Upon it, as it flows ahead.

Our Stars Come from Ireland

I

Tom McGreevy, in America, Thinks of Himself as a Boy

Out of him that I loved,

Mal Bay I made,

I made Mal Bay

And him in that water.

Over the top of the Bank of Ireland,

The wind blows quaintly

Its thin-stringed music,

As he heard it in Tarbert.

These things were made of him

And out of myself.

He stayed in Kerry, died there.

I live in Pennsylvania.

Out of him I made Mal Bay

And not a bald and tasselled saint.

What would the water have been,

Without that that he makes of it?

The stars are washing up from Ireland

And through and over the puddles of Swatara

And Schuylkill. The sound of him

Comes from a great distance and is heard.

II

The Westwardness of Everything

These are the ashes of fiery weather,

Of nights full of the green stars from Ireland,

Wet out of the sea, and luminously wet,

Like beautiful and abandoned refugees.

The whole habit of the mind is changed by them,

These Gaeled and fitful-fangled darknesses

Made suddenly luminous, themselves a change,

An east in their compelling westwardness,

Themselves an issue as at an end, as if

There was an end at which in a final change,

When the whole habit of the mind was changed,

The ocean breathed out morning in one breath.

World Without Peculiarity

The day is great and strong—

But his father was strong, that lies now

In the poverty of dirt.

Nothing could be more hushed than the way

The moon moves toward the night.

But what his mother was returns and cries on his breast.

The red ripeness of round leaves is thick

With the spices of red summer.

But she that he loved turns cold at his light touch.

What good is it that the earth is justified,

That it is complete, that it is an end,

That in itself it is enough?

It is the earth itself that is humanity …

He is the inhuman son and she,

She is the fateful mother, whom he does not know.

She is the day, the walk of the moon

Among the breathless spices and, sometimes,

He, too, is human and difference disappears

And the poverty of dirt, the thing upon his breast,

The hating woman, the meaningless place,

Become a single being, sure and true.

The Woman in Sunshine

It is only that this warmth and movement are like

The warmth and movement of a woman.

It is not that there is any image in the air

Nor the beginning nor end of a form:

It is empty. But a woman in threadless gold

Burns us with brushings of her dress

And a dissociated abundance of being,

More definite for what she is—

Because she is disembodied,

Bearing the odors of the summer fields.

Confessing the taciturn and yet indifferent,

Invisibly clear, the only love.

Imago

Who can pick up the weight of Britain,