Wise men in their bad hours have envied
The little people making merry like grasshoppers
In spots of sunlight, hardly thinking
Backward but never forward, and if they somehow
Take hold upon the future they do it
Half asleep, with the tools of generation
Foolishly reduplicating
Folly in thirty-year periods; the eat and laugh too,
Groan against labors, wars and partings,
Dance, talk, dress and undress; wise men have pretended
The summer insects enviable;
One must indulge the wise in moments of mockery.
Strength and desire possess the future,
The breed of the grasshopper shrills, "What does the future
Matter, we shall be dead?" Ah, grasshoppers,
Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made
Something more equal to the centuries
Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
The mountains are dead stone, the people
Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,
The mountains are not softened nor troubled
And a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper.

come out ye Black ‘n’ Tans
          ye self-despising slaves to the crown
come out and fight me like a man*
          I pity thee—Mercury to the Union Jack
cowering behind blinding flares that never
cease to illuminate the British Empire.

Sympathetic Mercury—suppliant
to the tempest knees of Jove—what good
is sympathy when ******* by cowardice?
open the flood-gates for the hand
of Jove to press a cage upon
the misted shores na hÉireann.