Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition

Shepherd and Goatherd (Author: William Butler Yeats)

p.142

1. ShepherdThat cry's from the first cuckoo of the year.
   I wished before it ceased.

Goatherd
Nor bird nor beast
Could make me wish for anything this day,
Being old, but that the old alone might die,
And that would be against God's providence.
Let the young wish. But what has brought you here?
Never until this moment have we met
Where my goats browse on the scarce grass or leap
From stone to Stone.

• ShepherdI am looking for strayed sheep;
  Something has troubled me and in my trouble
  I let them stray. I thought of rhyme alone,
  For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble
  And make the daylight sweet once more; but when
  I had driven every rhyme into its place
  The sheep had gone from theirs.

  Goatherd
  I know right well
  What turned so good a shepherd from his charge.

• ShepherdHe that was best in every country sport
  And every country craft, and of us all
  Most courteous to slow age and hasty youth,
  Is dead.

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  p.143

  Goatherd
  The boy that brings my griddle-cake
  Brought the bare news.

• ShepherdHe had thrown the crook away
  And died in the great war beyond the sea.

  Goatherd
  He had often played his pipes among my hills,
  And when he played it was their loneliness,
  The exultation of their stone, that cried
  Under his fingers.

• ShepherdI had it from his mother,
  And his own flock was browsing at the door.

  Goatherd
  How does she bear her grief? There is not a shepherd
  But grows more gentle when he speaks her name,
  Remembering kindness done, and how can I,
  That found when I had neither goat nor grazing
  New welcome and old wisdom at her fire
  Till winter blasts were gone, but speak of her
  Even before his children and his wife.

• ShepherdShe goes about her house erect and calm
  Between the pantry and the linen-chest,
  Or else at meadow or at grazing overlooks
  Her labouring men, as though her darling lived,
  But for her grandson now; there is no change
  But such as I have Seen upon her face
  Watching our shepherd sports at harvest-time
  When her son's turn was over.

  Goatherd
  Sing your song.
  I too have rhymed my reveries, but youth
  Is hot to show whatever it has found,
  And till that's done can neither work nor wait.
  Old goatherds and old goats, if in all else
  Youth can excel them in accomplishment,
  Are learned in waiting.

• ShepherdYou cannot but have seen
  That he alone had gathered up no gear,
  Set carpenters to work on no wide table,
  On no long bench nor lofty milking-shed

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  p.144

  As others will, when first they take possession,
  But left the house as in his father's time
  As though he knew himself, as it were, a cuckoo,
  No settled man. And now that he is gone
  There's nothing of him left but half a score
  Of sorrowful, austere, sweet, lofty pipe tunes.

  Goatherd
  You have put the thought in rhyme.

• ShepherdI worked all day,
  And when 'twas done so little had I done
  That maybe ‘I am sorry’ in plain prose
  Had sounded better to your mountain fancy.

• Shepherd (sings)'Like the speckled bird that steers
  Thousands of leagues oversea,
  And runs or a while half-flies
  On his yellow legs through our meadows,
  He stayed for a while; and we
  Had scarcely accustomed our ears
  To his speech at the break of day,
  Had scarcely accustomed our eyes
  To his shape at the rinsing-pool
  Among the evening shadows,
  When he vanished from ears and eyes.
  I might have wished on the day
  He came, but man is a fool.'

  Goatherd
  You sing as always of the natural life,
  And I that made like music in my youth
  Hearing it now have sighed for that young man
  And certain lost companions of my own.

• ShepherdThey say that on your barren mountain ridge
  You have measured out the road that the soul treads
  When it has vanished from our natural eyes;
  That you have talked with apparitions.

  Goatherd
  Indeed
  My daily thoughts since the first stupor of youth
  Have found the path my goats' feet cannot find.

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p.145

• ShepherdSing, for it may be that your thoughts have plucked
  Some medicable herb to make our grief
  Less bitter.

  Goatherd
  They have brought me from that ridge
  Seed-pods and flowers that are not all wild poppy.

• Goatherd (sings)'He grows younger every second
  That were all his birthdays reckoned
  Much too solemn seemed;
  Because of what he had dreamed,
  Or the ambitions that he served,
  Much too solemn and reserved.
  Jaunting, journeying
  To his own dayspring,
  He unpacks the loaded pern
  Of all 'twas pain or joy to learn,
  Of all that he had made.
  The outrageous war shall fade;
  At some old winding whitethorn root
  He'll practise on the shepherd's flute,
  Or on the close-cropped grass
  Court his shepherd lass,
  Or put his heart into some game
  Till daytime, playtime seem the same;
  Knowledge he shall unwind
  Through victories of the mind,
  Till, clambering at the cradle-side,
  He dreams himself his mother's pride,
  All knowledge lost in trance
  Of sweeter ignorance.'

  Shepherd
  When I have shut these ewes and this old ram
  Into the fold, we'll to the woods and there
  Cut out our rhymes on strips of new-torn bark
  But put no name and leave them at her door.
  To know the mountain and the valley have grieved
  May be a quiet thought to wife and mother,
  And children when they spring up shoulder-high.