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)

Darkness

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

John Martin's Apocalypse, Tate Britain, Pimilco, Westminster, SW1P

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Glendalough, County Wicklow, Ireland

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Mike Leigh's Naked (1993)

Morn came and went–and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread

Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952)

Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light…

Bill Callahan's Apocalypse (2011)

From Lord Byron’s Darkness (1816)

Victoria’s Way Indian Sculpture Park

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space…

Indian Sculpture Park, Victoria's Way, Roundwood, County Wicklow, Ireland

…it vanishes even as it’s made.

Indian Sculpture Park, Victoria's Way, Roundwood, County Wicklow, Ireland

You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again…

Indian Sculpture Park, Victoria's Way, Roundwood, County Wicklow, Ireland

…and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.

From Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room (2010)