Farewell! Farewell! Farewell! Fiona Macleod From: Tale of the Four White Swans

The laughter of Peterkin: a retelling of old tales of the Celtic wonderworld London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1897

“…Fionula, as she and her brothers slowly descended in wide-sweeping curves, sang this song:”

Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!
Far hence we lost ones go:
Hearken to our knell,
Hearken to our woe!

Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!
With breaking hearts we flee:
For none can tell
Our wild home on the sea.

For ages on the Moyle
In loneliness and pain,
Our feet shall tread no soil,
Wild wave, wild wind, wild rain.

For ages in the west,
Fierce storms and fiercer cold
Shall be alone our rest,
While ye grow old.

Let not our memories pass,
O ye who stay behind
Who are as the grass
And we the wind.

Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!
Far hence we lost ones go:
Hearken to our knell,
Hearken to our woe!

Notes:

Fiona Macleod was a pseudonym of the Scottish writer William Sharp (1885-1905), who was part of the late 19th c. ‘Celtic Twilight’ literary movement.  Though Sharp himself never publicly acknowledged this dual identity, he was 'unmasked' posthumously by his widow, Elizabeth Amelia Sharp in her  "William Sharp (Fiona Macleod) a Memoir."

See “Behind Fiona Macleod” for a bit of background on the writer & his works;  see the full text online of The Collected Works of Fiona Macleod.   This poem is one of several verse passages in the prose narrative of the Tale of the Four White Swans.