University of Notre Dame - Dome Yearbook (Notre Dame, IN)

Page 26 text:

M, ' AN LIVES ON THE EARTH, and he knows the suns and shadows of its ways. Its rivers run foam- ing on icy rocks, stir sluggish by willow banks of clay: and man hears them in the night, feels their moving in the pulse of his blood. The sea, moving to bind the lands together, beats the rocks of an old castle, and streams back again upon itself; gulls come in white waves in the moonlight, bending their wings to dip and rise. Rain falls in the night, searching out, streaming down over a tree, a roof corner, a tombstone, seeping hungrily home into the earth: man hears the rain, feels it returning, crossing into the seasons and the years. Man feels, hears, sees the things of the moment, smells them, touches them, knows the forms of his God: the hurl of wind in heavy trees, the burn of sun on stone, a brittle brown leaf, its life dried in the stem, breaking from a branch, scaling to earth to lie and wait for its weathering. Softly in pleasant movings, swiftly in startling flashes, are revealed the things of the earth to man, the poet, man of the earth and of his people. 22

Page 28 text:

- r- On the earth there are undiscovered things, and the seeker will hear of them: he will hear in a dream the pounding of surf on yellow beaches; in the port cities he will hear legends of a strange-talking people, of a land seen from ship deck, swelling in the dusk, gone at morning, its sight remem- bered for the telling; by his fires at night he will hear the rolling words of wanderers, saying the new sounds of lands back of the last-known land- marks. Then man will think of the new names, will sound them on his tongue, and he will go. He will search for them, the seeker, whether it be 24