The War of the Ghosts
Three Ghosts that haunt me have I,
Three Ghosts in my soul that fight,
Three grandsire Ghosts in my soul,
That haunt me by day and by night.
The first was a dark mountaineer,
Who hunted with arrow and knife,
To whom the turf was a bed,
And the wind of the moorland was life.
And the next was a mariner rude,
Whose home and whose grave was the sea,
For whom the land was a prison
And only the ocean was free.
And the last was a shrunken recluse,
Who lived with the dust and the gloom
And wrote of the Saints and of Him
Who went for us to His doom.
And all through the days and years
These ancient Ghosts contend,
And my soul is a battle-field
Of passions that pierce and rend.
And whenever a sunbeam alights
All gleaming and fresh on my page,
I am wild for the hills and the bush,
I am torn with the hunter's rage.
I am sick of the smell of a book,
I am off with the dogs or a gun,
Or I gallop my fifty miles
Before the set of the sun.
And yet from some loftier peak
When I look on the sea from afar,
I feel like one in a grave;
And I long for a ship full-sailed
And an ocean wide on the lee
I choke on the solid land
For the lift of the undulant sea.
Yet ever the battle goes on,
And ever there rises a day
When the Ghosts of the wave and the wood
To the Ghost of the cell give way.
Then the land is a wilderness drear,
And dismal and vast is the sea,
But cloistered in peace with my books
My soul is uplifted and free.
Three Ghosts that haunt me have I,
Three Ghosts in my soul that fight,
Three grandsire Ghosts in my soul,
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poem by William Gay
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