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Home  »  Poems of Places An Anthology in 31 Volumes  »  The Bog of Clondallagh

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Ireland: Vol. V. 1876–79.

Clondallagh

The Bog of Clondallagh

By John Frazer (1809–1849)

ARE the orchards of Scurragh

With apples still bending?

Are the wheat-ridge and furrow

On Cappaghneale blending?

Let them bend,—let them blend!

Be they fruitful or fallow,

A far dearer old friend

Is the bog of Clondallagh!

Fair Birr of the fountains,

Thy forest and river

And miniature mountains

Seemed round me forever;

But they cast from the past

No home memories, to hallow

My heart to the last,—

Like the bog of Clondallagh!

How sweet was my dreaming

By Brosna’s bright water,

While it dashed away, seeming

A mountain’s young daughter!

Yet to roam with its foam,

By the deep reach, or shallow,

Made but brighter at home

The turf fires from Clondallagh!

If, whole days of a childhood

More mournful than merry,

I sought through the wildwood

Young bird or ripe berry,

Some odd sprite or quaint knight,

Some Sindbad or Abdallah,

Was my chase by the light

Of bog fir from Clondallagh!

There the wild duck and plover

Have felt me a prowler

On their thin rushy cover,

More fatal than fowler;

And regret sways me yet

For the crash on the callow,

When the matched hurlers met

On the plains of Clondallagh!

Yea, simply to measure

The moss with a soundless

Quick step was a pleasure

Strange, stirring, and boundless;

For its spring seemed to fling

Up my foot, and to hallow

My spirit with wing,

O’er the sward of Clondallagh!

But alas! in the season

Of blossoming gladness,

May be strewed over reason

Rank seeds of vain sadness!

While a wild, wayward child,

With my young heart all callow,

It was warmed and beguiled

By dear Jane of Clondallagh!

On the form with her seated,

No urchin dare press on

My place, while she cheated

Me into my lesson!

But soon came a fond claim

From a lover to hallow

His hearth with a dame—

In my Jane of Clondallagh!

When the altar had risen,

From Jane to divide me,

I seemed in a prison,

Though she still was beside me;

And I knew more the true

From the love false or shallow,

The farther I flew

From that bride and Clondallagh!

From the toils of the city

My fancy long bore me,

To sue her to pity

The fate she brought o’er me!

And the dream, wood and stream,

The green fields, and the fallow,

Still return, like a beam,

From dear Jane of Clondallagh!