AN

When Poet George William Russell was a young man in Victorian Dublin, he wrote a philosophic article under the pseudonym "AEon." The printer mangled it, and AEon came out AE. For the rest of his life, Russell wrote under that diphthong. Outdistanced as a poet by such contemporaries as Thomas Hardy and William Butler Yeats, AE culled through his verses not long before his death (in 1935) and selected 124 that he hoped he might be remembered for. Last week his Selected Poems achieved the semiclassic permanence of republication in the Golden Treasury Series (Macmillan; $1.25), along with Hardy, Yeats and William Wordsworth. Samples:

FROLIC

The children were shouting together

And racing along the sands,

A glimmer of dancing shadows,

A dovelike flutter of hands.

The stars were shouting in heaven,

The sun was chasing the moon:

The game was the same as the children's,

They danced to the selfsame tune.

The whole of the world was merry,

One joy from the vale to the height,

Where the blue woods of twilight encircled

The lovely lawns of the light.

THE LONELY

Lone and forgotten

Through a long sleeping,

In the heart of age

A child woke weeping.

No invisible mother

Was nigh him there

Laughing and nodding

From earth and air.

No elfin comrades

Came at his call

And the earth and the air

Were blank as a wall.

The darkness thickened

Upon him creeping,

In the heart of age

A child lay weeping.

THE CITIES

They shall sink under water,

They shall rise up again:

They shall be peopled

By millions of men.

Cleansed of their scarlet,

Absolved of their sin,

They shall be like crystal

All stainless within.

Paris and Babel,

London and Tyre,

Reborn from the darkness,

Shall sparkle like fire.

From the folk who throng in

Their gardens and towers

Shall be blown fragrance

Sweeter than flowers.

Faery shall dance in

The streets of the town,

And from sky headlands

The gods looking down.

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