By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem gathers identity into blessing, linking the mother's Gaelic gift with creative history and love for Siobhan.
After the harder material around fathers and formation, these lines feel ceremonious and calm. The mother's gift is named as something ancient and quiet that can guide temperament, so inheritance becomes enabling rather than wounding. Ending with love for Siobhan and her consequence makes affection sound accepting, as if love includes what follows from the beloved's life.
The Siobhan sequence closes in blessing: 'all sweet song' gathers the speaker's 'grasp on worldly wings', 'Held by my mother's gift of the ancient Gaelic', whose purpose is 'first... to love Siobhan, / and then to let her smile at her consequence.'
After the wounded father material, this page hands the inheritance to the mother instead: her 'gift of the ancient Gaelic', 'given in quiet, to guide my temperment in my time', is the enabling bequest the father could not supply, and it carries the speaker's 'worldly wings'. The closing vow is the credible part - love defined not as protection but as 'let her smile at her consequence', a refusal to shield the beloved that reads as respect for her own outcome. The ceremonious, calm diction marks this as the sequence's resolution, and the source spelling 'temperment' is kept as written.