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There all the golden codgers lay, |
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There the silver dew, |
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And the great water sighed for love, |
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And the wind sighed too. |
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Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed |
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By Oisin on the grass; |
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There sighed amid his choir of love |
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Tall pythagoras. |
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Plotinus came and looked about, |
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The salt-flakes on his breast, |
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And having stretched and yawned awhile |
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Lay sighing like the rest. |
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Straddling each a dolphin's back |
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And steadied by a fin, |
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Those Innocents re-live their death, |
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Their wounds open again. |
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The ecstatic waters laugh because |
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Their cries are sweet and strange, |
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Through their ancestral patterns dance, |
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And the brute dolphins plunge |
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Until, in some cliff-sheltered bay |
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Where wades the choir of love |
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Proffering its sacred laurel crowns, |
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They pitch their burdens off. |
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Slim adolescence that a nymph has stripped, |
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Peleus on Thetis stares. |
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Her limbs are delicate as an eyelid, |
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Love has blinded him with tears; |
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But Thetis' belly listens. |
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Down the mountain walls |
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From where pan's cavern is |
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Intolerable music falls. |
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Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear, |
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Belly, shoulder, bum, |
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Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs |
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Copulate in the foam. |