The Burial

Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.

"The Burial"

by Rev. James Mills

A faint breeze is playing with flowers on the hill, And the blue vault of summer is cloudless and still; And the vale with the wild bloom of nature is gay, And the far hills are breathing a sorrowful lay.

As winds on the clairseach's sad chords when they stream, As the voice of the dead on the mourner's dark dream, Far away, far away from gray distance it breaks, First known to the breast by the sadness it wakes.

Now lower, now louder and longer it mourns; Now faintly it falls, and now fitful returns; Now near, and now nearer, it swells on the ear, The wild ululu, the death song is near.

With slow steps, sad burden, and wild uttered wail, Maid, matron, and cotter wind up from the vale; And loud lamentations salute the gray hill, Where their fathers are sleeping, the silent and still.

Wild, wildly that wail ringeth back on the air, From that lone place of graves, as if spirits were there; O'er the silent, the still, and the cold they deplore, They weep for the tearless, whose sorrows are o'er.

Alfred M. Williams, The Poets and Poetry of Ireland: With Historical and Critical Essays and Notes (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881), 437.

Alfred M. Williams

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