Chapter 2

Unto the deep the deep heart goes, It lays its sadness nigh the breast: Only the Mighty Mother knows The wounds that quiver unconfessed.

It seeks a deeper silence still; It folds itself around with peace, Where thoughts alike of good or ill In quietness unfostered cease.

It feels in the unwounding vast For comfort for its hopes and fears: The Mighty Mother bows at last; She listens to her children's tears.

Where the last anguish deepens--there The fire of beauty smites through pain: A glory moves amid despair, The Mother takes her child again.

SACRIFICE

Those delicate wanderers, The wind, the star, the cloud, Ever before mine eyes, As to an altar bowed, Light and dew-laden airs Offer in sacrifice.

The offerings arise: Hazes of rainbow light, Pure crystal, blue, and gold, Through dreamland take their flight; And 'mid the sacrifice God moveth as of old.

In miracles of fire He symbols forth his days; In gleams of crystal light Reveals what pure pathways Lead to the soul's desire, The silence of the height.

RECONCILIATION

I begin through the grass once again to be bound to the Lord; I can see, through a face that has faded, the face full of rest Of the Earth, of the Mother, my heart with her heart in accord: As I lie mid the cool green tresses that mantle her breast I begin with the grass once again to be bound to the Lord.

By the hand of a child I am led to the throne of the King, For a touch that now fevers me not is forgotten and far, And His infinite sceptred hands that sway us can bring Me in dreams from the laugh of a child to the song of a star. On the laugh of a child I am borne to the joy of the King.

Well, when all is said and done Best within my narrow way, May some angel of the sun Muse memorial o'er my clay:

'Here was beauty all betrayed From the freedom of her state; From her human uses stayed On an idle rhyme to wait.

Ah, what deep despair might move If the beauty lit a smile, Or the heart was warm with love That was pondering the while.

He has built his monument With the winds of time at strife, Who could have before he went Written in the book of life.

To the stars from which he came Empty handed he goes home; He who might have wrought in flame Only traced upon the foam.'

THE NUTS OF KNOWLEDGE

'Sinend daughter of Lodan Lucharglan, son of Lir, out of the Land of Promise went to Connlas' Well which is under the sea, to behold it. That is a well at which are the hazels of wisdom and inspiration that is, the hazels of the science of poetry; and in the same hour their fruit and their blossom & their foliage break forth, and then fall upon the well in the same shower, which raises upon the water a royal surge of purple.'

HERE ENDS THE NUTS OF KNOWLEDGE, WRITTEN BY A.E., PRINTED, UPON PAPER MADE IN IRELAND, AND PUBLISHED BY ELIZABETH CORBET YEATS AT THE DUN EMER PRESS, IN THE HOUSE OF EVELYN GLEESON AT DUNDRUM IN THE COUNTY OF DUBLIN, IRELAND, FINISHED ON THE TENTH DAY OF OCTOBER, IN THE YEAR NINETEEN HUNDRED & THREE.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Nuts of Knowledge, by George William Russell