"March is a silversmith," I thought on Friday,
As I looked in a jeweller's window at the bright
Cups for horse-show and football prizes -
What once was foggy metal. I was right,
For the streets and houses and the river
And the faces of the people and the sky
And my own thoughts were polished silver…
Then into a silversmith's went I
And saw Michael Staunton beat with a sledge
Of buffalo horn the crude white metal
To the smoothness of a leaf in a laurel hedge
To-morrow we shall hear the song of this kettle.
The jeweller whom I met an hour before
Gave me a tip that I pass on to you:
"In buying a wristlet watch make sure
It has a circular face. The dust comes through
The rectangular one no matter how fairly
The glass is ground, and if it breaks there's trouble
In getting one to fit the casing squarely.
When you marry your wife your marry your daughter's double."
* * *
So out into the streets I went once more
Noting my street-friends and eyesight-loves go by
At the same hour. One who used to smile smiles no more
And I know she's got a lover now who's real. Her eye
Looks through me with a blank indifference. I'm not sorry.
For March is paying out at every office
White shillings that are bribes enough for worry,
And we won't need to mind about the coppers.
I think of the artists of O'Connell Bridge,
Who squeeze from us the treacle of compassion
With drawings and sad stories of the grudge
Of Fortune, Art is here a fickle fashion.
The loaf "that's easy drawn but hard to get"
Is eaten, and in its place we see
Warnings in chalk along the whole parapet
From some old almanac's philosophy.
* * *
A townland down in Monaghan: Ah surely
This makes me glad. I know these names. I can see
The Garlands and Rooneys and Quigleys
Neighbours' children in the field next to me
Playing where a bewitched blackthorn's growing
Beside a pile of fairy whinstone rocks
That no man dreams of quarrying - no knowing
What's hid beneath, who here at midnight walks.
I saw it all not far from Tividina -
But when I came to myself in Abbey Street
I was looking at the programme of a cinema
California here we come - the Gaels of Greece
Sweden or Czechoslovakia…
* * *
Yesterday evening
I went to the Botanic gardens and there
With the flowers and the plants of Ceylon and Chile,
China and New Zealand I caught the air
Of fabulous travellers. These gardens are hilly
Which makes them more interesting than Kew
Which are flat and large and monotonous.
I talked to John Besant, chief gardener, who -
Born in Perthshire - has been forty years a botanist.
I remember the almond trees in blossom
And the polyanthus that are just primroses,
Palms from the Himalays and ferns from South Africa
And the Costa Rican "Columnae gloriosa."
* * *
Antony to-night to Cleopatra runs
From Actium again - his will was flabby.
At the Gate laughs the King of all the dandy ones.
A plebian O'Cuddy marches to the Abbey.
(8 March 1943)
