There all the golden codgers lay, There the silver dew, And the great water sighed for love, And the wind sighed too. Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed By Oisin on the grass; There sighed amid his choir of love Tall pythagoras. plotinus came and looked about, The salt-flakes on his breast, And having stretched and yawned awhile Lay sighing like the rest. Straddling each a dolphin's back And steadied by a fin, Those Innocents re-live their death, Their wounds open again. The ecstatic waters laugh because Their cries are sweet and strange, Through their ancestral patterns dance, And the brute dolphins plunge Until, in some cliff-sheltered bay Where wades the choir of love Proffering its sacred laurel crowns, They pitch their burdens off. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE CROPPY BOY: (A BALLAD OF '98) by WILLIAM B. MCBURNEY DAFFODILS by LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE IN MEMORY: MISS JEWETT by GRACE ALLERTON ANDREWS THE FROGS: A 'EURIPIDEAN' CHORUS by ARISTOPHANES THESEUS, SELECTION by BACCHYLIDES PEACE AND SHEPHERD by ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD TO MISS RIGBY, ON HER ATTENDANCE UPON HER MOTHER AT BUXTON by ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD |