The Ruined Chapel

The Ruined Chapel

By the shore, a plot of ground
Clips a ruin’d chapel round,
Buttress’d with a grassy mound;
Where Day and Night and Day go by,
And bring no touch of human sound.

Washing of the lonely seas,
Shaking of the guardian trees,
Piping of the salted breeze;
Day and Night and Day go by
To the endless tune of these.

Or when, as winds and waters keep
A hush more dead than any sleep,
Still morns to stiller evenings creep,
And Day and Night and Day go by;
Here the silence is most deep.

The empty ruins, lapsed again
Into Nature’s wide domain,
Sow themselves with seed and grain
As Day and Night and Day go by;
And hoard June’s sun and April’s rain.

Here fresh funeral tears were shed;
Now the graves are also dead;
And suckers from the ash-tree spread,
While Day and Night and Day go by;
And stars move calmly overhead.

–From Sixteen Poems by William Allingham: Selected by William Butler Yeats by William Allingham

(William Allingham on Amazon)