ASS IN RETIREMENT Ass orbits a firm stake: each circle round the last one is stamped slow and unmomentous like a tree-trunk's annual rings. He does not fancy himself as a tragedian, a circumference mystic or a treadmill hero, nor takes he pride in his grey humility. He is just one more Irish ass eating his way round the clock, keeping pace with his own appetite. Put out to grass, given a yard more rope each week, he takes time off from what's under his nose only to bray at rain-clouds over the distant bog; relishes asinine freedom -- having to bear no topple of hay, nor cleeves crammed with turf; ignorant that he'll come in time to the longest tether's end, then strangle or accept that stake. Either way on the endless grass one day he'll drop dead. -- The late Anglo-Irish poet Cecil Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubbert Queen's (Co. Laois), his father a Protestant clergyman. After his mother died he was brought up in London by his father with the help of an aunt. He graduated Wadham College, Oxford, in 1927. Day-Lewis also wrote detective stories under the name "Nicholas Blake" He was married twice and fathered five children, one of whom is Academy-Award winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis. C. Day-Lewis received the honor of England's poet laureate.