Page 275 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

And yet he felt that, however he might revile and mock
her image, his anger was also a form of homage. He had left
the classroom in disdain that was not wholly sincere, feel-
ing that perhaps the secret of her race lay behind those dark
eyes upon which her long lashes flung a quick shadow. He
had told himself bitterly as he walked through the streets
that she was a figure of the womanhood of her country, a
bat-like soul waking to the consciousness of itself in dark-
ness and secrecy and loneliness, tarrying awhile, loveless
and sinless, with her mild lover and leaving him to whisper
of innocent transgressions in the latticed ear of a priest. His
anger against her found vent in coarse railing at her par-
amour, whose name and voice and features offended his
baffled pride: a priested peasant, with a brother a policeman
in Dublin and a brother a potboy in Moycullen. To him she
would unveil her soul’s shy nakedness, to one who was but
schooled in the discharging of a formal rite rather than to
him, a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the
daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliv-
ing life.
The radiant image of the eucharist united again in an in-
stant his bitter and despairing thoughts, their cries arising
unbroken in a hymn of thanksgiving.

Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise

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