You gave but will not give again

Until enough of Paudeen's pence

By Biddy's halfpennies have lain

To be 'some sort of evidence,'

Before you'll put your guineas down,

That things it were a pride to give

Are what the blind and ignorant town

Imagines best to make it thrive.

What cared Duke Ercole, that bid

His mummers to the market place,

What th' onion-sellers thought or did

So that his Plautus set the pace

For the Italian comedies?

And Guidobaldo, when he made

That grammar school of courtesies

Where wit and beauty learned their trade

Upon Urbino's windy hill,

Had sent no runners to and fro

That he might learn the shepherds' will.

And when they drove out Cosimo,

Indifferent how the rancour ran,

He gave the hours they had set free

To Michelozzo's latest plan

For the San Marco Library,

Whence turbulent Italy should draw

Delight in Art whose end is peace,

In logic and in natural law

By sucking at the dugs of Greece.

Your open hand but shows our loss,

For he knew better how to live.

Let Paudeens play at pitch and toss,

Look up in the sun's eye and give

What the exultant heart calls good

That some new day may breed the best

Because you gave, not what they would

But the right twigs for an eagle's nest!

What need you, being come to sense,

But fumble in a greasy till

And add the halfpence to the pence

And prayer to shivering prayer, until

You have dried the marrow from the bone;

For men were born to pray and save:

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,

It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind

The names that stilled your childish play,

They have gone about the world like wind,

But little time had they to pray

For whom the hangman's rope was spun,

And what, God help us, could they save:

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,

It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread

The grey wing upon every tide;

For this that all that blood was shed,

For this Edward Fitzgerald died,

And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,

All that delirium of the brave;

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,

It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,

And call those exiles as they were,

In all their loneliness and pain

You'd cry 'some woman's yellow hair

Has maddened every mother's son':

They weighed so lightly what they gave,

But let them be, they're dead and gone,

They're with O'Leary in the grave.