2.

Clearing by inches the encircled eyes?
Bolder than the peasant tiger whose autumn beauty
Sags in the expletive kill, or the sacrifice,
Of death, puffed positive by the stance of duty
With which these pilgrims would propitiate
Forces, their fears; drab: not the medieval state

Of paschal cathedrals backed on earthy hooves
Against the craftsmen's primary-coloured skies
Whose gold was Gabriel on the patient roofs,
The parabled windows taught the dead to rise,
And Christ the Centaur, in two natures whole,
With fable and proverb joinered body and soul.

Water withers from the oars. The pilgrims blacken
Out of the boats to business with their sin
Where Dante smelled among the stones and bracken
The door to Hell, the deepest one, where pain
Persists in the helpless casuistry of guilt,
Spirit bureaucracy on a bet built

Part by this race when monks in convents of coracles
For the Merovingian centuries left their land,
Belled, fragrant; and honest in their oracles
Bespoke the grace to give without demand,
Martyrs heaven winged nor insulted with reward;
And not ours, doughed in doctrine, who never have dared

Will with surrogate rule distribute hope;
No better nor worse than I who in my books
Have angered at the stake with Bruno and, by the rope
Watt Tyler swung from, leagued with shifty looks
To fuse the next rebellion with the desperate
Deprived in the sane need to eat and get;

Thrilled, on its thunderous olive canvas, to the Florentine smile
As man took to wearing his death, his own,
Sapped crisis through the cathedral branches (while
Flesh groped loud round dissenting skeleton)
In soul, reborn as body's appetite
To be subsumed in body's forecast bite,

Now is consumed. O earthly paradise
Hell is to know our natural empire used
Wrong, and the solemn wormwood of the wise.
The vanishing tiger's saved, his blood transfused.
Kent is for Jutes again and Glasgow town
Burns high enough to screen the stars and moon.

3.

Well they cry who've been robbed, their already wasting
Shares in justice legally lowered until
Man his own actor, matrix, mould and casting,
Through man's injustice sees his image spill.
Say it was pride that did it, or virtue's brief:
To those who suffer it is no relief.

All indiscriminate, man, stone, animal
Are woken up in nightmare. What John the blind
From Patmos saw works and we speak it; it lives. Not all
The men of God nor the priests of mankind
Can mend or explain the good and broke, not one
Generous with love prove communion;

Behind the eyes the winged ascension flags
For want of spirit by the market blurbed,
And if hands touch, such fraternity sags
Frightened this side the dikes of death disturbed
Like Aran Islands' bibulous, unclean seas:
Pieta: but the limbs ache; it is not peace.

Barely to see, to sear the nerves' hunger!
Or but to report like newsmen whom words serve.
Life will go on and flower even in the younger:
But courage winces still in us who observe.
Courage kills its practitioners and we live,
Nothing forgotten, nothing to forgive,

We pray to ourself. The metal moon, unspent
Virgin eternity sleeping in the mind,
Excites the form of prayer without content;
The whitethorn lights, delicate and blind
The negro mountain, and so, knelt on her sod,
This woman beside me murmuring My God! My God!

IRISH LEGATION

WASHINGTON, D. C.

19th. March, 1942.

Dear Mr. Palmer,

I am extremely sorry to learn that _The Southern Review_ will have to cease publication. Its place can't be taken by any other magazine and its loss will be a great blow to your readers as it must be to yourselves.

I don't know whether, in the circumstances, you intend to publish my _Lough Derg_ in the final issue; but if you do, and if there is still time, could you substitute for the copy I gave you, the enclosed version? I have inkmarked it _B_ for your convenience.

LOUGH DERG

II Denis Devlin

The poor in spirit on their rosary rounds,
The jobbers with their whiskey-angerèd eyes,
The pink bankclerks, the tip-hat papal counts,
The drab, kind women their tonsured mockery tries,
Glad invalids on penitential feet
Walk the Lord's majesty like their village street.

With mullioned Europe shattered, this Northwest
Rude-sainted isle would pray it whole again
(Peasant Apollo! Troy is worn to rest.)
Europe that humanized the sacred bane
Of God's chance who yet laughed in his mind
And balanced thief and saint; but not this kind.

Low rocks, a few weasels, lake

Like a field of burnt gorse; the rooks caw;
These passive, for man's gradual wisdom take
Firefly instinct dreamed out into law;
The prophets' jeweled kingdom down at heel
Fires no Augustine here. Inert, they kneel;

All is simple and symbol in their world,
The misunderstood being rendered fabulous.
Sin teases life whose natural fruits withheld
Sour the deprived nor bloom for timely loss:
Jansenist clan! without the prestige that leavens
History's fitful, magniloquent heavens,

Where prayer was praise, O Lord! the Temple trumpets
Cascaded down Thy sunny pavilions of air,
The scroll-tongued priests, the galvanic strumpets,
All clash and stridency gloomed upon Thy stair;
The pharisees, the exalted boy their power
Sensually psalmed in Thee, their coming hour!

And to the sun earth turned her flower of sex,
The acanthus in the architects' limpid angles;
The close priests allegorized the orphic egg's
Brood, and in Academe tolerant wranglers
Heard the contemplatives of the Tragic Choir
Drain off man's sanguine pastoral death-desire.

It was said stone dreams and animal sleeps and man
Is awake; but sleep with its drama on us bred
Animal articulate, only somnambulist can
Conscience like Cawdor give the blood its head
For the dim moors to reign through druids again.
O first geometer! tangent-feelerèd brain

24

B

Clearing by inches the encircled eyes,
Bolder than the peasant tiger whose autumn beauty
Sags in the expletive kill, or the sacrifice
Of dearth puffed positive in the stance of duty
Their fears; drab: not the medieval state

Of paschal cathedrals backed on earthy hooves
Against the craftsmen's primary-colored skies
Whose gold was Gabriel on the patient roofs,
The parabled windows taught the dead to rise,
And Christ the Centaur, in two natures whole,
With fable and proverb joinered body and soul.

Water withers from the oars. The pilgrims blacken
Out of the boats to masticate their sin
Where Dante smelled among the stones and bracken
The door to Hell, the helpless Hell where pain
Persists in the mordant casuistry of guilt,
Spirit bureaucracy on a bet built

Part by this race when monks in convents of coracles
For the Merovingian centuries left their land,
Belled, fragrant; and honest in their oracles
Bespoke the grace to give without demand,
Martyrs Heaven winged nor tempted with reward;
And not ours, doughed in dogma, who never have dared

Will with surrogate palm distribute hope:
No better nor worse than I who in my books
Have angered at the stake with Bruno and by the rope
Watt Tyler swung from leagued with shifty looks
To fuse the next rebellion with the desperate
Serfs in the sane need to eat and get;

Thrilled, on its thunderous canvas, to the Florentine smile
As man took to wearing his death, his own,
Sapped crisis through the cathedral branches (while
Flesh groped loud round dissenting skeleton)
In soul, reborn as body's appetite,
To languish out in body's fierce delight,

Now is consumed. O earthly paradise
Hell is to know our natural empire used
Wrong, and to love and lack the just and wise.
The vanishing tiger's saved, his blood transfused.
Kent is for Jutes again and Glasgow town
Burns high enough to screen the stars and moon.

3.

Well may they cry who have been robbed, their wasting
Shares in justice legally lowered until
Man his own actor <u>matrix</u>, mould and casting,
Through man's injustice sees his image spill.
Say it was pride that did it, or virtue's brief:
To those who suffer it is no relief.

Barely to see, look little, let heart's hunger
Feed on water and berries. The penitents sing;
Life will go on and flower even in the younger
Though courage fail in a world-end rosary ring.
Courage kills its practitioners and we live,
Nothing forgotten, nothing to forgive,

We pray to ourself. The metal moon, unspent
Virgin eternity sleeping in the mind,
Excites the form of prayer without content;
The whitethorn lightens, delicate and blind
The negro mountain, and so, knelt on her sod,
This woman beside me murmuring My God! My God!

Benedictine.