Matheson Collection > Dánta grádha

XXVIU
Foiligh Oram do rosg rin,
ma théid ar mharhhais dinn leat ;
ar ghrddh th'anma dun do bhéal,
ná feiceadh aon do dhéad gheal,
our own lips begin to move involuntarily and to murmur :
Take, oh, take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn ;
And those eyes, the break of day.
Lights that do mislead the morn.
Ó Géaráin bids his mistress put away her mirror lest, looking
in it, she ht rself be lost for love of all that irresistible beauty
and pine away self-slain like Narcissus. So the Shropshire
Lad, in our own day, warns his love :
Look not in my eyes, for fear
They mirror true the sight I see ;
And for fear that she also will dote upon her image, like
Narcissus who now wavers in the wind " a jonquil, not a
Grecian lad." We might go on matching thought with
thought, image with image, pain with pain, out of that age-
long Book of Love, whose pages return always upon them-
selves, so that the poets of the Greek Anthology, the Romans
Ovid and Propertius, the men of Provence, their pupils of
Italy, the Elizabethans, the Jacobeans, the Carolines, write
in again and again the same things with every variety of
script and idiom.
And yet when we had finished our comparisons, we should
find that there was something unconquerably native and
original in the Irish contributions, an inbred tone and quality
that comes from another tradition than the common European
and that gives their peculiar edge and accent to these poems.
This is more to be felt than illustrated, and it cannot be con-