’It’s my grief that I am not a fair salmon,
    Going through the strong full water,
    Catching the mayflies by my craft,
    Swimming at my choice, and swimming with the stream.

    ’It’s my grief that I am of the race of the poets;
    It would be better for me to be a high rock,
    Or a stone or a tree or an herb or a flower
    Or anything at all, but the thing that I am.’

The sympathy of the moods of nature with the moods of man is a traditional heritage that has come to us through the poets, from the old time when the three great waves of the sea answered to a cry of distress in Ireland, or when, as in Israel, the land mourned and the herbs of every field withered, for the wickedness of them that dwelt therein.  The sea, and the winds blowing from the sea, can never be very far from the dweller in Ireland; and they echo the loneliness of the lonely listener.

    ’Cold, sharp lamentation
    In the cold bitter winds
    Ever blowing across the sky;
    Oh, there was loneliness with me!

    ’The loud sounding of the waves
    Beating against the shore,
    Their vast, rough, heavy outcry,
    Oh, there was loneliness with me!

    ’The light sea-gulls in the air,
    Crying sharply through the harbours,
    The cries and screams of the birds
    With my own heart!  Oh! that was loneliness.

    ’The voice of the winds and the tide,
    And the long battle of the mighty war;
    The sea, the earth, the skies, the blowing of the winds. 
    Oh! there was loneliness in all of them together.’

Here is a verse from another poem of loneliness:—­

    ’It is dark the night is; I do not see one star at all;
    And it is dark and heavy my thoughts are that are scattered and
        straying. 
    There is no sound about but of the birds going over my head—­
    The lapwing striking the air with long-drawn, weak blows
    And the plover, that comes like a bullet, cutting the night with its
        whistle;
    And I hear the wild geese higher again with their rough screech. 
    But I do not hear any other sound, it is that increases my grief—­
    Not one other cry but the cry and the call of the birds on the bog.’

Here is another, in which the storm outside and the storm within answer to one another:—­

    ’The heavy clouds are threatening,
    And it’s little but they’ll take the roof off the house;
    The heavy thunder is answering
    To every flash of the yellow fire. 
    I, by myself, within in my room,
    That is narrow, small, warm, am sitting,
    I look at the surly skies,
    And I listen to the wind.

    ’I was light, airy, lively,
    On the young morning of yesterday;
    But when the evening came,
    I was like a dead man! 
    I have not one jot of hope
    But for a bed in the clay;
    Death is the same as life to me
    From this out, from a word I heard yesterday.’