Having To Live in the Country

Back once again in wild, wet Monaghan

Exiled from thought and feeling,

A mean brutality reigns:

It is really a horrible position to be in

And I equate myself with Dante

And all who have lived outside civilization.

It isn't a question of place but of people;

Wordsworth and Coleridge lived apart from the common man,

Their friends called on them regularly.

Swift is in a somewhat different category

He was a genuine exile and his heavy heart

Weighed him down in Dublin.

Yet even he had compensations for in the Deanery

He received many interesting friends

And it was the eighteenth century.

I suppose that having to live

Among men whose rages

Are for small wet hills full of stones

When one man buys a patch and pays a high price for it

That is not the end of his paying.

"Go home and have another bastard" shout the children,

Cousin of the underbidder, to the young wife of the purchaser.

The first child was born after six months of marriage,

Desperate people, desperate animals.

What must happen the poor priest

Somewhat educated who has to believe that these people have souls

As bright as a poet's - though I don't, mind, speak for myself.