SKIM-MILK 

 A small part only of my grief I write; And if I do not give you all the tale It is because my gloom gets some respite By just a small bewailing: I bewail That I with sly and stupid folk must bide Who steal my food and ruin my inside. 

 Once I had books, each book beyond compare, But now no book at all is left to me, And I am spied and peeped on everywhere, And my old head, stuffed with latinity, And with the poet's load of grave and gay Will not get me skim-milk for half a day. 

 Wild horse or quiet, not a horse have I, But to the forest every day I go Bending beneath a load of wood, that high! Which raises on my back a sorry row Of raw, red blisters; so I cry, alack, The rider that rides me will break my back. 

 Ossian, when he was old and near his end, Met Patrick by good luck, and he was stayed; I am a poet too and seek a friend, A prop, a staff, a comforter, an aid, A Patrick who will lift me from despair, In Cormac Uasal Mac Donagh of the golden hair. 

 

 

 BLUE BLOOD 

 We thought at first, this man is a king for sure, Or the branch of a mighty and ancient and famous lineage— That silly, sulky, illiterate, black-avised boor Who was hatched by foreign vulgarity under a hedge. 

 The good men of Clare were drinking his health in a flood, And gazing with me in awe at the princely lad, And asking each other from what bluest blueness of blood His daddy was squeezed, and the pa of the da of his dad? 

 We waited there, gaping and wondering, anxiously, Until he'd stop eating and let the glad tidings out, And the slack-jawed booby proved to the hilt that he Was lout, son of lout, by old lout, and was da to a lout! 

 

 

 O'BRUAIDAR 

 I will sing no more songs: the pride of my country I sang Through forty long years of good rhyme, without any avail; And no one cared even as much as the half of a hang For the song or the singer, so here is an end to the tale. 

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