Summer spent exploring
Yeats’s noble canon,
His heroes’ sprezzatura,
But now, an overnight
Stay en route to Shannon

In Bally-something-or-other
With its castle that beguiles
The traveler not to notice
The grimy factory
Where men are making tiles—

Tiles and tourists, these
The only two ways here
To turn a shilling.
My brimming mug of beer
Is drawn by a colleen,

Mere child, maybe thirteen.
Her Dad is publican.
I’m the only tourist,
Hard at their game of darts
The tile-workers, boy and man,

Play for sixpence a game.
They ask, Will I play with them?
I’ve been shooting all summer
But these lads—Darts
Is a way of life with them!

First, from eight and a half feet
You must hit the outer rim
Of the targe, only half an inch wide
Before your score begins to count.
Was I a drag on our side!

The others were well on their way
To a perfect 601
When my scoring had barely begun.
They played with confident grace
And concentration,

Keeping well out of mind
The dingy hovels they lived in,
Raw fires in the kilns of clay,
The long, long years of their bleak
Labor, their mingy pay.

The next morning I turn aside
From the movie on TWA.
I close my eyes, am with friends
At the dartboard again as we play,
Keeping well out of mind

As they did, that they
Would be toiling at tiles again
While I’m flying home.
For their ale, for the fun of our game,
They’d not let me pay.