Aubrey De Vere

The Rock of Cashel

ROYAL and saintly Cashel! I would gaze
Upon the wreck of thy departed powers,
Not in the dewy light of matin hours,
Nor the meridian pomp of summer’s blaze,
But at the close of dim autumnal days,
When the sun’s parting glance, through slanting showers,
Sheds o’er thy rock-throned battlements and towers
Such awful gleams as brighten o’er Decay’s
Prophetic cheek. At such a time, methinks,
There breathes from thy lone courts and voiceless aisles
A melancholy moral; such as sinks
On the lone traveller’s heart, amid the piles
Of vast Persepolis on her mountain stand,
Or Thebes half buried in the desert sand.