Fearing Their Symbols

Razed the garden, profaned the chalices and the altars…

Trellick Tower, Golborne Road, Kensington & Chelsea, W10

…by horse the Huns broke into the Monastic library and they tore the incomprehensible books and they vituperated them and they burnt them…

Windmill Lane, Dublin, Dublin 2

…fearing their symbols and characters might be concealing secret blasphemies against their God…

Leake Street, Waterloo, Lambeth, SE1

…who was an iron scimitar.

Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar, Tower Hamlets, E14

From Jorge Luis Borges’ The Theologians (1947)

The Animal Within Me

I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory…

Corleck Head, National Museum of Ireland, Kildare Street, Ranelagh, Dublin 2

…the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.

From Robert Louis Stephenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Where Dips the Rocky Highland

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake

Sugarloaf Mountain, County Wicklow, Ireland

The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.

Glendalough, County Wicklow, Ireland

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand.
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Sugarloaf Mountain, County Wicklow, Ireland

From William Butler Yeats’ The Stolen Child (1889)