I came across the following poem (Heredity) by Thomas Hardy, today, by accident. I remember reading it for the first time on a panel, in a DART carriage, one morning when I was commuting to work (from about the late 1980s to the early 1990s Iarnród Éireann used to display short poems on the DART).

It reminded me of another poem, written in Irish by Seán Ó Ríordáin: Súile Donna; especially the last verse....

I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place,
Over oblivion.

The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance - that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.