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From: "Jean Rice" <>
Subject: [IGW] "Ballintubbert House, Co. Laois" -- Cecil DAY-LEWIS
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 21:08:42 -0700

BALLINTUBBERT HOUSE, CO. LAOIS

Here is the unremembered gate,
Two asses, a grey and a black,
Have ambled across from the rough lawn
As if they'd been told to greet
The revenant. Trees draw graciously back
As I follow the drive, to unveil
For this drifty wraith, composed and real
The house where he was born.

Nothing is changed from that sixty-year-old
Photograph, except
My father's young face has been brushed away.
On the steps down which he strolled
With me in his arms, the living are grouped,
And it is my son, Sean
Who stands upon the dishevelled lawn
To photograph us today.

I walk through the unremembered house,
Note on the walls each stain
Of damp; then up the spacious stair
As if I would now retrace
My self to the room where it began.
Dust on fine furnishings,
A scent of wood ash -- the whole house sings
With an elegiac air.

Its owner is not at home -- nor I
Who have no title to it
And no drowned memories to chime
Through its hush. Can piety
Or a long-lost innocence explain it?
By what prodigious spell,
Sad elegant house, you have made me feel
A ghost before my time?

-- Anglo-Irish C. Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate, England

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• [IGW] "Ballintubbert House, Co. Laois" -- Cecil DAY-LEWIS by "Jean Rice" <>