The Wayfarer

The beauty of the world has made me sad.
This beauty that will pass.

Sometimes my heart has shaken with great joy
to see a leaping squirrel on a tree
or a red ladybird upon a stalk.
Or little rabbits, in a field at evening,
lit by a slanty sun.

Or some green hill, where shadows drifted by,
some quiet hill, where mountainy man has sown, and soon will reap, near to the gate of heaven.

Or little children with bare feet
upon the sands of some ebbed sea, or playing in the streets
of little towns in Connacht.

Things young and happy.

And then my heart has told me -
these will pass,
will pass and change,
will die and be no more.

Things bright, and green.
Things young, and happy.

And I have gone upon my way, sorrowful.

That is by Padraig Pearse. The poem at the top of the thread reminded me of it. And when I went to check the lines, from a suberb reading by Milo O'Shea on a record in 1967, I was reminded that it's one of the very few poems that can be relied on to bring me to tears.

And it makes it easier to understand how great love can lead to people doing terrible things - in Dublin 1916, or to a vastly lesser extent, in Seattle 1999, and that some of the roots of Yeats' "Terrible beauty" do not lie far away from ther concerns that moved people in Seattle.

We'd all better be very careful not to allow ourselves to be carried to places we don't want to go to.