| ALTHOUGH I can see him still, | |
| The freckled man who goes | |
| To a grey place on a hill | |
| In grey Connemara clothes | |
| At dawn to cast his flies, | 5 |
| It’s long since I began | |
| To call up to the eyes | |
| This wise and simple man. | |
| All day I’d looked in the face | |
| What I had hoped ’twould be | 10 |
| To write for my own race | |
| And the reality; | |
| The living men that I hate, | |
| The dead man that I loved, | |
| The craven man in his seat, | 15 |
| The insolent unreproved, | |
| And no knave brought to book | |
| Who has won a drunken cheer, | |
| The witty man and his joke | |
| Aimed at the commonest ear, | 20 |
| The clever man who cries | |
| The catch-cries of the clown, | |
| The beating down of the wise | |
| And great Art beaten down. | |
| |
| Maybe a twelvemonth since | 25 |
| Suddenly I began, | |
| In scorn of this audience, | |
| Imagining a man | |
| And his sun-freckled face, | |
| And grey Connemara cloth, | 30 |
| Climbing up to a place | |
| Where stone is dark under froth, | |
| And the down turn of his wrist | |
| When the flies drop in the stream: | |
| A man who does not exist, | 35 |
| A man who is but a dream; | |
| And cried, ‘Before I am old | |
| I shall have written him one | |
| Poem maybe as cold | |
| And passionate as the dawn.’ | 40 |