Joseph Campbell ( Seosamh MacCathmhaoil ) |
Joseph Campbell was born in Belfast in 1881, and is not only a poet but an artist; he made all the illustrations for The Rushlight (1906), a volume of his own poems. Writing under the Gaelic form of his name, he has published half a dozen books of verse, the most striking of which is The Mountainy Singer, first published in Dublin in 1909. I AM THE MOUNTAINY SINGER I am the mountainy singer—
The voice of the peasant's dream,
The cry of the wind on the wooded hill,
The leap of the fish in the stream.
Quiet and love I sing—
The carn on the mountain crest,
The cailin in her lover's arms,
The child at its mother's breast.
Beauty and peace I sing—
The fire on the open hearth,
The cailleach spinning at her wheel,
The plough in the broken earth.
Travail and pain I sing—
The bride on the childing bed,
The dark man laboring at his rhymes,
The eye in the lambing shed.
Sorrow and death I sing—
The canker come on the corn,
The fisher lost in the mountain loch,
The cry at the mouth of morn.
No other life I sing,
For I am sprung of the stock
That broke the hilly land for bread,
And built the nest in the rock!
THE OLD WOMAN As a white candle
In a holy place,
So is the beauty
Of an aged face.
As the spent radiance
Of the winter sun,
So is a woman
With her travail done,
Her brood gone from her,
And her thoughts as still
As the waters
Under a ruined mill.
|
  |
