Stranger: What kind your people are
I would wish to know -
Round-shouldered men like rolling-stock?
Great in despair
Simple in prayer
And their hard hands tear
The soil on the rock
Where the plough cannot go?
Poet: 'Tis not so.
Faint-hearted folk my people are
To Poverty's house they have never invited
The giant Pride,
But await the hour when wrongs are righted.
They till their fields and scrape among the stones
Because they cannot all be policemen -
They work because they cannot eat the stones.
Stranger: Poet be fair
You surely must have seen
Beneath these rags of care
Hearts that were not mean
And cowardly and faint?
Poet: O stranger why
Should poet seek to prove
The lean purse of a saint?
For one in love
Would never sharply pry
Into the quiet cove
Where all that is God's
Is safe from the hurtling clods.
I cannot give you what you wish
But I shall give you other things
I shall pile your dish
With the flesh historian's find on Irish kings.
Stranger: I will go
To my townfull [sic] of vermin
That sways to-and-fro
Like fool-heads at a sermon.
I shall pour out for them
The vitriol of Hell,
And may Christ condemn
My name if I tell
Of the jewels your folk
Hide in a thin cloak.
