There was a time

Four stanzas from the medieval Irish legend Buile Suibne, variously translated as The Frenzy of Suibhne or Sweeney Astray:

There was a time when I preferred
to the low converse of humans
the accents of the turtle-dove
fluttering about a pool.

There was a time when I preferred
to the tinkle of neighbour bells
the voice of the blackbird from the crag
and the belling of a stag in a storm.

There was a time when I preferred
to the voice of a fine woman near me
the call of the mountain-grouse
heard at day.

There was a time when I preferred
the yapping of the wolves
to the voice of a cleric
melling and megling within.

The above is Flann O'Brien's rendition, as presented in At Swim-Two-Birds, where the story of Sweeny (as he spells it) forms just one element in the novel's set of narrative nesting dolls. Among other English-language versions, there is a notable (and more complete) one by Seamus Heaney, but I find Heaney's translation of the corresponding stanzas comparatively flat. O'Brien, a native Irish speaker and competent student of the medieval forms of the tongue, could be a bit cheeky in his treatment of the eccentricities of the literary style of the original — elsewhere he renders a line as "the saint-bell of saints with sainty-saints" — but in the quatrains above he plays it straight. As far as I know he translated and arranged the material himself; the definitive English version at the time, by James G. O'Keefe, is quite different. The curious "melling and megling," based on a comparison with other versions, is meant to evoke the bleating of sheep.

The story of Sweeney, to the extent that one can summarize it briefly, is the tale of an Irish king who, finding his peace disturbed by church bells, seizes a bishop's psalter and flings it in a lake (whence it is retrieved, miraculously undamaged, by an otter) and commits other violent assaults on the bishop and his acolytes. The bishop puts a curse on him through which he became a kind of Bird-Man or Wild Man of the Trees, undergoing various torments and adventures and fleeing the society of men and women for the space of many years. In time, however, he seems to prefer his new existence — which is perhaps why he is said to be mad. Finally taken in by another bishop, he is mortally wounded by an irate herdsman due to a misunderstanding. He speaks the lines above, atones for his sins, and dies in honor.