greenest bough
of the dark-green Iberian oak
for God's holy bonfire,
and for love flame one with God?

But to-day ... What does a day matter?
for the new household gods
there are plains in forest shade
and green boughs in the old oak-woods.

Though long the land waits
for the curved plough to open the first furrow,
there is sowing for God's grain
under thistles and burdocks and nettles.

What does a day matter? Yesterday waits
for to-morrow, to-morrow for infinity;
men of Spain, neither is the past dead,
nor is to-morrow, nor yesterday, written.

Who has seen the face of the Iberian God?
I wait
for the Iberian man who with strong hands
will carve out of Castilian oak
The parched God of the grey land.

_XII: A Catalan Poet_

_It is time for sailing; the swallow has come chattering and the
mellow west wind; the meadows are already in bloom; the sea is
silent and the waves the rough winds pummeled. Up anchors and loose
the hawsers, sailor, set every stitch of canvas. This I, Priapos
the harbor god, command you, man, that you may sail for all manner
of ladings._ (_Leonidas in the Greek Anthology._)

Catalonia like Greece is a country of mountains and harbors, where the
farmers and herdsmen of the hills can hear in the morning the creak of
oars and the crackling of cordage as the great booms of the wing-shaped
sails are hoisted to the tops of the stumpy masts of the fishermen's
boats. Barcelona with its fine harbor nestling under the towering
slopes of Montjuic has been a trading city since most ancient times. In
the middle ages the fleets of its stocky merchants were the economic
scaffolding which underlay the pomp and heraldry of the great sea
kingdom of the Aragonese. To this day you can find on old buildings the
arms of the kings of Aragon and the counts of Barcelona in Mallorca and
Manorca and Ibiza and Sardinia and Sicily and Naples. It follows that
when Catalonia begins to reemerge as a nucleus of national
consciousness after nearly four centuries of subjection to Castile,
poets speaking Catalan, writing Catalan, shall be poets of the
mountains and of the sea.

Yet this time the motor force is not the sailing of white argosies
towards the east. It is textile mills, stable, motionless, drawing
about them muddled populations, raw towns, fattening to new arrogance
the descendants of those stub