A much neglected Irish poet overlapping Yeats. I happen to like this and thus have posted it.

Celibacy
On a brown isle of Lough Corrib,
When clouds were bare as branch
And water had been thorned
By colder days, I sank
In torment of her side;
But still that woman stayed,
For eye obeys the mind.

Bedraggled in the briar
And grey fire of the nettle,
Three nights, I fell, I groaned
On the flagstone of help
To pluck her from my body;
For servant ribbed with hunger
May climb his rungs to God.

Eyelid stood back in sleep,
I saw what seemed an Angel:
Dews dripped from those bright feet.
But, O, I knew the stranger
By her deceit and, tired
All night by tempting flesh,
I wrestled her in hair-shirt.

On pale knees in the dawn,
Parting the straw that wrapped me,
She sank until I saw
The bright roots of her scalp.
She pulled me down to sleep,
But I fled as the Baptist
To thistle and to reed.

The dragons of the Gospel
Are cast by bell and crook;
But fiery as the frost
Or bladed light, she drew
The reeds back, when I fought
The arrow-headed airs
That darken on the water.

There's a fine Selected Poems of Austin Clarke in Penguin Books.

Whooshed over my head the first time through. I will have to read it a few more times

And water had been thorned
By colder days

I thought this a strange image, until I remembered seeing ice cube trays in the freezer, with pointed thorns rising from the cubes.

You probably live somewhere balmy where ice or frost never hangs on trees!

It is indeed an excellent tome. Every time I turn to it, I find I enjoy his work more and more.