Sweeny, Peregrine
The Verse

I

God has given me life;

without music, without rest,
without woman's company,
loveless
he gave me life,

and so you find me here
living disgraced in Ros Bearaigh;
the life God gave
seems somehow dislocated.

You do not wish to know me.

II

The blackthorn drinks my blood again,
my face bleeds on the sodden wood.

Flood and ebb encompass me;
lunar phases can't affect
the homicidal iron I dread.

Thorns lance my sores. I doze.

III

Is it the cold that wakes me;
can deadly iron draw near through dream?

Here night is palpable. - Listen!
hear the sound of mounted men
thunderous through the echoing wood;
have they my imminent death in mind?

Only the rain throbs on the grass.

IV

My lids still slack,
a year of fearful nights has made them
heavy as lids of gold.

Christ, king of saints, hear me,
this is no fate for a monarch.
What dignity is there in this,
dodging between tree and tree?

My feet are open sores.
Two black suns
burn in my face
and my raw lips pulse
like edges of a wound.

V

This clearing is too open,
without trees;
I am vulnerable here
without spear or shield.

I have no weapons;
I know no women in Glen Bolcain.

Listen to the wind.
No deftfingers jerk the lutestring.

The blackthorn bears new fruit tonight:
an insane king.

His blood becomes its sap,
flowing like water.

VI

I am too weak for wars,
mine is a complete poverty;
snow sits next neighbour to the bone
of pauper and energumen.

There is no further hindrance in the night
which snow-blind eyes anticipate;
ice and wood
have thrown up palisades against me,
blossoms can lacerate theflesh.
Pathways of this dementia
writhe, serpentine, on earth.

My pale paunch juts
from a torn and threadbare vest:
I am Sweeny of Ros Earcain,
call me Sweeny crazed.

The ice-sharp wind lances me through,
the snow has left me red and raw;
upon this gale I drift to death
that dangles from each twisted tree:
fear has enervated me,
left me frenzied in Glen Bolcain.

VII

Madness shrieks beneath my feet
as I search for watercress.

Madness lurks among the reeds
leaping at me when I stoop
about a hill-pool.

Madness has a white and haggard face.

VIII

When the livid sky is swollen with thunder
and the reeds ache beneath the pelting hail;
then you may see the proud, the noble Sweeny
dragging his sodden rags across blueflesh.

IX

In summertime the blue-grey herons stand
rigid above sharp waters.

In wintertime the wolfpacks
thread the snow-glens with their spoor,
and with their moaning they thread the long wind.

I hear their snow-blurred howling
as I cross the iron lakes
and crack the frost from my beard.

X

Frost stands in the air
ice grips the bone;
ice holds half the doubled moon:
snow is coldest
before dawn.

Nothing delays, my love,
decay of crimson cloth.
On bleak plateaux
snow and the wind
undressed me long ago;
cruel sempstress briar
confounds seam and suture,
sews my skin with wood.

Sweeny possessed
is Sweeny dispossessed
of glib and dazzling wife.
Do not, therefore,
distress yourself
who once were
subject of my
sad distraction;
with you, good love,
I harvest tares.

You and the thorn
still mortify
proudflesh.
For a down bed
I am abandoned
and unanswerèd;

the falcon does not brood
upon such mutes.
Chanting, I will stoop and bind
upon afield of air.

Brambles cast
sly nets of wood;
the air is thorned with frost:
before dawn always
wind is sharpest.

XI

You whose thorned orbsfix me
know I am a fallen image;

dulled and scarred since war
is Sweeny, the pre-eminent:

stay house-held and husbanded;
our paths, co-terminal. Woman, I go.

XII

Life is loud in the glen.

Frail stag,
your cry has halted me;
now I am sick with sudden longing:

odour of herds from pasturelands,
stag bold in crag and sky.

Oak, broad and leafy spire;
good fruit bends the hazel wands.

Gap stopped with dappled boughs,
bright alder boughs;
there are no blood specks on my skin
as I move on.

Blackthorn: barbed wine. And this
above the pool and on the pool, sparse
and sour green,
cress.

Saxifrage and oyster-grass
are a green path. and see
this ochre, fallen fruit,
this apple-tree.

Mountain blossom. Mountain ash.
Myflesh has dropped in a crimson net;
briar, drunk-thorn briar.

Yew is the little churchyard tree,
and where the night of wood congeals
the ensnarled darkness is named 'ivy'.

In hollyboughs I hide from storms,
I hide from the clubbed ash too.

Verge of a dark wood,
vertical chalked motif,
slender, silver, coiling, lovely
birch.

Aspen is swift; its leaves
sing like a distant war;
green blade smashes green blade.
Then, for a time,
silence.

In forest glades
my dread:
oakwood pendulous in wind.

XIII

Mountains are rivered slopes,
brown rock and scree;
I would sleep if I were let
in green twilight of Glen Bolcain.

Water; light through green glass,
wind bright as glancing steel,
the ouzel sips the vivid spring,
cress green as the ocean's ice.

Slopes littered with tough ivy,
thin willows blade the mirrored streams,
yews are intense and many there,
birch is the dim glen's lamp.

No act could hold me, Loingseachan;
I would break frosted routes up Boirche.

You were a scabbard of iron words:
father and mother
daughter and son
and brother dead;

supple sweet body,
bright wife
gone to earth.

I am a cave of pain.

XIV

Dense wood is my security,
the ivy has no edge.

Though the lark pursues me,
summed, I take the dove
that crosses, and am no red hawk.
Shadow of the rising woodcock,
blackbird's scream, disturb me.

I stoop to see the little fox
a-worrying of the butchered bones;
he has more shifts to seize me than the wolf.
The guileful fox, the murderous wolf I shun,
scumber andfilth befoul them.

Light folds and bends in the chill ice
of pools, and I am cold.
Still, the heron is at sedge,
the badgers squeal in Benna Broc.

Here there are ample stags
to turn much fallow with the share,
but no hand holds
the stag of high Sliabh Eibhlinne,
the stag of sharp Sliabh Fuaid,
the stags of Ealla and of Orrery,
thefierce stag of Loch Lein,
the stag of twin-spurred Baireann;
each stands at rest on salient ground.

Sweeny, I, swift visitant of glens;
rather, call me Man Run Through.
O stag, I could lie down
among your jagged tines
in pointed luxury;
now I await thefinal point.

See the royal stag go by
dressed in his tattered velvet.

Ronan Finn compelled me here.

XV

My sleep is sad
without feather-bed, numb
from the sharp air
and the grit of the wind-blown snow.

Cold wind with ice,
ghost of an old sun,
shelter of a single tree
on this barren table-land.

Striding through rainstorms,
pacing the mountain deer-paths
and paths through grass
in the orange frost at dawn;
stags are belling
in forest copses,
the paths of the deer are sheer and hard:

I hear the hammer of the distant surf.

O great God above
my weakness is also great
and black are the sorrows of Sweeny
whose scrotum hangs slack.

XVI

Four winds fetch many miles
to meet in me, am as a fifth,
fluent and cold. Boirche
is perilous: so deep
its silent reaches, power
of secret currents threatens me.

I have not yet forgotten
harvest-time in Ulster
around quivering Lough Cuan;

I have lived in Ossory
and within the glades of Meath,
now their springs inhabit me;
in the aftermath of fruit
observe such exaltation:

I sift the debris of the shattered woods.

XVII

I occupy in alien woods
an old retreat;
in my familiar square of trees
shrewd centre of such intimate quincunx am I
whistle of a woken plover
is unsettling plangency.

Secure amid a lasting drift of leaves
I graze on mast and sorrel.
Hazards are these:
shy doves agog in upper branches,
cormorant's disturbance.

Where heron calls cold waters move,
my soft co-occupant of woods.

XVIII

Enmity is sorrow.

Better be stillborn,
better a misbirth, slight sprawling foetus,
than bear enmity.

There is seldom a league of three
but one murmurs;
blackthorn and briar have wounded me
so it is I who murmur.

The crazed woman fears her man;
mine is a curious story,
as the naked man, his feet unshod,
hides from the fearful woman.

When the wild duck and the autumn
move among the glades and lakes,
and the woodlands glow like thickening honey;
then it is good to rest, cradled in the gloom of ivy.

Whosoever bears enmity,
whether man or wife,
whosoever bears enmity,
may he die eternally.

Glen Bolcain has bright waters;
I have heard it loud with birds
and foaming streams
and the lisp of river-surf on reefs.

Holly and the close wands of its hazel
have sheltered me; berries and nuts
acorns and blue velvet sloes,
these have fed me.

Its woods are quick with hounds,
and the stag, at gaze, barks;
all is mirrored in the lucid waters.

I did not hate it.

XIX

My madnessfinds congruity
on the frozen peak of Boirche;
but what milk or bread sustains
flesh invaded by the snow?

A strait bed sprung with frost
straddles the barren rock,
branches play bone
to wasted limbs.

In a cage of ice
I pace the bars
while frost-buds mimic sweat.

I givefire to the glinting wind.

As the snow succeeds the hail
in autumn I, precipitate,
abandon chasms
of oblique basalt
for zones less igneous,
less cold: replete
anfractuous Glen Bolcain.

Four gaps to the wind
de. ne the glen;
its fertile woods,
its frigid springs
trapped in sheer pits.

Through clear pools gravel spins
in a shifting vortex,
cress and brooklime
dip their leaves
to make a green meniscus.
Beyond, as in, Glen Bolcain
drenched earth tonight is frozen,
but no marauder breaks
the glen's secure horizon.

Bitter leaves
drift among berries there,
garlic and the wild onion
exhale their pungent steam
against the iridescence of the sloes,
and underfoot the path
is frail with acorns.

See, in decaying groves, a king
who stumbles among pawns.

XX

I am miserable
Sweeny,
bone and blood
are dead;
sleepless;
storm-sound
is the only music.

Luachair Deaghaidh
to Fiodh Gaibhle
journeying,
fed on the ivy-crop
and oakmast;
a twelvemonth on this mountain,
aviform,
gorged on the saffron holly-fruit.

Berserk
in Glen Bolcain,
my anguish is
patent,
my strength is worn away tonight,
I have cause for grief.

XXI

Cliff of Farannan,
abode of saints; with many hazel groves
and nuts in cluster; quick icy brooks
that sprinkle down its walls: there are green cords
of ivy, a rich mast of acorns
and the apple-trees,
heavy with good fruit they arc
their boughs.
Many badgers make their setts and the lithe hare
shelters there, the seals gather in
from the open sea.

I am Sweeny,
son of Colman the Just.
I have lain weak
beneath many frostfalls;
Ronan of Druim Gess outraged me.

I shall rest beneath some tree
at that far
waterfall.

XXII

I once thought that the quiet speech
of people held less melody
than the low throating of doves
thatflutter above a pool.

I thought the bell
by my elbow not so sweet
as thefluting of the blackbird to the mountain
or the bellow of a hart in the storm.

I thought the voice
of a lovely woman less melodious
than the dawn-cry
of the mountain grouse.

I thought the yowling
of the wolves more beautiful
than the baa and bleat
of a preaching priest.

Though in your chapel youfind melody
in the quiet speech of students,
I prefer the awesome chant
of Glen Bolcain's hounds.

Though you relish salted hams
and the fresh meat of ale-houses,
I would rather taste a spray of cress
in some zone exempt from grief.

I am transfixed; the iron
intrudes on shattered bone.
Tell me, God who sanctions all,
why did I survive Magh Rath?

Though each bed I made
without deceit was good
I would rather inhabit familiar stone
above Glen Bolcain's wood.

I give thanks to you, Christ,
for partaking of your body;
in my death I truly repent
all my evil deeds.