Red Hanrahan's Curse by W.B. Yeats

One fine May morning a long time after Hanrahan had left Margaret / Rooney's house, he was walking the road near Collooney, and the sound / of the birds singing in the bushes that were white with blossom set him / singing as he went. It was to his own little place he was going, that / was no more than a cabin, but that pleased him well. For he was tired of / so many years of wandering from shelter to shelter at all times of the / year, and although he was seldom refused a welcome and a share of what / was in the house, it seemed to him sometimes that his mind was getting / stiff like his joints, and it was not so easy to him as it used to be to / make fun and sport through the night, and to set all the boys laughing / with his pleasant talk, and to coax the women with his songs. And a / while ago, he had turned into a cabin that some poor man had left to / go harvesting and had never come to again. And when he had mended the / thatch and made a bed in the corner with a few sacks and bushes, and / had swept out the floor, he was well content to have a little place for / himself, where he could go in and out as he liked, and put his head in / his hands through the length of an evening if the fret was on him, and / loneliness after the old times. One by one the neighbours began to send / their children in to get some learning from him, and with what they / brought, a few eggs or an oaten cake or a couple of sods of turf, he / made out a way of living. And if he went for a wild day and night now / and again to the Burrough, no one would say a word, knowing him to be a / poet, with wandering in his heart.

It was from the Burrough he was coming that May morning, light-hearted / enough, and singing some new song that had come to him. But it was not / long till a hare ran across his path, and made away into the fields, / through the loose stones of the wall. And he knew it was no good sign a / hare to have crossed his path, and he remembered the hare that had led / him away to Slieve Echtge the time Mary Lavelle was waiting for him, and / how he had never known content for any length of time since then. 'And / it is likely enough they are putting some bad thing before me now,' he / said.