—The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth,more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to m of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
Davin knocked the ashes from his pipe.
—Too deep for me, Stevie, he said. But a man's country comes first. Ireland first, Stevie. You can be poet or a mystic after.
