tower, I think tenth century-now, the high Round Tower, the ruins it is called, carried my mind up further than any of little churches, are all that remain of the estab- round tower I have ever seen...
...the dark lakes here...
...are amongst the great pieces of monumental sculpture...
...It is topless...
...May 26, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 73 thorns and thistles, my sons, and make a beautiful spot of birds, belongs to emptiness, to desolation...
...branches, and look on the towers, the ruined churches, There is a stone with a hollow in it that is called the high crosses, and the river bending beyond...
...rise up making a call that, more than any other call JESSICA POWERS...
...Turcan was the sculptor of the higher of of mine, a scholar, maintains that Kevin came to over- the two...
...She was Iona : what is put up for modern monuments is a milked into the hollow of the stone...
...the cross of Muiredach in Monasterboice, the crosses They were shepherds who discovered Kevin ; he was here are of limestone and are covered with quaint living in a hollow tree, a young anchoret...
...Looklishment...
...Like is the mark of where the father sat...
Vol. 4 • May 1926 • No. 3
