I am the man-child. From a virgin womb, Begot among the hills of virgin loins, The generation of a hundred kings, I come. I am the man-child glorious,
The love-son of the second birth foretold By western bards, the fruit of form and strength By nature's prophylactic forethought joined In marriage with their kind, the crown, the peak,
The summit of the scheme of things, the pride And glory of the hand of God. Behold! Where in the spaces of the morning world
The sunrise shines my harbinger, the hills Leap up, the young winds sing, the rivers dance, The leaving forests laugh, the eagles scream; For I am one with them, a mate, a brother,
Bound by nature to the human soul That thro’ the accidents of nature runs. And wherefore do they leap and laugh and sing, And dance like vestals on a holyday?
Because their hearts are glad, and maenad-like, They fain would share the frenzied cup they drink With me, the man-child glorious. I am he,
Even he, the master-mould, the paragon! Behold me in my nonage, child and man: The ripest grape on beauty's procreant vine, The reddest apple of ingathering:
Perfect in form, of peerless strength, and free As Caoilte when he roamed the primal hills ( Those “wildernesses rich with liberty” ), A hero that the shocks of chance might strike,
But never tame, a giant druid-ringed, A god-like savage of the golden days Ere service shackled action: free itself As Oisin when he strayed in Doire-cairn,
His hand upon the mountain top, his feet Fixt in the flowing sea, his holy head Crowned by a flight of birds, acclaiming him The singer of the dawn.
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