I AM THE MAN-CHILD

I am the man-child. From a virgin womb,

Begot among the hills of virgin loins,

The generation of a hundred kings,

I come. I am the man-child glorious,

The love-son of the second birth foretold

By western bards, the fruit of form and strength

By nature's prophylactic forethought joined

In marriage with their kind, the crown, the peak,

The summit of the scheme of things, the pride

And glory of the hand of God.

Behold!

Where in the spaces of the morning world

The sunrise shines my harbinger, the hills

Leap up, the young winds sing, the rivers dance,

The leaving forests laugh, the eagles scream;

For I am one with them, a mate, a brother,

Bound by nature to the human soul

That thro’ the accidents of nature runs.

And wherefore do they leap and laugh and sing,

And dance like vestals on a holyday?

Because their hearts are glad, and maenad-like,

They fain would share the frenzied cup they drink

With me, the man-child glorious.

I am he,

Even he, the master-mould, the paragon!

Behold me in my nonage, child and man:

The ripest grape on beauty's procreant vine,

The reddest apple of ingathering:

Perfect in form, of peerless strength, and free

As Caoilte when he roamed the primal hills

( Those “wildernesses rich with liberty” ),

A hero that the shocks of chance might strike,

But never tame, a giant druid-ringed,

A god-like savage of the golden days

Ere service shackled action: free itself

As Oisin when he strayed in Doire-cairn,

His hand upon the mountain top, his feet

Fixt in the flowing sea, his holy head

Crowned by a flight of birds, acclaiming him

The singer of the dawn.