"This is our fate: eight hundred years’ disaster,
crazily tangled like the Book of Kells:
the dream’s distortion and the land’s division,
the midnight raiders and the prison cells.
Yet like Lir’s children banished to the waters
Our hearts still listen for the landward bells."
- John Hewitt (b. 1907) From "An Irishman in Coventry"

"…With a stone on the cairn, with a word on the wind, with a
prayer in the flesh let me honour this country"
- Louis MacNeice, "Collected Poems", 1948