Poems I like: The School in August by Philip Larkin

This is a rather tongue-in-cheek poem that Larkin wrote when he was twenty-one, but it always comes to mind in the summer. I work in University College Dublin library and, as you can imagine, there's row upon row of empty desks from early May to late September.

(Anyone who's read this blog for any length of time would realize I work in UCD. But I have a bit of an allergy to people presuming others are familiar with their circumstances-- more particularly, to people who assume that I'm familiar with their circumstances. It seems so self-important.)

Anyway, I wrote an analysis of this poem for the Philip Larkin Society website, which can be read here. I wrote it twenty years ago this year! (The Philip Larkin Society used to have a forum which was one of my very first internet "haunts". I've memorialized it here.)

I'm not claiming this is a great poem, but it definitely catches an atmosphere.

The School in August by Philip Larkin

The cloakroom pegs are empty now,
And locked the classroom door,
The hollow desks are lined with dust,
And slow across the floor
A sunbeam creeps between the chairs
Till the sun shines no more.

Who did their hair before this glass?
Who scratched 'Elaine loves Jill'
One drowsy summer sewing-class
With scissors on the sill?
Who practised this piano
Whose notes are now so still?

Ah, notices are taken down,
And scorebooks stowed away,
And seniors grow tomorrow
From the juniors today,
And even swimming groups can fade,
Games mistresses turn grey.

An Extraordinarily Accurate Prediction

This passage is from an article that appeared in The Irish Press on 12th April 1966, in the midst of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. It was written by Charles McCarthy, the secretary of the Vocational Teachers' Organisation, and it's remarkably prescient:

"There was in the men on 1916 a sense of destiny. In these rather concrete and somewhat cynical times I imagine our organized commemoration this year, with its renewal of emotion and almost of sanctification, may well be followed by a period of more critical assessment, inevitable anyway as personal involvement gives way to history, and all the more inevitable as a reaction to romantic restatement.

"Both the messianic patriotism of Pearse and the socialistic patriotism of Connolly will come in for sharper intellectual examination than they have before; and both will be faulted, I have no doubt, very intelligently and quite validly. But while this will be appropriate to a lecture-room, we must remember that these were not lecture-room men..."

(Whenever someone ties a discourse or attitude or atmosphere to a particular setting, like a lecture room in this case, it gives me a thrill. I like the idea that reality shifts-- or at least, shimmers-- according to what space we're standing in.)

The reaction McCarthy was predicting was accelerated by the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland three years after he wrote. Of course, he couldn't have predicted that.

I'm always impressed when people can see past the atmosphere of the moment. For instance, St. John Paul II was by no means misled by his triumphant reception in Ireland in 1978. If you read the speeches he made on his tour, he could quite clearly see that secularism and materialism were on the rise in Ireland.

Favourite Poems: "Death of an Irishwoman" by Michael Hartnett.

This poem is a bit of an anomaly in my list of favourite poems. It was published in 1975. Other than the work of Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, I don't really bother with poetry that recent. (And, by a strange coincidence, I've just learned that Betjeman and Larkin's last collections were both published in 1974.)

I haven't read a huge amount of poetry by Michael Hartnett, either, although I can't really explain why. I've just looked at some of his other poems now, and they seem pretty good. I should give him a proper look. I guess I expected all his other poems would be typical modernist dreck, and that this one was just a moment of pure inspiration. His other most famous poem is "A Farewell to English", and I thought that one (or the excerpt I read from it) was pretty poor.

This poem, at any rate, is utterly magnificent. And heartbreaking. Some of its lines are actually unbearable-- in the moment that you read them, or think of them. Indeed, this is a poem that, whenever I find lines from it coming into my memory, has me turning my face away from other people, since I expect they'll ask: "Are you OK?". The sort of poem that doesn't just bring a tear to my eye, but makes my whole face crumple.

Lines such as: "She clenched her brittle hands around a world she could not understand."

Or the very next line: "I loved her from the day she died". (Like a kick in the stomach from a Doc Martin boot.)

Or the final line, pure perfection, a line as good as any written in the history of poetry: "She was a child's purse, full of useless things."

I know nothing about the circumstances of this poem's composition and I've read no critical analysis of it. But I very much suspect that it's not just about the death of an Irishwoman, but rather about the death of Ireland itself. The "child's purse full of useless things" being replaced by office blocks, indoor shopping centres, life coaches, play dates, world cuisine, designer labels, rap music, and...

Well, and all the rest of it. It's a familiar litany, and we're all tired of hearing it. Indeed, it seems self-indulgent at this point to even indulge in it. None of us are going to do anything about it, if we even could.

And yet, despite this, every now and again, we get a fresh stab or grief or horror-- at least I do. Even things we assumed would always be there start to disappear. (I've noticed that the line "There won't be a Shire, Pip", from the Two Towers film, has become proverbial in certain online conservative communities.)

Today one of my colleagues-- who describes himself as centrist-- was lamenting that he goes abroad on holidays only to find that everything is now the same as at home. I made my usual Eeyorish prediction (which I fear is really true) that Ireland will be gone in twenty years. He agreed with me.

Was this the prophecy in "Death of an Irishwoman"? I don't know. But, in any case, it's a masterpiece.

("Púcas" is pronounced "pookas" and means "ghosts").

Death of an Irishwoman by Michael Hartnett

Ignorant, in the sense
she ate monotonous food
and thought the world was flat,
and pagan, in the sense
she knew the things that moved
at night were neither dogs nor cats
but púcas and darkfaced men,
she nevertheless had fierce pride.
But sentenced in the end
to eat thin diminishing porridge
in a stone-cold kitchen
she clenched her brittle hands
around a world
she could not understand.
I loved her from the day she died.
She was a summer dance at the crossroads.
She was a card game where a nose was broken.
She was a song that nobody sings.
She was a house ransacked by soldiers.
She was a language seldom spoken.
She was a child’s purse, full of useless things.

Happy St. John's Eve!

It crept up on me this year. I might make some goody later. My attempts at goody have been pretty messy and tasteless, but what the heck?

Here's a reasonable description of the tradition from RTE. It's pleasing to know that people still make St. John's Eve bonfires.

The Poetry of Cliché

I was reading a book this morning and I came across the phrase "the mists of time". As always I felt a frisson of pleasure. It's one of the many clichés that strike me as intensely poetic.

What is a cliché, anyway? We can't be entirely original with every utterance. Why is it OK to use an idiom and not a cliché? What's the difference?

There are some clichés I just hate, such as "life-hack" and "bucket list". (The critique in the link is from Professor Bruce Charlton.) But that's not so much because they're clichés. I hate them because they're so inelegant and banal.

I'm not saying we should always speak in clichés. I'm defending the use of clichés that are especially poetic.

Here's some of my favourites. I know I've mentioned many of them before, in other posts. But what the heck.

The morning after the night before.

A walk down memory lane.

The wit and wisdom of...

Till the cows come home.

The dead of night.

The back of beyond (and the middle of nowhere).

The cold light of day.

Calling a pub a "hostelry", "tavern", or other jokey name.

The last chance saloon (much loved by sports commentators).

Dreaming spires (of academia).

In at the deep end.

As old as Father Time.

The best thing since sliced bread. (What did they say before sliced bread?)

A bumpy ride.

Goes to the movies (as in the titles of innumerable books: Stephen King Goes to the Movies, Philosophy Goes to the Movies, etc. etc.)

The silver screen.

The stroke of midnight.

I'm sure I'll think of more, and add to this post 

A common feature of all these favourite clichés of mine is that they are (in my view) aesthetically pleasing, both in the sounds of the words and in the image they use. I don't like clichés that are coarse or grotesque. For instance, instead of using "the back of beyond" or "the middle of nowhere", people increasingly seem to use phrases such as "the armpit of Ireland"-- or a part of the body even less pleasant than the armpit. I think that's yukky and not at all something to be encouraged.

I also dislike venerable clichés such as "I have my eyes peeled", clichés that are not aesthetically appealing and don't conjure up a pleasing image.

The pleasure I take from clichés actually enriches my life. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think to myself: "This is the dead of night", which fills me with pleasure. And, on a lazy morning after an eventful day, I relish the phrase "the morning after the night before". (I barely drink so it doesn't really apply to me in the sense of a hangover or a night of carousing.)

Alickadoo!

I encountered this word for the first time yesterday, while reading a memoir. It describes a member of a sports club who doesn't actually play, but who helps out and hangs around the clubhouse. It comes from Irish rugby, although the guy who's memoir I'm reading used it in the context of a rowing club.

You can read a discussion of alickadoos here, from a rugby fan forum.

There's a charming theory of its origin, which seems too good to be true. It's explained in the Dictionary of Irish Biography entry for the person who supposedly first used it, William Ernie Crawford:

One of the great characters of Irish rugby, Crawford is credited with inventing the word ‘alickadoo’ (meaning a non-playing rugby aficionado): when a team-mate preferred to read his book about an oriental potentate than to play poker, Crawford, in his annoyance, exclaimed, ‘You and your bloody Ali Khadu.’

Another theory is that it comes from the phrase "it's all I can do", as spoken by overworked club hangers-on.

The memoir I was reading was written by an Irish doctor, who began his career after World War Two. He mentions that, at that time, it was customary for a doctor to give his first fee from a private client to his mother. But he didn't, both because he was too hard-up and because the banknote was too grubby.

Words and traditions! Two subjects that fascinate me endlessly. I have realized, from sad experience, that other people are less interested. But hopefully my blog readers will indulge me.

What Has the Catholic Church Been Vindicated About?

I entered this query into a search engine, and it returned the following answer. (Obviously AI-generated, which I generally avoid, but its very impersonality might be appropriate here. I'm well aware that AI tells you what you want to hear, but this is all stuff that anyone could independently verify.)

1) The Big Bang Theory: The prevailing scientific consensus is that the universe originated in a massive expansion event. This model was actually first proposed in 1927 by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest and astronomer. Initially, the scientific community resisted his theory (with Albert Einstein notably dismissing it), but decades of astrophysical data ultimately proved the church-affiliated scientist correct. (My comment: obviously this wasn't just a Belgian priest being vindicated, it was the doctrine of creation ex nihilo itself.)

2) The Origins of Early Christianity: For centuries, skeptics theorized that the divinity of Jesus and early Catholic theology were fabricated much later by medieval institutions. However, the discovery of early Christian writings (like the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch from circa 107 AD) provided historical confirmation that the earliest church possessed an explicitly Catholic structure and sacramental theology. (My comment: a little bit of research shows that these were discovered in the seventeenth century, partly as a result of the work of Archbishop James Ussher, the Protestant Archbishop of Armagh. This is the same gent who dated the creation of the world to my birth-date in 4004 BC-- a theory that I've heard defended by at least one eminent scientist as a very good guess based on the knowledge available to him at the time.)

3) Preservation of Western Civilization: Historical consensus has shifted regarding the "Dark Ages." Historians now widely credit Catholic monasteries as the intellectual repositories of antiquity. Irish and European monks diligently copied and preserved classical literature and philosophy, laying the foundational texts for the Renaissance. (I'm actually kind of sick of hearing about this one; nobody really talks about the Dark Ages anymore, and so this claim has become a bit of an Aunt Sally, and an occasion for Catholic triumphalism, which irritates me.)

4) Societal Predictions on the Family: In 1968, Pope Paul VI released the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which controversially banned artificial contraception. It famously predicted that widespread contraceptive use would lead to a general lowering of moral standards, a rise in marital infidelity, and governments coercing citizens' reproductive rights. Today, Reddit discussions among conservative theologians and cultural critics highlight how societal shifts and subsequent demographic crises have led some to view these specific socio-cultural predictions as vindicated. (OK, Reddit is hardly an authority, but anyone who's being honest can observe that Pope Paul was abundantly vindicated about this-- even when the report of the Pontifical Commission that preceded the encyclical famously supported artificial birth control. A source of hope in our synodal times.)

And Google left one out: the widespread predictions of global overpopulation, which even the UN now admits were unfounded. This uncanny ability of the Catholic Church to be right when all the clever, well-spoken, throat-clearing types are completely convinced it's wrong is part of why I believe it's the true Church.