W.B. Yeats – The Second Coming (2014). Acrylic painting by Peter Walters.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Source:The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)
Commentary
The Second Coming surely holds the distinction of being the most plundered poem in the English language. To fully understand the poem, we are required to have some biblical knowledge as well as a basic understanding of Yeats’s vision of history. The biblical reference is twofold: the poem blends Christ’s prediction of his own second coming with St. John’s vision of the coming of the Antichrist, the beast of the Apocalypse. This is ‘the rough beast’ of the second last line of the poem. Yeats makes the rough beast even more disturbing and sinister by assigning its place of birth to Bethlehem, the place of Christ’s birth, associated over the course of two thousand years – until recent times – with peace, mercy, gentleness and forgiveness.
To understand Yeats’ cosmology it is essential to read his book, A Vision where he explained his views on history and how it informed his poetry. Yeats saw human history as a series of epochs, what he called “gyres.” He saw the age of classical antiquity as beginning with the Trojan War and then that thousand-year cycle was overtaken by the Christian era, which he suggests is now coming to a close. That is the basis for the final line of the poem, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” In his mystical book, A Vision, he foretold the birth of a new, violent, bestial anti-civilisation and the simultaneous destruction of the two-thousand-year-old Christian cycle. The second coming of the poem is thus not that of Christ but of his opposite, the slouching, revolting figure of the beast whose birth will herald in a new age of anarchy to be ‘loosed upon the world’ (line 4). Yeats’s thesis in A Vision is that each epoch or period of history is eventually overthrown by some massive upheaval. This may explain why Yeats used the phrase “the second birth” instead of “the Second Coming” in some of his first drafts.
It is in this context that the opening lines of the poem should be read: ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer’. The falcon here is an image of man rapidly losing contact with Christ the falconer as he moves along the widening gyre of history. The next six lines paint a grim picture of the beginning of a new age, marked by worldwide anarchy and violence (‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed’). As the gyre widens, ‘things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’. The end of the Christian age is granted the revelation of the character of the new age. The tide of violence has already begun to move, and as it does, it begins to drown ‘the ceremony of innocence’ which, in Yeats’s symbolic system, stands for order and harmony as opposed to the personal and social violence of the ‘blood-dimmed tide’.
The ‘vast image out of ‘Spiritus Mundi’ (line 12) is a favourite Yeatsian idea. According to Yeats, Spiritus Mundi is a storehouse of ideas deriving from the great universal memory common to all humankind, and is also the source of prophecy, since, he believed, history repeats the same predestined cycles every two thousand years or so.
The more terrible events associated with the coming of the Antichrist are all in the future, but in lines 3 – 8, Yeats suggests that his world is already experiencing a foretaste of the grim future heralded by the birth of the ‘rough beast’. There was plenty of evidence all around him in 1919, the year he composed the poem. Yeats began The Second Coming during the tense, eventful month of January 1919. The ‘war to end all wars’ was barely over and the Russian Revolution, which dismayed him, was still unfolding, while another war was brewing on his doorstep. On 21 January, the revolutionary Irish parliament met in Dublin to declare independence while, in a quarry in Soloheadbeg in Tipperary, Dan Breen and other members of the IRA killed two officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary ushering in the War of Independence. This war threatened to uproot the Anglo-Irish ascendency and the civilisation it represented, many elements of which appealed to Yeats himself. Empires and dynasties were all in a state of flux as a result of this anarchy and revolution that had been loosed upon the world. The birth of Yeats’s daughter, Anne, in February, was also fraught with danger. During her pregnancy, his young wife Georgie Hyde-Lees had been stricken by the Spanish flu that was burning through Europe at that time in the wake of the war. All these events conspired to put Yeats in an apocalyptic frame of mind.
For Yeats, the Incarnation of Christ was a violent, turbulent event, after which ‘twenty centuries of stony sleep / were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle’. This new incarnation, that of the slouching ‘rough beast’ will unleash universal horrors. Its sinister possibilities are hinted at in the suggestion that even the predatory desert birds, for all their savagery, are ‘indignant’ at its coming.
The poem gives us a frightening account of the fate in store for the post-Christian world. Social anarchy and massive destruction are made worse by the collapse of moral values among the leaders of nations: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity’. He predicts that evil will triumph in the public sphere because those political leaders who might be expected to defend humane values (and basic human rights) lack the determination to resist those who preach violence and intolerance.
As I mentioned earlier, The Second Coming has become perhaps the most plundered poem in the English language – only Heaney’s From ‘The Cure at Troy’ comes a close second, with its ‘let hope and history rhyme’ so beloved of politicians. At 164 words, The Second Coming consists of almost nothing but quotable lines. Someone reading it for the first time in 2024 might resemble the apocryphal theatregoer who complained that Hamlet was nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together. Whether or not it is Yeats’s greatest poem, it is by far his most useful. As Auden wrote in “In Memory of WB Yeats” (1939), “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.” We have to admit, after its first one hundred years, this poem was built to last.
As our world has recently been wrenched out of joint by the Covid-19 pandemic, many people are turning to poetry for wisdom and consolation. However, The Second Coming fulfils a different role, as it has done in crisis after crisis, from the Vietnam War to 9/11, to the genocides in Rwanda or Syria or Gaza, to the election of Donald Trump and to the looming prospect of his imminent re-election: it provides us with an opportunity to confront chaos and dread, rather than to escape it. This is surely why Fintan O’Toole has proposed the “Yeats Test”: “The more quotable Yeats seems to commentators and politicians, the worse things are.”
Translations is a three-act play by Irish playwright Brian Friel, written in 1980. It is set in Baile Beag (Ballybeg), in County Donegal which is probably loosely based on his beloved village of Glenties in West Donegal where Friel was a frequent visitor and where he is buried. It is the fictional village, created by Friel as a setting for several of his plays, including Dancing at Lughnasa, although there are many real places called Ballybeg throughout Ireland. Towns like Stradbally and Littleton were other variations and ‘translations’ of the very common original ‘Baile Beag’. In effect, in Friel’s plays, Ballybeg is Everytown.
The original staging of the play, in Derry in 1980, was the inaugural production by the newly formed Field Day Theatre Company, which Brian Friel had founded with the actor Stephen Rea. “It was a poignant play for us because the Troubles in the north of Ireland were still raging,” Rea says. “All the issues were local, but Friel was writing about the bigger picture.”
That inaugural production was at the Guildhall, often seen as a symbol of British authority in the city. “It was pretty different for us to do a play there,” Rea says. “It had a huge impact. That was radical because we didn’t premiere it in Dublin, we didn’t premiere it in Belfast. We did it in Derry, which was very severely affected by the Troubles… When we first did the play, many anti-nationalist people said it was whingeing and moaning about the same old problems. However, because of the continuing war in Ukraine, people can see that the play has a considerable influence and relevance to colonialism worldwide”.
“Translations is one of the greatest plays about identity, language, landscape, history – about how we communicate across those divides or fail to – and how a community or nation can navigate times of profound change and dislocation,” said Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin when speaking at the grand opening of the Lesya Ukrainka National Academic Drama Theatre production at The Abbey Theatre in July 2023. “Friel wrote it for the Field Day company during one of the darkest periods of the conflict in Northern Ireland – it’s very significant that the national theatre ensemble in Kyiv, and their audiences, have felt that this Irish text resonates with their personal and collective experience as they live through this appalling, illegal war”.
Friel has said that Translations is ‘a play about language and only about language’, but it deals with a wide range of issues, stretching from language and communication to Irish history and cultural imperialism and the effects of colonialism. Friel said that his play ‘should have been written in Irish’ but, despite this fact, he carefully crafted the verbal action in English, which help bring the political questions of the play into focus.
The play traces the impact of an actual historical event, the 1824 – 1846 project to produce a British government-sanctioned ordnance survey map of Ireland. The English Parliament ordered Major Thomas Colby to Ireland in 1824 to undertake a comprehensive survey of the country. His teams of surveyors would produce detailed maps on a six-inch = one-mile scale that would be used to determine land valuations for tax purposes. The maps were finally published in 1846. They cover almost the entire country and include details of even the smallest civil division of the time: the townland.
Translations shows the effect this operation has upon a typical Irish village (Baile Beag), an impact which causes unemployment, theft, flight, threatened evictions, and violence. Here in Ballybeg, Captain Lancey has been tasked with creating an accurate map of Ireland, with English placenames, so that Ireland can be more easily navigated by the British Army, and that land taxes can be more easily charged. These objectives are connected to the British agenda to colonise and modernise the comparatively ancient civilisation of Ireland. Lancey, who has been sent by commanders in London to carry out this project, is described by Yolland in Act Two, Scene One as ‘the perfect colonial Servant’. Yolland marvels at this hard-working, industrious attitude: ‘Not only must the job be done — it must be done with excellence’.
At face value, this development seemed to be progressive yet in reality it is being used as a weapon of subjugation by a colonial invader. I am reminded of those Pathè News clips from the 40s seen in cinemas at the time and often lampooned by many commentators since of local Home Guard volunteers taking down all road signs in the English countryside so that any of Hitler’s spies who might happen to parachute in would be totally lost. Tragically the huge and ambitious translating project being carried out by the British army sappers which replace all the Irish placenames with new, standardised English ones has the effect of surgically cutting off the natives from their culture – their living geography, history, mythology, and literature – and leaves them stranded and apprehensive in a strange, new world with unfamiliar language labels. This is all the more relevant today because this very tactic is being re-enacted and repeated by Russia in trying to illegally invade and reclaim territory belonging to one of its neighbours.
Translations is set at the time in the nineteenth century when English was becoming the dominant language of Ireland. Using historical metaphor, Friel at once writes an elegant epitaph for Irish as a cultural medium and reflects on the emerging new reality; what it means to be Irish while speaking English. This context is appropriate because it marks the beginning of a more active intervention in Ireland by Britain. The early decades of the 19th century saw the tide turn against the Irish language in Ireland. Already English was spoken in major cities such as Dublin, and the potato blight and mass emigration would combine to reduce the proportion of Irish speakers to about a quarter of Ireland’s population by the end of the century. The decline of Irish was further spurred on by the introduction of the National Schools system in the 1830s, whose origins are hinted at in the play. Maire expresses succinctly the reasons for learning English in Act One: “I don’t want Greek. I don’t want Latin. I want English… I want to be able to speak English because I’m going to America as soon as the harvest’s all saved”. It is hard to argue with the desire of the 19th-century Irish peasant to learn English, as it was the only way for basic economic advancement, and in many cases, survival. The tension between the need to learn the language of the coloniser and the desire to preserve one’s heritage is the central dilemma of Translations.
The play is, appropriately enough, set in a school. While some historians have accused Friel of mythologizing and lionising the Irish Hedge School, his use of it in the play allows him to embrace the full range of Irish education of the early 19th century, giving the audience a limited idea of what it meant to be Irish then. The Hedge School is the place where all education is conducted, from the simplest things, such as Manus teaching the dumb Sarah Johnny Sally to say her name, to Jimmy Jack’s constant poring over Homer in the original Greek. In the town of Baile Beag, students learn in Irish, and they learn the languages and cultures of classical antiquity. Those who do know English only use it, to quote Hugh, the master of the school, “outside the parish… and then usually for the purposes of commerce, a use to which [English] is particularly suited”. We are reminded here of Michael Hartnett’s cutting riposte in his Farewell to English when he too notes the advantages of having English:
… finding English a necessary sin
the perfect language to sell pigs in.
Hugh explains the significance of the Irish language and literature to the inhabitants of Baile Beag to the British surveyor, Lieutenant Yolland, in this half-joking way:
A rich language. A rich literature… full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception – a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to… inevitabilities.
A major theme of Translations is the replacement of the Ancient with the Modern. This can be seen in the Royal Engineers project to replace the Irish place names with standard English ones. While Irish is the traditional language of the country, it is being replaced by English: a language spoken internationally, one of commerce and progress.
The Irish language represents Ireland’s ancient past, while English represents the replacement of this in favour of something more modern and pragmatic. Maire speaks to this in Act One, when arguing they should all learn English. She quotes Daniel O’Connell, The Liberator, who had only recently (1829) achieved a huge victory for Ireland in Westminster with the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act which finally gave Catholics freedom to practice their religion in public. In his view, Maire tells us, ‘The old language is a barrier to modern progress’. However, not all the residents of Baile Beag, are as keen to adapt to these modern ways.
Thus, the colonial encounter between the English and Irish is illustrated for us in the play within the cultural realm. From the point of view of the English surveyors, the cultural space of the Irish seems to be inaccessible. Yolland tells his Irish assistant, Owen, for instance, “Even if I did speak Irish, I’d always be an outsider here… I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me”. Similarly, to the inhabitants of Baile Beag, the English seem strange and distant. Hugh reflects that English succeeds in making Latin verse sound “plebian,” and remarks that the Irish are not familiar with English literature, feeling “closer to the warm Mediterranean”. Maire, for all her love of things English, also reflects that even the English placenames Yolland tells her about “don’t make no sense to me at all”.
The drama revolves around contact between the people of Baile Beag and colonising soldiers, who enter the town to conduct a survey that will “standardise” the place names, meaning, to Anglicize them, either by changing the sounds to approximate those of English – for example, Cnoc Ban to “Knockban,” or by translating them directly – in this case, Cnoc Ban would become “Fair Hill”. Although the villagers welcome the soldiers at first, most of the characters soon become aware of the sinister aspects of this task. As Manus, the son of Hugh and his assistant at the Hedge School, tells his brother Owen, “It’s a bloody military operation”. The task of giving new names to the places of Baile Beag stands in for the full colonisation of Irish life, covering over the previously existing Irish cultural map in order to make “a new England called Ireland,” to use Declan Kiberd’s phrase. Owen, who has been assisting in the colonisation of his own country, draws out the implications:
Lis na Muc, the Fort of the Pigs, has now become Swinefort… And to get to Swinefort you pass through Greencastle and Fair Head and Strandhill and Gort and Whiteplains. And the new school isn’t at Poll na gCaorach – it’s at Sheepsrock. Will you be able to find your way?
It seems that much has been ‘lost in translation’ and the loss of the Irish language reflected in this play is a huge loss for civilisation, none more so than for the Irish themselves. However, Friel’s play also carries an implicit critique of the modern-day use of Irish. If today the vast majority of Irish do not speak Irish, what significance does the quest to preserve or restore the language really have? In Translations, different characters engage in this discussion, with many points made on both sides. The most obvious is Jimmy Jack, who while marginal to the action for the most part is important, especially in this respect. Called “the infant prodigy” by the Hedge School students, Jimmy is anything but – he is in his sixties, does not wash himself, and spends most of his time reading the Greek and Latin classics. His fellow students regard his devotion to the literature of antiquity with bemusement, and he is treated as a buffoon. His infatuation with antiquity, which ends in a literal desire to marry Pallas Athene, serves in the play as a metaphor for a certain kind of cultural nationalist (or Gaelgóir) who continues to use Irish long after it has ceased to be relevant to the Irish themselves. By speaking Irish, and revelling in the glories of Ireland that was, they make themselves as irrelevant to modern Irish life as Jimmy Jack with his Greek, whose only response to the English army’s incursion into Baile Beag is to shout “Thermopylae! Thermopylae!”. The idea seems to be that trying to preserve Irish as a way to evoke the past before colonisation is a futile endeavour and is inadequate for the need of the Irish seeking a new cultural identity. Besides, one suspects that in any case, the glories of Celtic civilisation might never have existed quite in the form one reads about in books, much like life in ancient Greece and Rome could not be judged by reading the Odyssey or the Aeneid.
Close readers of Friel will know that there is this double dimension in all of his work. He purposely sets out to illustrate the same theme from different points of view. In his play ‘Philadelphia Here I Come!’, for example, we see immigration and ‘escape from the land’ from Gar’s viewpoint and from Lizzie’s point of view. Even here in Translations, Yolland wishes to be part of the more ancient Irish civilisation, and so tries to learn Irish; Maire, on the other hand, wants to become part of modern society, and so feels she must learn English.
The final question that the play poses is a simple one: can Irish civilisation and culture survive after colonisation, after the loss of Irish as a medium and the enforcement of English norms? Friel seems to believe that it does, and his answer is implied in a remark of Hugh from Act Two:
Remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen – to use an image you’ll understand – it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour that no longer matches the landscape of… fact.
One of the many tragedies perpetrated by the English colonisation of Ireland is that the words of Irish no longer match “the landscape of fact,” an act that the play shows us happening very literally. However, to use the words of Hugh once again, Friel is arguing precisely against allowing Irish civilisation to be imprisoned in the linguistic contour it once had. Hugh, drunk and distraught at the end of the play, sees the necessary step one must take to prevent this:
“We must learn these new names… We must learn where we live. We must learn to make them our own. We must make them our new home”.
For the Irish, to accept the new place names as their home and to “learn to make them their own” is to ask them to carry on their civilisation, in a language that was imposed on them by force, it is true – but Friel suggests it is either this, or nothing remains to be called Irish culture. The great irony of course is that modern Irish writers now writing in English have taken a stranglehold on most of the prestigious English literary awards including the Booker Prize in recent years!
In conclusion, the contexts and drama of Translations combine in a remarkable, sophisticated discussion of cultural decline and renewal. Brian Friel uses many characters and events that combine into a central argument: the loss of Irish as a cultural medium was a tragedy, enforced both by literal violence and the “soft power” of English cultural hegemony. However, it is equally a mistake to try and recreate the Irish past, as this would be to condemn Irish civilisation to death and complete the task the coloniser started. His play ends with the proposition that not only can English be used to express a uniquely Irish cultural identity, but that it must be used in this manner if it is to happen at all. That Friel wrote his play in English rather than Irish is more than for the sake of convenience or comprehensibility – it is his way of participating in the task he sets out for the Irish in the very same work.
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My own fascination with Translations stems from some research I did back in 2019 on the contentious etymology of the townland of Ahalin (Aughalin) in my own home place of Knockaderry (Cnoc an Doire, the hill of the oak). Dr John O’Donovan, noted historian and the translator of the Annals of the Four Masters, an Irish-speaking scholar and scribe, was the Ordnance Survey’s overall Names Expert used by the Ordnance Survey during their survey conducted between 1824 and 1846. Like Owen in the play, it was O’Donovan’s responsibility to enter all the Irish versions of names into the Names Books, in addition to the English spelling recommended for the published maps. For this reason, the Ordnance Survey of Ireland Names Books are sometimes referred to as O’Donovan’s Name Books.
O’Donovan spent July and August 1840 in Limerick and he signed off on his work on the parish of Clonelty and Clouncagh on 25 July 1840. He was assisted in his work in Limerick by Padraig Ó Caoimh and Antaine Ó Comhraí.
Evidence suggests that in the year 1824, there were three pay Hedge Schools recorded in Knockaderry by official report – two in the village of Knockaderry run by John Mulcahy and John O’Callaghan, and one in Clouncagh run by Edward Conway which was located in the corner of ‘Hartnett’s Field’ on the Begley farm. This was at a time when every field had a name not to mind every townland! John Croke, a relative of Archbishop Thomas Croke, first patron of the GAA and after whom Croke Park is named, set up a Hedge School in Clouncagh in 1850 in a building set aside for him by William McCann and his family.
The first official National School in the parish assisted by the Board of Commissioners of National Education was established in 1832. The school was located in the village of Knockaderry and John O’Callaghan was appointed headmaster of the Boys’ School and his daughter, Amelia O’Callaghan, was appointed as mistress of the Girls’ School. The first purpose-built National School in the parish opened its doors in 1867 in Ahalin (Áth na Linne, The Ford of the Pool).
You can read further about my own local investigations here:
The Gospel of Matthew is the only one of the four canonical gospels to mention the Magi. Matthew 2:1–2 has it that they came “from the east” to worship the “king of the Jews”. We know that St. Matthew wrote his Gospel with a Jewish audience in mind and so, therefore, he begins his Gospel account with an elaborate genealogy that places Jesus as an ancestor of King David and Abraham. Here already Matthew shows his special interest and the intended audience for his Gospel and so he presents Jesus as a King, better than David, and a teacher greater than Moses.
It is Matthew who tells us about the Three Wise Men (Eliot’s Magi) who came to worship, bringing gifts fit for a king. Matthew, in his powerful birth account, presents Jesus, in fulfillment of the prophecies and hopes of the Hebrew Scriptures, as the King of the Jews who has been given all authority in Heaven and Earth. He is Emmanuel, God with us. Matthew, however, is making a powerful distinction for his Jewish audience – the Magi represent those outsiders, those wise men, magicians, or astrologers from the East, from Persia or other civilisations or religions who will now be saved by this Christ child. The Good News of Matthew, therefore, is that this Christ has come for all people and not just for the Chosen People of Israel. Eliot sees in the Magi a metaphor for his own conversion – he too has made a long and tortuous journey and has finally made his decision to bow down before the Christian God.
This poem, ‘Journey of the Magi’, published in 1927, was the first of a series of poems written by Eliot for his publisher, Faber and Faber, composed for special booklets or greeting cards which were issued in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
‘Journey of the Magi’ – one of the great classic Christmas poems – is told from the perspective of one of the Magi (commonly known as the ‘Three Wise Men’, though the Bible makes no mention of their number or gender – it does mention that they brought three gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh). The poem examines the implications that the advent of Christ had for the other religions of the time, and it emphasizes this pivotal moment in human history. In the Christian calendar, the coming of the Wise Men or Magi is celebrated on January 6th – the Twelfth Day of Christmas. It is often referred to as the Feast of the Epiphany, when Jesus is revealed to all, Jew and Gentile, as the Saviour of the World.
This is an apocryphal account of the journey made by the Three Wise Men which eventually led them to a humble stable in Bethlehem where the Christ Child lay. It is narrated to us by one of their number, perhaps over a glass of wine, after their return home. The story, and it is a beautifully told story, is told not in Biblical language, but in the language of everyday speech and with an amount of detail not found in the Gospel story of St. Matthew.
The opening quotation comes from one of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes’ Nativity Sermons, preached at Christmas during the 1620s. The speaker, one of the Magi, talks about the difficulties encountered by the Magi during their eventful journey to see the infant Christ. It is unconventional in that it focuses on the details of the journey: their longing for home (and for the ‘silken girls’ bringing the sweet drink known as ‘sherbet’), their doubts about the point of the journey they’re undertaking, the unfriendly people in the villages where they stop over for the night, and so on. The hardships of the journey are recounted in some detail. The details underline the absurdity of the journey in the first place but stress the strong impulses that made them undertake the journey in the middle of winter. The hardship is further stressed by the sharp juxtaposition between what they faced on their journey and what they had left behind in their ‘palaces’.
Eventually, the Magi arrive at the place where the infant Christ is to be found. The weary travelers trek through a ‘temperate valley’ – a kind of Garden of Eden – and eventually arrive at a tavern with its drunkenness and gambling. The description of the valley is akin to a movie still – the camera pans slowly over the landscape lingering on sharply etched details such as the running stream, the watermill, the three trees, and the old white horse. Then the camera moves on and picks out the gamblers and the empty wine skins. There is no mention of Bethlehem or the stable in this account and the narrator simply states that they ‘arrived at evening, not a moment too soon / finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory’. Neither is there mention of the star which – the Gospels and a million children’s nativity plays tell us – guided the Magi to the spot where Christ lay in a manger. The words ‘not a moment too soon’ are important here because the narrator seems to realize that they, like Simeon later, because of their advanced years, were unlikely to survive to witness the Crucifixion or the Resurrection of Christ and that they can only count themselves lucky to have witnessed the beginning of this powerful movement.
The poem ends with the poem’s speaker reflecting on the journey years later, saying that if he had the chance he would do it again, but he remains unsure about the precise significance of the journey and what they found when they arrived. Was it the birth of a new world (Christianity) or the death of an old one (i.e. the Magi’s own world)? The speaker then reveals that, since he returned home following his visit to see the infant Christ, he and his fellow Magi have felt uneasy living among their own people, who now seem to be ‘an alien people clutching their gods’ (in contrast to the worshippers of the newly arrived Jesus, who worship one god only, in the form of the Messiah). The speaker ends by telling us that he is resigned to die now, glad of ‘another death’ (his own) to complement the death of his cultural and religious beliefs, which have been destroyed by his witnessing the baby Jesus.
Jesus himself, however, is absent from this poem. One reason for this may be that we are, of course, all too familiar with the story of the Nativity and we don’t need reminding here. Another possible reason is that the focus here in this account is on the journey, the quest, and the hardship of the search. Eliot places himself here among and alongside the Persian astrologers as they seek out the face of the baby Christ. The poet empathises with the ‘Wise Men’ who are seeing their once deeply held beliefs being called into question by this new Messiah.
No study of the poem would be complete without reference to the imagery used by the poet. In carrying out such an analysis we also need to remember that the narrator is one of a band of ‘wise men’, ‘astrologers’ who are learned in the study of signs and omens. Sadly, it seems, the Magi miss the significance of almost all the images mentioned in the poem! Much of the imagery foreshadows Christ’s later life: the three trees suggesting Christ’s crucifixion on Calvary; the vine, to which Jesus will liken himself; the pieces of silver foreshadowing the thirty pieces of silver Judas Iscariot will receive for betraying him; the wine-skins foreshadowing the wine that Jesus would beseech his disciples to drink in memory of him at the Last Supper. Even though the narrator is a priest or astrologer, someone trained to look for the significance in the things around him, to read and interpret signs as symbols or omens, he fails to pick up on what they foreshadow.We, however, living in a Christian (or even a post-Christian) society, can read their significance all too well. At the poem’s end, the narrator is left feeling perplexed and troubled by his visit and by the advent of Christ: he wonders whether Christ’s birth has been a good thing since his arrival in the world has finally signalled the death of his own old religion and the religion of his people. Now, he and his fellow Magi, like Simeon in Eliot’s other great religious poem, A Song for Simeon, are left world-weary and they welcome the end.
So, therefore, ‘Journey of the Magi’ is partly about belonging, about social, tribal, and religious belonging: the speaker of the poem reflects sadly that the coming of Christ has rendered his own gods and his own tribe effete, displaced, destined to be overtaken by the advent of Christ – and, with him, Christianity. It is tempting to see the poem – written in the year Eliot converted to Anglo-Catholicism – as a metaphor for Eliot’s own feelings concerning secularism and the Christian religion. In the space of the century since its publication, Christianity has itself been rendered effete in the face of Darwinism, modern physics, secular philosophy, and whatever the hell is going on in 2023! And so, therefore, this poem, about a people’s conversion from one religion to another, is equally bound up with Eliot’s own conversion to Christianity.
T.S. Eliot portrait by Baltimore Maryland artist Jerry Breen.
This beautiful video has been produced by Danny Barry’s grandson, Dan Barry. The poem is narrated by the poet Michael Hartnett and it is taken from a radio documentary that he did in 1979 for RTE Radio entitled Poems Plain. The programme was produced by Donal Flanagan. The video contains copyrighted material that is being used for educational purposes under the doctrine of ‘fair use’. The use of this material is not intended to infringe upon the copyright owner’s rights. The material is used here solely for educational and non-commercial purposes. Dan Barry has suggested a small but necessary edit to verse four and the printed poem below reflects those changes.
Danny Barry’s poem, ‘The Christmas Tree’, deals with an actual happening. A few men from Maiden Street in Newcastle West decided to erect a Christmas tree in the street. They cut it down in Glenmageen, an area reputed to be haunted by a witch known as Sprid na Barna. Glenmageen is located about four miles south of Newcastle West and people can now visit the townland as they walk or cycle on the new Limerick Greenway. The stories of Sprid na Barna were well known, and the area near the present-day Barna Gardens was greatly feared by the local people. Indeed, it was said that only a few tough men would go home after dark along the road she haunted. Michael Hartnett is fulsome in his praise for the poet:
Danny Barry’s simple evocation of Sprid and her victims is extraordinary. Not because it is great poetry, but because he does not question the truth of the event at all. By the way, the Silver Dollar Saloon, which is a strange Hollywood, Western-type name, is a pub in Newcastle West, which was then run by the Flynn family, and is now run by the Kelly family.
The poem is purely mischievous and no insult should be taken by anyone, dead or alive, concerning the story told by the poet. Danny Barry is ‘ball hopping’ here and there are distinct similarities between this poem and many later written by Michael Hartnett, such as ‘The Balad of Salad Sunday’.
The Christmas Tree
A bunch of the boys from Maiden Street, one Wednesday afternoon,
Were drinking and awaiting in the Silver Dollar Saloon,
Waiting for a lorry to convey them to Glenmageen.
And they brought from there a Christmas tree, the finest ever seen.
They put it up in splendor, bedecked with fairy lights.
It was a wonderful tree, a beautiful tree, that lightened the darkest nights.
Now, the festive season passed away, but this Christmas tree was there to stay.
In time it became the talk of the town, for none of the boys dared take it down.
They were stricken with a malady the doctors could not say,
And there is one poor chap who now resides at the back of Shaw’s today.
Now, you have heard of Sprid na Barna, that very naughty dame,
That evil maid of Glenmageen, of the haunting ghostly fame.
The clergy had to banish her between the tree and the bark.
No more she would haunt and terrify the neighbours after dark.
Now the moral of this ditty I want you all to know
Twas a tree that grew in Glenmageen twenty years ago.
Now what I am trying to tell you will cause you all to frown
That the amadans from Maiden Street have brought auld sprig to town.
Now when the blackthorn blooms again and the sheepdogs howl at the full of moon
You could meet auld sprig with a glass of grog in the Silver Dollar Saloon.
Note: The reference to ‘auld sprig’ in the last line is a local mispronunciation of ‘sprid’
The original manuscript of the poem in Danny Barry’s own handwriting – you can see that it was a work in progress from all the crossing out!
Michael Hartnett in pensive mood by the River Arra in Newcastle West in the 1970’s. Photo credit to Limerick Leader Photo Archives
I have been posting essays and commentary here over the years on the life and poetry of Michael Hartnett. The nature of my blog is a bit disjointed and doesn’t have a ready index so I have decided to pull together all the Hartnett stuff in this one blog post. It’s a One-Stop-Shop for Hartnett fans. All you need to do – I think! – is Bookmark the post and you can then browse at your leisure. You know the drill – just click on the link!
Nautilus Island’s hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; she’s in her dotage.
Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall.
The season’s ill— we’ve lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall; his fishnet’s filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl; there is no money in his work, he’d rather marry.
One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind’s not right.
A car radio bleats, “Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat. . . . I myself am hell; nobody’s here—
only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air— a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.
Glossary:
hull to hull – the speaker sees the cars as boats, next to one another as if on a river, maybe the river Styx from Greek mythology, associated with the final crossing of the soul?
hill’s skull – a suggestion of Golgotha, or Calvary which was the hill Christ was crucified on. Both words, Golgotha (from Hebrew) and Calvary (from Latin) translate as ‘skull’.
spar spire – mastlike spire
Tudor Ford – Ford luxury car
Commentary
Skunk Hour is a confessional poem written in 1957. It depicts a man at a moment of crisis in his life. It was the last poem in an important volume of poetry titled Life Studies (1959), one of Lowell’s most influential publications. This is a dark and thought-provoking poem, with religious anxieties surfacing, and it raises issues that are universal and relevant for us today. The speaker admits to secretly watching lovers in their cars at night and this makes him feel bad. He confesses to being a type of voyeur – a victim of a modern, uncaring, materialistic community, a depressed loner who will resort to spying on young couples for titillation.
The first four verses of Skunk Hour focus on several prominent inhabitants of Nautilus Island, Maine: the ‘hermit heiress’, the ‘summer millionaire’, and the ‘fairy decorator’. Brief descriptions set the scene until the main protagonist, the sad, lonely speaker, begins his rather pathetic confession. Lowell once remarked, ‘The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town’.
In fact, as Scott Edward Anderson tells us, ‘he wrote the poem “backwards,” the final stanzas before the opening four, but did it with such seeming ease that the opening reads as almost a laconic warm-up exercise or scene-setter’. In truth, however, the opening four verses are masterful: the weight of his forthcoming confession weighs so heavily upon him that he delays and obfuscates because of the enormity of it. Lowell is human, after all.
The scene is set by first introducing the old and frail heiress of the island who is a stickler for tradition, a conservative, a fading aristocrat landowner with a bishop for a son, and ruins for the future. The poet’s diction reflects this refusal to move on by using the word still twice to emphasize the longevity of her reign. She clings on through the winter, and the sheep go on grazing. Even her farmer (more likely her gardener) is a traditional local administrator (selectman) in the speaker’s own village.
The tone is one of mild desperation at this stage in the poem, the heiress thirsting for a return to the glorious days of old Queen Victoria, when the great and good ruled supreme and everyone knew their place. Basically, she’s living in the past and as derelict buildings come on the market, she buys them up ‘and lets them fall’, presumably to protect her privacy, as well as to reclaim some semblance of what the place resembled in the previous golden era.
The line, ‘she’s in her dotage’, echoes ‘the world is in its dotage’ from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). Note the way the poet uses end half-rhyme (slant or near or imperfect rhyme) in cottage/village/dotage which suggests that things are not making full sense, and there is little harmony. These combine to endorse the idea that on this island things are falling into a state of disrepair, which doesn’t bode well for the future.
Skunk Hour is a free verse poem of eight sestets (six-line stanzas). There is no set rhyme scheme but there are interesting end rhymes and some internal rhymes that help our understanding. These sounds, a variation on a theme of ill, are half-rhymes and produce an echo that keeps the reader in touch with the voice of the speaker, alive in a season that is itself ill. This is illustrated by the demise of ‘our summer millionaire’ who despite putting on a fashionable outward appearance falls ill and dies and his yawl ‘was auctioned off to lobstermen’. Lowel’s use of words like lost, leap, and auctioned off all point to a person permanently not returning, his boat now belonging to locals who will put it to better use. The stanza ends with the enigmatic line, ‘A red fox stain covers Blue Hill’. Lowell reassures us that the line ‘was merely meant to describe the rusty reddish colour of autumn on Blue Hill, a Maine mountain near where we were living’.
In stanza four the plot thickens, and we are introduced to the “fairy decorator,” actually, “our fairy decorator,” because every summer village from Massachusetts to Bangor, Maine, had one! He appropriates the tools of the local fishing and lobstering trade to decorate the windows of his shop, and would “rather marry,” presumably an heiress, since there’s “no money in his work” and without any prospect of marrying someone of his own sex for at least another half-century. Of course, this was before the arrival of political correctness! Lowell would no doubt be challenged by his characterization here were he writing today. The full-end rhyme fall/awl and half-rhymes cork/work and fairy/marry help tie up this stanza, a near-comic portrayal of a guy making the best out of a sorry situation. Wedlock would seem to be a way out of a life destined for a peculiar kind of sad, island loneliness. In these four stanzas, Lowell has masterfully built up a vivid portrait of a threadbare New England village and its archetypes.
Stanza five offers us some clues as to what the poet is wrestling with in his own darkness, his own crisis point: the stanza opens with “One dark night,” and he ends the stanza with, “My mind’s not right.” ‘One Dark Night’ as well as being a good opening for a scary story told at Halloween also has echoes of ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ as depicted by St. John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic monk and poet from the 16th century. In a talk ‘On Skunk Hour’, Lowell stated,
‘I hoped my readers would remember St John of the Cross’s poem. My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostic. An existentialist night.’
The speaker’s dark troubled secret is revealed in this stanza, giving the poem its confessional nature. He climbs into his Ford Tudor sedan and drives up to a quiet graveyard on a hill overlooking the town and he watches the young couples necking in their cars, windows steaming in the late summer night – it is late August, early September. He remembers the anecdote related to him by Elizabeth Bishop of Walt Whitman in his old age being driven by horse and buggy to witness the hillside lovers in a bygone era and imagines the internal satisfaction that that poet felt from seeing young people in love. Lowell was continually influenced by Elizabeth Bishop’s work and, apparently, the Bishop poem that inspired Lowell’s Skunk Hour and helped unlock his new, freer style, was The Armadillo which was written in Brazil in the mid-fifties at the height of the Cold War. ‘Armadillo is one of your absolutely top poems, your greatest quatrain poem,’ Lowell writes to Bishop late in 1958. ‘I mean it has a wonderful formal-informal grandeur – I see the bomb in it in a delicate way.’ It was originally published in The New Yorker in June of 1957 and she later dedicated the poem to Lowell when it appeared in Questions of Travel in 1965. Lowell, in turn, dedicated Skunk Hour to Bishop.
So, in stanza five the speaker is revealed to us at last; having ‘hidden’ behind the first four stanzas he finally reveals his dark secret: he has come here to this Golgotha to spy, like some Judas, on couples having sex in their cars:
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
And that line about the graveyard is a powerful hint – it ‘shelves’ or slopes down and so the island’s dead are looking in on this love-making too, just like the speaker. The four dots at the end of this line are poignant and pregnant with possibility. The stanza ends in self-reflection with yet another confession: ‘My mind’s not right’.
In the sixth stanza, the speaker is so close to the cars on the hill he can hear music from one of the radios. He hears snippets of Fats Domino singing “Careless Love,” and this depresses him even further and he realizes he is on a fool’s mission: he won’t find what he is looking for here either. He heads back down the hill, noticing off to his left, that autumn has already arrived on Blue Hill, and in the fading light, the hill is turning ‘fox red’, as the first trees and the low shrubs start to turn. He admits that his “mind’s not right.” He needs to get home. When he reaches the house, he enters through the back porch so as not to disturb his wife and three-month-old child.
At this point, the speaker feels completely alone, in sharp juxtaposition to the lovers in their cars on the nearby hill. Some have argued that Lowell was feeling suicidal here, or more likely he was coming to the realization that he was on the verge of another manic episode. (He’d been free of such episodes for three years but in December 1957 he was again admitted to Boston State Hospital).
Ascending the back stairs, he is startled by a noise from the garbage cans behind the house. A mother skunk and her kittens are nosing around in the spilled contents which include a cup of sour cream that the mother skunk jabs her nose into with abandon. Nature comes to his rescue in the form of the instinctive skunk, a mother with her young in tow out looking for food. The speaker seems almost relieved as he watches this family go about their business of surviving in an urban environment, an unnatural one for these animals.
The last two stanzas bring some redemption for the sad speaker, whose meaningless existence in a Maine backwater is put on hold temporarily by the simple act of witnessing a lowly skunk scavenging with her young kittens.
Skunk Hour and the other poems Lowell wrote late in 1957 turned increasingly inward only to emerge into an outward flourish of personal expression that critics came to call “confessional.” The overall tone of Skunk Hour is pessimistic, even depressing – there is an atmosphere of doubt, failure, and poverty of spirit, relieved temporarily by the actions of the courageous if slightly disgusting, skunks. Only they seem to live brightly in the here and now of Nautilus Island. It’s not a fun place to exist in according to the speaker; there is a sickness pervading, and he seems to be a victim of it, admitting that ‘my mind’s not right’. He probably sensed another manic bout in the offing and, sure enough, by December 1957 Lowell was again hospitalized due to bipolar disorder, the mental condition then known as “manic depression”. While bipolar disorder was often a great burden to the writer and his family, it also provided the subject matter for some of Lowell’s most influential poetry, such as Skunk Hour and the other poems included in his prize-winning volume, Life Studies (1959).
References:
Anderson, Scott Edward. The Nautilus of Robert Lowel’s Skunk Hour, in http://www.svjlit.com/
Believe it or not, Michael Hartnett is not the only poet to hail from Newcastle West! There have always been local balladeers and poets who have pandered to their local audience in the town and in the surrounding parishes. In Hartnett’s brilliant poem Maiden Street Ballad, he mentions two of these troubadours and he takes pride in saying that he intends to hold people to account ‘like Aherne and Barry before me’. He will, therefore, follow in the illustrious footsteps of Jack Aherne from Lower Maiden Street and Danny Barry who was born in Bothar Buí. He will be true to them and speak out like they had done in the generation before him. In the introductory verses of that famous ballad, Hartnett sets out his stall and warns us in advance of what we are to expect from him:
8
Now before you get settled, take a warning from me
for I’ll tell you some things that you won’t like to hear –
we were hungry and poor down in Lower Maiden Street,
a fact I will swear on the Bible.
There were shopkeepers then, quite safe and secure –
seven Masses a week and then shit on the poor;
ye know who I mean, of that I am sure,
and if they like they can sue me for libel.
9
They say you should never speak ill of the dead
but a poet must say what is inside his head;
let drapers and bottlers now tremble in dread:
they no longer can pay men slave wages.
Let hucksters and grocers and traders join in
for they all bear the guilt of a terrible sin:
they thought themselves better than their fellow men –
now the nettles grow thick on their gravestones.
10
So come all you employers, beware how you act
for a poet is never afraid of a fact:
your grasping and greed I will always attack
like Aherne and Barry before me.
My targets are only the mean and the proud
and the vandals who try to make dirt of this town,
if their fathers were policemen they’d still feel the clout
of a public exposure in poetry.
Danny Barry was born in Bothar Buí in 1911 and lived his whole life in Newcastle West. He married Margaret (Peig) Sayers from Ferriter’s Quarter, Dunquin, and together, they had four children: Breda, Mary, Kevin and Dennis. Danny worked as a summons server and pound keeper in Newcastle West. He was known to many as the “Sheriff” and to others as the “Bard of Bothar Buí”.
Danny Barry’s Warrant of Appointment as Summons Server issued by the Circuit Court Office on 15th August 1955
Michael Hartnett believed that Danny Barry of Newcastle West was an example of the local poet at his best. He lived most of his married life at 46 Assumpta Park, just round the corner from Hartnett’s childhood home. He died in 1973 while still in his early 60s. He is still remembered with a shudder by many of the people targeted by his verse. In praise of Danny’s poetry, Hartnett has said ‘he mocked the foolish, the vain, the craw thumper, the jack-in-office, and the bogus patriot’.
Danny’s son Kevin and Kevin’s sons, Dan and Graham Barry have done sterling work collecting the remnants of their grandfather’s poems in recent years. Remember these local poets did not publish their work or expect to have it dissected and analysed in academic circles. They never considered themselves as professional poets in the first place. Their songs and ballads were written for local consumption, to be recited in their homes, in local bars, in local ‘rambling houses’, or occasionally given a public performance in The Square. In a recently unearthed radio documentary entitled ‘Poems Plain’, broadcast by Radio Eireann in 1979 and produced at the time by Donal Flanagan, Michael Hartnett praises the work of these local balladeers and especially the work of Danny Barry:
They seldom publish their work. They write about local events. They’re firmly rooted in 19th-century verse forms. They don’t worry about identity, life, love, or any of the big themes that begin with capital letters. As a result, they’re not accepted by the arbiters of literary taste.
So, if these poets don’t write about the big mainstream issues, ‘life or love’, what do they write about? In the documentary, Hartnett tells his audience that they concentrate on local issues:
They commemorate hurling matches, football matches, disasters and they usually write badly when dealing with these themes. The ballads they produce are virtually interchangeable. Just a few names need to be changed here and there. But when they deal with humorous themes, or when they satirize, they can be brilliant.
In this, Hartnett suggests they form an unbroken line that stretches back into the Gaelic past, especially into the 18th century. The professional poets even then, such as Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, who was lucky and privileged enough to enjoy the patronage of the Fitzgerald family of Springfield Castle in Broadford, County Limerick, despised these local poets, ‘the sráid éigse, he called them, the street poets’.
Thankfully, due mainly to the intervention of Kevin Barry and his sons Dan and Graham and other members of the family much of his best work has been saved for posterity. Along with his other contemporary, the often notorious, Jack Aherne, only the more salubrious of their sound bites are still retained in people’s memories. Some of their surviving verses are still libelous, but as Hartnett says in the documentary, ‘the trouble with poetry is, no matter how vicious, how scandalous, how libelous, it becomes public property once distributed, whether by word of mouth or slipped under people’s doors early in the morning’. Hartnett, like Barry and Aherne before him, was wont to deliver verses to his neighbours in this manner on his return to Newcastle West in 1975, especially for those who had recently passed away. His Epitaph for John Kelly, Blacksmith, and In Memoriam Sheila Hackett are but two such examples of poems written following the death of a friend or neighbour.
Hartnett, who took no prisoners in his role as critic, dismisses some of Danny Barry’s work as weak and overly sentimental:
Like all Irish poets, he was in love with places, and his verses are full of place names. But these poems happen also to be his weakest poems. He fell heavily into an almost cloying sentimentality, made more syrupy by echoes from Robert Service and Thomas Moore.
Barry wrote about local places, Newcastle West, Glenastar, Glenmageen, Rooska Hill, the river Arra but Hartnett tells us that ‘his real strength lay in his satires, or in those poems in which he dealt with people’.
One such poem is The Old School in which he mentions two of the teachers, J.D. Musgrave and George Ambrose, who taught in the old Courtenay School. Master Musgrave was the principal of the school until his retirement in 1915. The poem was probably written around 1955 at the time when the old school was demolished to be replaced by the present building in Gortboy. There are slight echoes of Goldsmith’s The Village Schoolmaster here, but the poem is firmly rooted in the 18th century Anglo Irish ballad tradition, as in such songs as The Limerick Rake.
The Old School
Gone are the days when hearts were young and gay
Gone are the boys from the old school away
Gone are the monks the bright boys and the fool
Gone are the days of the old Courtenay School
If you wander back in memory to the days of long ago
When you were young and happy and worry you did not know
Ducking out to the back alley to play a game of ball
Or trying to jump the highest point of Boody Fitz’s wall
Or mooching in the Majors where the breeze was fresh and cool
And these are the happy memories of the old Courtenay School
Gone is J.D. Musgrave a gentleman was he
A student of prognosis he could tell what was to be
‘Twas often said he was severe he made them face the wall
But he was a man of progress he made scholars of them all
And there was Master Ambrose as George he was better known
For nicknames and for wisdom of superiors he had none
There was no one could afford to miss for he had an awful saying
You had better brush it up me boys cause you have sawdust for a brain
He christened many a pupil from his lofty rostrum stool
And no one knew his own name at the old Courtenay school.
So goodbye old school memories no more your rooms will ring
Of children’s happy voices and the happy songs they sing
My dear old school you are silent now ’cause they took your heart away
No more the tramp of children’s feet soon you will crumble and decay
But I will not forget you and the happy days of yore
Nor will the boys across the seas in far and foreign shore
Our boyhood terms our boyhood joys a lingering memory
That no time or age can yet blot out in our hearts you will always be
For there are many words when spoken cause a tear to dim their eye
But the saddest little word of all is the simple word Goodbye.
Here Danny Barry uses words and misuses words which only a master of verse in the 18th century could have done. He uses the lovely expression, “a student of prognosis” to describe Master Musgrave. Interestingly, his son, Maurice Musgrave later married Dolly McMahon who ran a public house where Gearoid Whelan now has his establishment. She is the Dolly Musgrave that Hartnett immortalises in Maiden Street Ballad:
‘twas in Dolly Musgrave’s I drank my first glass
As is obvious from the poem nicknames have always been synonymous with Newcastle West. Hartnett, himself, in Maiden Street Ballad, describes the many from the town who had to take the emigrant boat to England and elsewhere:
Off went Smuggy and Eye-Tie and Goose-Eye and Dol,
off went Ratty and Muddy and Squealer and Gull;
then the Bullock and Dando and Gallon were gone,
all looking for work among strangers.
The old men who stayed, time soon thinned their ranks –
like Gogga and Ganzie and Dildo and Sank,
and the Major and Bowler felt death’s icy hand;
old Maiden Street went to the graveyard.
Hartnett himself admitted that the list given in the verse above is only a small sample of the nicknames given to the natives of the town. The nickname ‘Smuggy’ is interesting – it’s from the Irish smugach, meaning ‘snotty’!
In his notes for that great ballad, Hartnett tells us that, ‘it used to be said that if a stranger walked from Forde’s Corner (now Bourke’s Corner at the top of Maiden Street) he’d have a nickname before he got to Leslie’s Ating House’ (where Richard (Dickie) Liston had his sweet shop). Also in an article written for The Irish Times on 11th November 1968 entitled ‘Poet’s Progress’, he declared that ‘in small towns in Ireland, unless a man has a nickname (a reputation, good or bad), he hardly exists at all’.
Hartnett himself was simply referred to as ‘The Poet’ and he gave his younger brother John the nickname ‘Wraneen’. In the Maiden Street Ballad, he refers to his brother Denis as ‘Dinny the Postman’. Dinny, who has sadly only recently passed away, was also often referred to as ‘Halpin’. In Danny Barry’s poem The Old School, George Ambrose is credited with giving each student a nickname and, Barry uses the poignant and telling phrase, ‘and no one knew his own name at the old Courtenay school’. I’m sure that this also applied to the teachers!
Hartnett informs us that Barry’s poem, The Christmas Tree, deals with an actual happening. A few men from Maiden Street in Newcastle West decided to erect a Christmas tree in the street. They cut it down in Glenmageen, an area reputed to be haunted by a witch known as Sprid na Barna. Glenmageen is located about four miles south of Newcastle West and people can now visit the townland as they walk or cycle on the new Limerick Greenway. The stories of Sprid na Barna were well known, and the area near the present-day Barna Gardens was greatly feared by the local people. Indeed, it was said that only a few tough men would go home after dark along the road she haunted. Again Hartnett is fulsome in his praise for the poet:
Danny Barry’s simple evocation of Sprid and her victims is extraordinary. Not because it is great poetry, but because he does not question the truth of the event at all. By the way, the Silver Dollar Saloon, which is a strange Hollywood, Western-type name, is a pub in Newcastle West, which was then run by the Flynn family, and is now run by the Kelly family.
The poem is called The Christmas Tree. Again I mention Robert Service, and it’s evident in the meter, even the introduction is pure Service.
The Christmas Tree
A bunch of the boys from Maiden Street, one Wednesday afternoon,
Were drinking and awaiting in the Silver Dollar Saloon,
Waiting for a lorry to convey them to Glenmageen.
And they brought from there a Christmas tree, the finest ever seen.
They put it up in splendour, bedecked with fairy lights.
It was a wonderful tree, a beautiful tree, that lightened the darkest night.
Now, the festive season passed away, but this Christmas tree was there to stay.
In time it became the talk of the town, for none of the boys dared take it down.
They were stricken with a malady the doctors could not say,
And there is one poor chap who now resides at the back of Shaw’s today.
Now, you have heard of Sprid na Barna, that very naughty dame,
That evil maid of Glenmageen, of the haunting ghostly fame.
The clergy had to banish her between the tree and the bark.
No more she would haunt and terrify the neighbours after dark.
Now the moral of this ditty I want you all to know
‘Twas a tree that grew in Glenmageen twenty years ago.
Now what I am trying to tell you will cause you all to frown
That the amadáns from Maiden Street have brought auld sprig* to town.
Now when the blackthorn blooms again and the sheepdogs howl at the full of moon
You could meet auld sprig with a glass of gin in the Silver Dollar Saloon.
*Sprid na Barna was sometimes mispronounced locally as Sprig na Barna
This beautiful video has been produced by Danny Barry’s grandson, Dan Barry. The poem is narrated by the poet Michael Hartnett and it is taken from a radio documentary that he did in 1979 for RTE Radio entitled Poems Plain. The programme was produced by Donal Flanagan. The video contains copyrighted material that is being used for educational purposes under the doctrine of ‘fair use’. The use of this material is not intended to infringe upon the copyright owner’s rights. The material is used here solely for educational and non-commercial purposes.
Danny Barry perhaps wrote a couple of hundred poems, many of them now lost or mouldering in the cupboards of his victims. A handful, between twenty and twenty-five, have been recovered due to the perseverance of Danny’s family, especially his daughter Mary Flanagan, and in recent times by his grandchildren Dan and Graham Barry.
Michael Hartnett believed that the best poem Danny Barry wrote, is a piece called The Eviction. Again, it is based on a natural happening. It is full of irony and humour, and of course, the elemental Irish hate for landlords, sheriffs, and bailiffs is very evident.
The Eviction
My name is Peter Shea, my age is fifty-seven.
The old Dock Road was my abode, a station next to heaven.
I was happy as an angel, with my lot I was content,
But I took the drinking porter, and I could not pay the rent.
So now to all good neighbours, a sad tale I must state.
I was forced to go from my bungalow, beside the Sandpit Gate.
Tom Hartnett was my landlord, and a damn bad one was he.
I only owed him six years’ rent when he kindly summoned me.
I tried to calm his temper, but I could not calm old Tom,
So to ease the situation, I took in sweet Maggie Nom.
Poor Maggie was so gentle and mild in her debate
That she won my heart and I lost my house beside the Sandpit Gate.
It was on a fine September morn, the year was thirty-one,
The sheriff came and flung me out, myself and Maggie Nom.
As he called to his head bailiff, ‘Is there any more to go?’
I said, wait a while your honour, sir, you forgot poor Maggie’s po.
And when he raised the lid off in candour I must state,
I smothered all the neighbours that live around the Sandpit Gate.
So now to finish up my rhyme, there’s one thing I must say
About the smiling face and the charming grace of my darling Gurky Shea.
For when the world frowned at me, she did not hesitate
With me to stay, and perhaps to lay, down by the Sandpit Gate.
Hartnett is effusive in his praise for this poem and as already stated he was by nature a very severe critic. His verdict here is glowing!
If you compare this poem, with the hundreds similar to it, which were written in Munster in the Irish language 200 years ago, it is easy to see the link between, say, Seán Ó Tuama and Danny Barry. The same love of place, of the cherished phrase, of galloping meters and tumbling rhyme, the same disregard for the very thin skins of the fool and of the oppressor, and amazingly enough, they had the same effect.
Danny Barry could frighten his enemies with a threat of public laughter, and yet he achieved what all poets try to achieve. Because of the earlier efforts of Danny Barry and Jack Aherne, Michael Hartnett was very conscious of his local audience, and when he returned to Newcastle West in the mid-70s he wrote many ribald verses for that audience culminating in the publication of Maiden Street Ballad in 1980. Like Hartnett, Danny Barry managed to ‘write a few songs for his people’, he was recognized by them as a poet, he could make his people laugh or sing or tremble, and he was well aware of the fragility of his own meagre attempts in verse. He says in one of his little poems, called Remembrance,
And so it will be when he is gone.
Someone will sing of him in song.
Someone will read what he held dear.
But too late for praise he will not hear.
References and Links:
“Poems Plain – Danny Barry” was a short radio documentary presented by Michael Hartnett on RTE radio in 1979 and produced by Donal Flanagan. All quotations in this article come from a transcript of the documentary. Listen to the full radio documentary by clicking on the link below
The author is indebted in particular to Dan Barry, grandson of Danny Barry, for invaluable background information in the preparation of this blog post. The Barry family has done amazing work in collecting the scattered remnants of their grandfather’s life’s work. They have done us all a great service.
Jack Aherne’s Supermarket in Lower Maiden Street. Jack was also a coal merchant and he also sold sand and gravel from the sandpit behind the store in what was known as Aherne’s Field – now the location for the Lidl Supermarket and the Scanglo factory. When Jack Aherne closed his supermarket the premises were bought by Tom Moran who carried on an electrical business on the site. Jack’s father, also Jack Aherne is the other noted bard and rhymer whom Hartnett refers to in Maiden Street Ballad – ‘like Aherne and Barry before me’. Photograph by Sean Kelly.
I have been posting notes here for some years now since I retired as a teacher of English and as an Advising Examiner for English Higher Level for many years. What I have done here is bring all those links together in one post or blog – as a kind of Index of all the posts I’ve written that are specifically relevant to Leaving Cert English 2024 – to save you the trouble of constantly searching the internet each time you want to do some background work on a text or a poet or author. It’s not perfect and it won’t suit every student, class, or teacher – you may have already made different text choices from the many available. It’s my version of a ‘One-Stop Shop’ and you know the drill: just click on the link if it’s relevant to your studies! My choice of texts is personal and obviously will not suit every teacher, every student, or every class. You can easily see where my own preferences lie by simply viewing the number of links provided for each text or poet!
However, Caveat Emptor! Leaving Cert Student Beware !! These are resources that you should use wisely. They are my personal responses to the various texts and you should read and consider them and decide to study them if you find them useful. IN OTHER WORDS, MAKE YOUR OWN OF THEM, ADD TO THEM, OR DELETE FROM THEM AS YOU SEE FIT.
For each Leaving Certificate course, three modes of comparison will be prescribed. This means that the texts chosen for comparative study must be studied under these particular modes (headings).
This year the modes of comparison at Higher Level are as follows:
Literary Genre
Theme or Issue
Cultural Context
Two of these three will be examined in June 2024.
Literary Genre
This mode focuses on the ways that texts tell their story. This is also a legitimate basis for comparison: whether it is a tragic play, a detective thriller, a film, a historical novel, an autobiography or a travel book. (The amazing thing is that all these differing genres are available for study on your Leaving Cert course!).
The following questions should be asked about the texts being studied by you:
How is this story told? (Who tells it? Where and when is it told?)
Why is the story told in this way?
What effects do all these have?
Is there just one plot or many plots? How do these relate?
What are the major tensions in the texts? Are they resolved or not?
Was this way of telling the story successful and enjoyable?
How do the texts compare as stories?
Is the story humorous or tragic, romantic or realistic?
To what genre does it actually belong?
Because your three texts are so different you have to be very aware of how different the experience of encountering a novel, a play, and viewing a film is.
Theme or Issue
This involves comparing texts on a prescribed theme. These would have to be themes that were pervasive and central to the texts chosen for study e.g.
Isolation and Loneliness.
Relationships and love.
Fantasy and reality.
These themes/issues will be the messages or concerns that the writer or film director wishes to impart to the audience. In most texts, there will be a number of themes/issues worth considering
Your task, therefore, in this section is to compare and contrast the same theme as it is treated by different authors or film directors.
Cultural Context
Compare the texts focusing on social rituals, values, and attitudes. This is not to be seen as a sociological study of the texts alone. It means taking some perspectives, which enable the students to understand the kind of values and structures with which people contend. It amounts to entering into the world of the text and getting some insight and feel for the cultural texture of the world created. This would imply considering such aspects as the rituals of life and the routines of living, the structures of society, familial, social, economic, religious, and political: the respective roles of men and women in society, the position of children, the role and nature of work, the sources and structures of power and the significance of race and class.
When you answer a question in the Comparative Section remember that you have to be selective in emphasising the most meaningful similarities and differences between texts. The more similar they appear to be, the more provocative and challenging it is to contrast them and to draw out differences between them. Remember also that when you draw out surprising or disputable similarities or differences, you require detailed support from the texts.
In a Comparative answer, it is vitally important to compare and contrast these different ways of looking at life, or to examine if there is coherence or a lack of coherence between all these differing viewpoints.
Five years after his brilliant dark comedy “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”, Martin McDonagh has written and directed another brilliant tale about friendship, ambition, and loneliness. “The Banshees of Inisherin” is the best a McDonagh movie has ever looked, every scene has a visual landscape setting and the colour tone has a uniquely pleasing filter throughout. It pays homage to other ‘Irish’ classics such as “Ryan’s Daughter” and “The Quiet Man” and in its costumes and setting there are very obvious echoes of J. M. Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World”.
The movie is set on an island off the coast of Ireland about 100 years ago. On the mainland a Civil War is raging, where after long years of colonisation, brother is fighting brother; friends and families are being ruptured and irreparably damaged. However, the island, the last bastion of innocence, has its own demons and banshees to contend with. Inisherin is an enclosed place, a microcosm, where everything is concentrated and the surrounding sea keeps everything compressed and isolated. This island has deeply affected its inhabitants and they have each been moulded by it and damaged by its limited horizons.
McDonagh was born in London in 1970 the son of Irish parents from the West of Ireland. The backdrop to his childhood and early adulthood was dominated by ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and Britain’s most recent involvement in that sad and tragic episode in Irish history. The setting for this film, Inisherin, has only recently freed itself from the grip of British colonial domination, and the gossipy postmistress is seen painting the red postbox in the village a garish green, the colour of the new ‘Free State’. There is evidence of other colonial powers at play also: the island is home to a prominently located Catholic church and the mysterious and magical Latin Mass reminds us of the power of Rome. There is also a grotto to the Virgin Mary which stands where the road diverges.
So, this is Ireland: there’s a pub, a church, a Post Office, a thatched cottage where Pádraic Ó Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) lives with his unmarried sister Siobhán; and another hovel where Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) lives alone. Colm, who plays the violin and composes (mediocre) music, has recently become obsessed with the passing of time, with the pressing need to indulge his art in order not to be forgotten. His art now demands total exclusive focus from him, leaving no room for the banality of feelings and former friendships. Pádraic Ó Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) can’t figure out why his friend Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) has become hostile and refuses to speak to him. Colm’s behaviour turns darkly troubled and before long even Pádraic is acting a bit unhinged himself, especially after the departure of his sister, Siobhán, (played superbly by Kerry Condon), to the mainland. Pádraic’s repeated efforts at reconciliation only strengthen his former friend’s resolve and when Colm delivers a desperate ultimatum, events swiftly escalate, with shocking consequences.
It becomes clear there’s something beneath the surface of their friendship that is struggling to break through to see the light of day. Colm no doubt knows what it is, but Pádraic may not have quite figured it out yet. Only a few fleeting moments hint at their deep feelings for each other, but it is a subject neither of them can even articulate – much less try to fulfil.
The movie is a study of friendship on the edge of becoming something deeper, but instead, it works its way out in violent, destructive deeds. The shockingly needless maiming is a metaphor for the Civil War atrocities taking place within earshot of the islanders. What we have here is what Patrick Kavanagh would call ‘a local row’ and there is another bigger ‘local row’ in progress on the nearby mainland, again as Kavanagh would say, ‘God’s make their own importance’.
The movie tries to resolve its three main subplots and in the end, all three have their perfect conclusions and intersect cleverly. The writing is impeccable and as in “Three Billboards Outside Epping, Missouri” and the earlier “In Bruges”, there is a perfect blend of humour and tragedy. The three stories revolve around Pádraic trying to come to terms with the fact that his best friend Colm has rejected him; his sister Siobhán trying to find a meaningful purpose in her life and Dominic (played by Barry Keoghan), who is fighting his own demons and seeking friendship and intimacy. Indeed, Barry Keoghan’s performance as the haunted abused, and fragile Dominic is a masterclass and equals John Mill’s performance in the classic “Ryan’s Daughter”.
The wild beauty and desolate qualities of the island are captured in the cinematography and the music is perfectly sewn into the fabric of the film without drowning it. What’s so satisfying about the story, is that you’re left to interpret it for yourself. This, of course, has caused consternation on Twitter and Live Line and on other platforms because McDonagh leaves people to make up their own minds.
It is a well-told dark (even black) comedy that keeps you wanting more. McDonagh explores a myriad of largely unexplored themes at a time when Ireland was full of despair, not long after the War of Independence and a long-suffering period that brought about a post-colonial inferiority complex (which still hasn’t been fully addressed to this day). Other motifs touched on include: the struggle to achieve an Irish identity, a repressive church, superstitions, isolation, mass emigration, poverty and to top it all off a brutal civil war. This film does a great job to capture the zeitgeist of the time and to top that off the cinematography, costumes, music, and atmosphere are wonderful.
Both leads, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, as they did in “In Bruges”, knock it out of the park, and they are ably supported by the two new shining stars of Irish cinema in Barry Keoghan and the beautiful Kerry Condon. Pat Shortt who plays Jonjo Devine the publican and Jon Kenny who plays his sidekick Gerry add to the ensemble cast and they make valuable contributions to the banter and gossip in the pub scenes. (And there are also goats, a dog and a donkey, a horse, and some nondescript cattle).
And then there is the war, distant but present, with ominous explosions heard in the distance. And finally, there is the old banshee (a fairy woman), a legendary harbinger of Death in Irish folklore and legend. At times it’s hard to tell if this is a wonderful dark comedy or a Shakespearean tragedy. Served by a magisterial group of actors and actresses, this film takes you to stunning Irish landscapes and gives you a false sense of security with its comfortable scenery, cute farm animals, and lovely violin tunes in the old local shebeen … until men resort to a classic story of pride and stubbornness, mirroring the sad, pathetic and damaging Civil War being played out on the mainland.
Like a dark children’s tale, the movie seems to be a metaphor for the stupidity of war and humanity’s many contradictions. Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and a scene-stealing Barry Keoghan as Dominic are just wonderful at creating those flawed and unique men spiralling toward their destiny.
Martin McDonagh has created a fantastic piece of filmmaking here with a very timely message. The ending, like all black comedies, is pessimistic – Pádraic suggests that scores have not been settled fully – like the war of brothers on the mainland this local skirmish will be played out until the banshee’s prophecy is finally fulfilled. Dare I say it but Colm’s dog may well be Pádraic’s next target!
“The Banshees of Inisherin” is not perfect and no modern director has the ability to satisfy every critic – and there are many. Maybe I ascribe far too much credit to McDonagh in this review but I have to say I really enjoyed exploring the intricate layers of meaning suggested in the dialogue and the cinematography. For me, it is the best movie of the year so far, better even, dare I say it than “An Cailín Ciúin”. It has left me brooding long after the final credits and that’s no bad thing!
One side of the potato-pits was white with frost – How wonderful that was, how wonderful! And when we put our ears to the paling-post The music that came out was magical.
The light between the ricks of hay and straw Was a hole in Heaven’s gable. An apple tree With its December-glinting fruit we saw – O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me
To eat the knowledge that grew in clay And death the germ within it! Now and then I can remember something of the gay Garden that was childhood’s. Again
The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place, A green stone lying sideways in a ditch, Or any common sight, the transfigured face Of a beauty that the world did not touch.
II
My father played the melodeon Outside at our gate; There were stars in the morning east And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodeon called To Lennons and Callans. As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry I knew some strange thing had happened.
Outside in the cow-house my mother Made the music of milking; The light of her stable-lamp was a star And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.
A water-hen screeched in the bog, Mass-going feet Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes, Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.
My child poet picked out the letters On the grey stone, In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland, The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.
Cassiopeia was over Cassidy’s hanging hill, I looked and three whin bushes rode across The horizon — the Three Wise Kings.
And old man passing said: ‘Can’t he make it talk’ – The melodeon. I hid in the doorway And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.
I nicked six nicks on the door-post With my penknife’s big blade – There was a little one for cutting tobacco. And I was six Christmases of age.
My father played the melodeon, My mother milked the cows, And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.
From Collected Poems (2004). Edited by Antoinette Quinn, Allen Lane. An imprint of Penguin Books, by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.
Commentary
In this, one of Ireland’s most beloved and recognised poems, ‘A Christmas Childhood’, Kavanagh (21 October 1904 – 30 November 1967) explores themes of memory, coming of age, and imagination. The poem is set in 1910 and it is a memory poem. We are told that Kavanagh was ‘six Christmases of age’ but the poem also remembers and celebrates the original Christmas event almost two thousand years earlier. The poet is looking back on the magical and mysterious world of childhood and he is mourning its passing with some regret.
The poet recognises that his childhood was a time when the ordinary seemed extraordinary. Through figurative language and colourful imagery, he paints a picture of his early childhood and what it meant to be a child in those difficult times. In line one, we are presented with a factual and accurate description: ‘One side of the potato-pits was white with frost’ and line two is powered with emotion. The tone, the use of repetition and the exclamation mark in ‘How wonderful that was, how wonderful!’ convey wonder and excitement.
Similar to his poem ‘Advent’, this poem uses religion both as a theme and as its main source of imagery. Kavanagh’s spirituality is to the fore and this was very much informed and influenced by traditional pre-Vatican II Catholic theology. He desires to return to the state of childish innocence when he was six years old and Christmas surely brings out the child in all of us! Kavanagh’s well-worn theory was that if he could rediscover a world of childhood innocence he would ipso facto become a better poet. Indeed, the poem’s title gives the game away: he describes his childhood as ‘a Christmas childhood’ rather than the more limiting ‘a childhood Christmas’.
Both ‘Advent’ and ‘A Christmas Childhood’, therefore, are very religious poems – religious at a very personal level. Kavanagh’s feeling is that experience has corrupted him – in ‘Advent’ he tells us that he has ‘tested and tasted too much’ and this has echoes in this poem when he says:
O you Eve, were the world that tempted me
To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it!
He wants to bring back the newness that was in the world before things grew stale through over-familiarity. In ‘Advent’ he lists the mundane things that will inspire him in the New Year: a ‘black slanting Ulster hill’ will be new again; the boring chat of a tedious old man will become wonderful; the whole ordinary, ‘banal’, common world of reality will be renewed; wonderful then will be ‘whins’, ‘bog holes’, ‘cart-tracks’, ‘old stables’. To this list, he now adds ‘potato pits’, ‘paling posts’ and,
The tracks of cattle to a drinking place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch …
The poem is in two parts: Part II first appeared in The Bell magazine (December 1940) and Part I was published in TheIrish Press (24 December 1943). Part I describes the townland of Mucker in the parish of Inniskeen, County Monaghan, and explores, from an adult’s perspective, how childhood is a time of innocence, an innocence that we inevitably lose. As a child he saw ‘An apple tree/ With its December-glinting fruit’ but just as Eve ate the apple which led to man’s Fall and sinful state, Kavanagh knows that as we leave childhood behind us we lose our innocence. The Garden of Eden is no more; but Christmas is a time when an Eden-like world becomes possible. Adulthood, says Kavanagh, blinds us to the beauty, freshness and innocence of childhood but it can be recaptured occasionally, especially at Christmas time.
Part II of the poem introduces a cast of characters – Kavanagh’s father, his beloved mother, and the neighbours. In Antoinette Quinn’s words ‘Through a series of crisp, lucid images it conjures up the child’s sense of being part of a family and a closely-knit Catholic community’. Everything is in harmony and the poem is very musical. We hear his father’s melodeon, the music that came from putting his ear to the paling-post, the music of milking, the screech of the water-hen in the nearby bog, the crunch of feet on the icy potholes along the road and also the sound of the bellows wheel in the country kitchen. And of course, the beautiful onomatopoeic line ‘I nicked six nicks on the doorpost’ which creates its own marvellous music also. The melodeon calls to the Lennons and Callans and the stars dance to his father’s music. The music unites one place to another and neighbour to neighbour. The imagery of Co. Monaghan blends with imagery from the Biblical account of Christ’s birth: ‘The light of her stable-lamp was a star’ and the ‘three whin bushes’ become ‘the Three Wise Kings’.
The poem sums up his Christmases and the things that made them memorable and precious to him – his father playing the melodeon, his mother milking the cows, the special gift of ‘a white rose’ that he gave to the Virgin and pinned it on her blouse. He was a real boy – can I say that now? – he notched his age on the doorpost – not six years but ‘six Christmases of age’!
When all is said and done ‘A Christmas Childhood’ is a chatty little poem that deals with simple things in simple, everyday language. Yet this seemingly rustic simplicity can be deceptive and underneath it all, there is the constant realisation of the presence of Christ and Christ’s mother – and perhaps all mothers. After all, the final image is that of a father and mother and child, an ordinary family and the Holy Family.
Little wonder then that at Kavanagh’s funeral in Inniskeen on the 30th of November 1967, Seamus Heaney read ‘A Christmas Childhood’ at his graveside.
Works Cited
Kavanagh, Patrick. Collected Poems. Edited by Antoinette Quinn. Allen Lane. An imprint of Penguin Books, London, 2004.
Quinn, Antoinette. Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography. (Second Edition). Gill Books, 2003.
Translations is a three-act play by Irish playwright Brian Friel, written in 1980. It is set in Baile Beag (Ballybeg), in County Donegal which is probably loosely based on his beloved village of Glenties in West Donegal where Friel was a frequent visitor and where he is buried. It is the fictional village, created by Friel as a setting for several of his plays, including Dancing at Lughnasa, although there are many real places called Ballybeg throughout Ireland. Towns like Stradbally and Littleton were other variations and ‘translations’ of the very common original ‘Baile Beag’. In effect, in Friel’s plays, Ballybeg is Everytown.
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