One of my favorites, by Robert Graves. For some reason, every online link to this poem is a variation to my preferred version, so I won't link it. (Graves, like Yeats, was known for obsessively tinkering with his verse.) I've posted it at least once before. Sempiternal: eternal, unchanging.
Rocky Acres, by Robert Graves
This is a wild land, country of my choice,
With harsh craggy mountain, moor ample and bare.
Seldom in these acres is heard any voice
But voice of cold water that runs here and there
Through rocks and lank heather growing without care.
No mice in the heath run, no song-birds fly
For fear of the buzzard that floats in the sky.
He soars and he hovers, rocking on his wings,
He scans his wide parish with a sharp eye,
He catches the trembling of small hidden things,
He tears them in pieces, dropping from the sky;
Tenderness and pity the heart will deny,
Where life is but nourished from water and rock-
A hardy adventure, full of fear and shock.
Time has never journeyed to this lost land,
Crakeberry and heather bloom out of date,
The rocks jut, the streams flow singing on either hand,
Careless if the season be early or late,
The skies wander overhead, now blue, now slate;
Winter would be known by his cutting snow
If June did not borrow his armour also.
Yet this is my country, beloved by me best,
The first land that rose from Chaos and the Flood,
Nursing no valleys for comfort or rest,
Trampled by no shod hooves, bought with no blood
Sempiternal country whose barrows have stood
Stronghold for the demigods when on earth they go,
Terror for fat burghers on far plains below.
