Free Opened Ground by Seamus Heaney

defiles,
             wading estuaries,
             breasting summits,
             trekking through glens,
             until he found the pleasures of Glen Bolcain.
    That place is a natural asylum where all the madmen of Ireland used to assemble once their year in madness was complete.
        
             Glen Bolcain is like this:
             it has four gaps to the wind,
             pleasant woods, clean-banked wells,
             cold springs and clear sandy streams
             where green-topped watercress and languid brooklime
             philander over the surface.
             It is nature’s pantry
             with its sorrels, its wood-sorrels,
             its berries, its wild garlic,
             its black sloes and its brown acorns.
    The madmen would beat each other for the pick of its watercresses and for the beds on its banks.
        
    Sweeney stayed a long time in that glen until one night he was cooped up in the top of a tall ivy-grown hawthorn. He could hardly endure it, for every time he twisted or turned, the thorny twigs would flail him so that he was prickled and cut and bleeding all over. He changed from that station to another one, a clump of thick briars with a single young blackthorn standing up out of the thorny bed, and he settled in the top of the blackthorn. But it was too slender. It wobbled and bent so that Sweeney fell heavily through the thicket and ended up on the ground like a man in a bloodbath. Then he gathered himself up, exhausted and beaten, and came out of the thicket, saying:
    – It is hard to bear this life after the pleasant times I knew. And it has been like this a year to the night last night!
    Then he spoke this poem:
        
                             A year until last night
                             I have lived among dark trees,
                             between the flood and ebb-tide,
                             going cold and naked
                             with no pillow for my head,
                             no human company
                             and, so help me, God,
                             no spear and no sword!
                             No sweet talk with women.
                             Instead, I pine
                             for cresses, for the clean
                             pickings of brooklime.

                             No surge of royal blood,
                             camped here in solitude;
                             no glory flames the wood,
                             no friends, no music.
                             Tell the truth: a hard lot.
                             And no shirking this fate;
                             no sleep, no respite,
                             no hope for a long time.
                             No house humming full,
                             no men, loud with good will,
                             nobody to call me king,
                             no drink or banqueting.
                             A great gulf yawns now
                             between me and my retinue,
                             between craziness and reason.
                             Scavenging through the glen
                             on my mad king’s visit:
                             no pomp or poet’s circuit