In The Dials

To GARRYOWEN upon an organ ground     Two girls are jigging.    Riotously they trip,     With eyes aflame, quick bosoms, hand on hip,     As in the tumult of a witches' round.     Youngsters and youngsters round them prance and bound.     Two solemn babes twirl ponderously, and skip.     The artist's teeth gleam from his bearded lip.     High from the kennel howls a tortured hound.     The music reels and hurtles, and the night     Is full of stinks and cries; a naphtha-light     Flares from a barrow; battered and obtused     With vices, wrinkles, life and work and rags,     Each with her inch of clay, two loitering hags     Look on dispassionate - critical - something 'mused.     ***     The gods are dead?    Perhaps they are!    Who knows?     Living at least in Lempriere undeleted,     The wise, the fair, the awful, the jocose,     Are one and all, I like to think, retreated     In some still land of lilacs and the rose.     Once high they sat, and high o'er earthly shows     With sacrificial dance and song were greeted.     Once . . . long ago.    But now, the story goes,     The gods are dead.     It must be true.    The world, a world of prose,     Full-crammed with facts, in science swathed and sheeted,     Nods in a stertorous after-dinner doze!     Plangent and sad, in every wind that blows     Who will may hear the sorry words repeated:-     'The Gods are Dead!'