Leaving Ireland's Green Fields For Faraway Shores
The Place as Witness There's a particular geography in 'The Parting Way of Time' that reads like a person. The road, the shoreline and the patchwork of fields all act as witnesses to a leaving that hurts. You can hear a man standing on a headland, longing and looking — 'I gaze along the sea' — and the coast answers back with salt and memory. The song gives us a small town, not by name, but by detail. Sabbath bells and the 'soft sound of the reaper in the yellow field of corn' sketch a rural Ireland of hedgerows, low hills and a church spire. There’s a path that runs along the ocean; a road that leads past stone walls and down to the pier. Even the strange image of the palm tree — a foreign thing in Irish memory — tells you where this place’s imagination travels when it thinks of the wider world: ports, distant springs and the strange, fertile places where emigrants might find themselves. The sea in this song is more than water. It’s a throat, a road a...