Poem: Far Away

Editor's Note: This poem is one of several for which printed copies have been since been found in early newspaper clippings. The print version matches the Donnallan transcription word for word, but the line breaks are different and the poem falls into six stanzas. The first stanza reads as follows:

Up the shore of evermore,
We sport like children at their play
And gather shells--
Where sinks and swells--
The mystic sea from "Far Away."

It would appear that Sr. Donnallan doubled the line-length and eliminated stanza breaks in many of her transcriptions, possibly to save space and paper in her prebound notebook. Note her use of mid-line commas followed by capital letters, as if to mark earlier line breaks. We do not know whether she transcribed the poems from original ms. versions sent by Ryan; if so, it is possible that Ryan 'compacted' the lines and stanzas himself to fit more text on his legendary scraps of paper.--DRB


Up the shore of evermore, We sport like children at their play,
And gather shells where sinks and swells The mystic seas from “Far Away”
Upon that beach, no voice or speech, Doth things intelligible say
But through our smile a whisper rolls. That comes to us from “Far Away”
Into our ears, the voice of years, Comes deeper, deeper, day by day.
We stop to hear as it draws near Its awfulness from “Far Away”
At what it tells, we drop the shells, We were as full as yesterday’
And pick no more upon the shore. But dreams of the brighter “Far Away”
And in that tide, far and wide, The yearning of our souls doth stay.
We long to go, we do not learn, Where it may but- “Far Away”
The mighty deep doth slowly creep, Upon the shore where we did play
The very sand where we did stand, A moment since, swept “Far Away”
Our playmates all, beyond our call, Are passing hence as we too, may
Outo that shore of evermore. Beyond the boundless “Far Away”
Will trust the wave and Him to save. Beneath where feet as marble lay
The rolling sleep for we can keep, Our souls in that dim “Far Away.”