Today is the feast of St. Oliver Plunkett, as well as the date he was executed. He was the last Catholic martyr in the British Isles. He's an interesting saint and worth reading about.
In fact, you might say that the first of July is mired in blood-- St. Oliver's is the least of it. This is also the date that the Battle of the Somme began, as well as the Battle of Gettysburg, as well as the Battle of the Boyne!
I've recently been returning to a project (for want of a better word) that I call An Tobar. An Tobar means "the well" in Gaelic, and it's basically a repertoire of poems that I've memorized.
Why did I do this? Well, I did it for various reasons, but ultimately it's a sort of visceral reaction to the way our society is going. I've often quoted the words of Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter who said: "The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint." The more our lives are lived in cyberspace and on screens, the more we drift into a world of artificial intelligence and whatnot, the stronger need I feel to have a decent amount of oral lore inside my own head.
Having said that, I've neglected An Tobar for years at this stage, and I'm only returning to it recently. It's definitely rusty. Some of these poems I could recite at the drop of a hat (another cliché I like), word perfect or close to it.. With others, I'd struggle with a few lines here and there. And with some others, I've probably lost most of the words. I'll have to build it up again. (Or dig it again, perhaps, given my "well" metaphor?)
I've sometimes recited some of these poems at social gatherings, principally "The Raven" by Poe and "Ulysses" by Tennyson. However, I've generally been discouraged by the reception. I can see people's eyes glaze over pretty quickly.
Revisiting An Tobar again, I made the decision to drop some poems that would just never "take", for whatever reason. One was "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray. This poem is justly one of the most beloved in all of English poetry-- but, for whatever reason, it's never been one of my own favourites. And, for some reason, it wouldn't "stick" in my memory, and it took a lot of "maintenance". I memorized it because I thought that, being such a general favourite, it might be a poem people would like to hear recited. That never happened.
Other poems that kept sliding from my memory were "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas and several of Shakespeare's sonnets.
One of the reasons I started neglecting An Tobar is that I had an unhealthy "not an inch" attitude towards it. I didn't want to give up any poem once I'd committed it to memory. I've got over that now.
Some of the selections are odd, I know. I'd be astonished if anybody else had ever heard of "A Fragment" by Alfred Austin. This is a relic of a plan to memorize a poem (or passage of poetry) by every Poet Laureate of England. These are the kinds of whims that seize me. Anyway, many of the Poets Laureate are completely forgotten now and didn't leave behind anything memorable. I've dropped most of the Poet Laureate pieces, but "A Fragment" is charming.
Will this list be of any interest to anybody? I don't know. Here it is, anyway.
Death of an Irishwoman by Michael Hartnett
Snow by Louis MacNeice
The Fool by Patrick Pearse
Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon
“Our revels now are ended” by William Shakespeare
“To Helen” by Edgar Allan Poe
“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by William Shakespeare
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats
“Ay, but to die…” by William Shakespeare
Lines Written on Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth
The Wayfarer by Patrick Pearse
The Kraken by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
A Birthday by Christina Rossetti
Heraclitus by William Johnson Cory
The Owl by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Planster’s Vision by John Betjeman
“My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun” by William Shakespeare
“When I Consider” by John Milton
“Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth” by Arthur Hugh Clough
“The Burning Babe” by Robert Southwell
Remember by Christina Rossetti
The Song of the Strange Ascetic by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
“Forget Not Yet” by Sir Thomas Wyatt
“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
“September 1913” by William Butler Yeats
The Workman’s Friend by Flann O'Brien
“If—” by Rudyard Kipling
When I was One-and-Twenty by Alfred Edward Housman
Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now by Alfred Edward Housman
Annus Mirabilis by Philip Larkin
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by William Butler Yeats
How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Yonder See the Morning Blink by Alfred Edward Housman
Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Robert Louis Stevenson
Into My Heart an Air That Kills by Alfred Edward Housman
Peace by Henry Vaughan
She Walks in Beauty by George Gordon, Lord Byron
Acquainted with the Night by Robert Frost
John Anderson My Jo, John by Robert Burns
When He Who Adores Thee by Thomas Moore
Golden Stockings by Oliver St. John Gogarty
Ringsend by Oliver St. John Gogarty
Shakespeare by Matthew Arnold
Adlestrop by Edward Thomas
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Fisherman by William Butler Yeats
The World’s a Stage by Hilaire Belloc
No Second Troy by William Butler Yeats
All Things Can Tempt Me by William Butler Yeats
On a House Shaken by the Land Agitation by William Butler Yeats
Aedh Tells of the Rose in His Heart by William Butler Yeats
The Song of Wandering Aengus by William Butler Yeats
Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland by William Butler Yeats
“Ring out, wild bells…” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“I to my perils…” by Alfred Edward Housman
Surprised by Joy by William Wordsworth
When I Set Out to Lyonesse by Thomas Hardy
Easter 1916 by William Butler Yeats
The Coat by William Butler Yeats
Song of an Old Philosopher by Walter Savage Landor
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
Raglan Road by Patrick Kavanagh
Thomas MacDonagh by Francis Ledwidge
The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats
When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats
The Planter's Daughter by Austin Clarke
Advent by Patrick Kavanagh
Ode to a Grecian Urn by John Keats
“Oh friend, I know not…” by William Wordsworth
Jerusalem by William Blake
The Eagle by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“Should fickle hands…” by Alfred Austin
“This royal throne of kings…” by William Shakespeare
“Happy the man” by John Dryden
While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Nahum Tate
The Beatitudes by St. Matthew
Everyone Suddenly Started Singing by Siegfried Sassoon
Invictus by William Ernest Henley
I Used to Think All Poets Were Byronic by Wendy Cope
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats
To My Daughter by Thomas Kettle
Epitaph on a Tyrant by Wystan Hugh Auden
Epic by Patrick Kavanagh
“The Quality of Mercy” by William Shakespeare
To Althea from Prison by Richard Lovelace
So We’ll Go No More a-Roving by George Gordon, Lord Byron
To Lucasta, Going to the Wars by Richard Lovelace
“Breathes there a man…” by Sir Walter Scott
The Daffodils by William Wordsworth
Determination by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Ecce Puer by James Joyce
Dublin by Louis MacNeice
The Rainy Day by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“The distant Seychelles are not so remote…” by Osbert Lancaster
I took this picture today. I always like it when something which is purely functional turns out to have an aesthetic or decorative dimension to it.
Gogarty had a wonderful gift for polished, mellifluous verse. "Streel" is an Irish term that usually means to stagger drunkenly. I've loved this poem for at least two decades but, so far as I can remember, I'd never encountered its subtitle ("after reading Tolstoy") until now. My two favourite lines in this poem are: "Imagined, outrageous, preposterous wrongs", and the brilliant last line. (Well, strictly speaking, they are both couplets, but we don't do pedantry on this blog.)
There's a joke that Oliver St. John Gogarty was famous as a poet and a surgeon; famous as a poet to his patients, and a surgeon to his readers. He was in fact an excellent poet, and is much underrated today-- although he does have a pub named after him in Dublin's Temple Bar, which seems always to be thronged.
Ringsend by Oliver St. John Gogarty
I will live in Ringsend
This is an article I wrote for the magazine Leaven, which is now (as far as I know) defunct. Yes, it's an old hobby-horse of mine, so I hope regular readers don't groan. I really like the title-- it has a certain ring to it.
Six years ago, I was called for jury duty. The case was quite dramatic and dragged on for two weeks. Much of that time was spent in the jury room, as the barristers duked it out among themselves. Juries are not supposed to discuss the case until it comes to discussing the verdict. Most of my fellow jurors discussed it anyway, but we still had a lot of time to kill.
There was a whiteboard in the jury room, which was presumably intended for the serious business of sifting evidence and presenting theories. One day, the boredom became such that we decided to put it to a less civic-minded use; playing Hangman and drawing visual riddles.
After days and days of boredom, I suddenly felt energised. It had been a long, long time since I played Hangman. It brought me back to childhood, back to the eighties when the only computer in my life was my cousin's Spectrum console-- which I never actually got to use, being restricted to watching my cousin and my older brother play games like War of the Worlds and Back to Skool. (I remember the games took longer to load than they did to play.) It felt good to be back to playing games that didn’t require the mediation of a glowing screen; “making our own entertainment”, as the saying goes.
I assumed my fellow jurors were experiencing the same nostalgia, the same relief from the tyranny of the passive. Then one of them said: “They should have televisions in these jury rooms”. It felt like a kick in the teeth.
All my life, I’ve felt an anxiety about this matter. But what exactly is “this matter”?
It’s difficult to put a name to it. The decay of oral tradition? The loss of folklore? The tyranny of entertainment? The triumph of the electronic? None of those exactly seem to cover it, although all of them apply.
It seems fair to say that, since the advent of radio and television, mass media have become a bigger and bigger part of everyday life. We all live in a mental universe of pop culture. The passivity of radio and TV may have been mitigated by the arrival of the internet-- now anyone can write their own blog or start their own online forum, on any subject whatsoever. However, the mediation of the electronic screen remains, eliminating barriers of time and space in a way that surely has costs as well as benefits. Today we can send a message across the world in a moment, but what of the local legends and sayings and customs that were once protected by those very barriers?
Take, for instance, the case of Irish ballads. Ireland has a phenomenal heritage of ballads-- patriotic, sentimental, local, humorous, and of many other kinds. Up until very recently, as far as I can tell, most Irish people would have had a wide repertoire of these ballads, which often seeped into the written literature of our country. My own father could sing hundreds of them, or so it seemed. Now and again he would recite a verse or two from some obscure ballad, and then comment: “It must be fifty years since I last heard that”. I remember many sing-alongs, during which he and his friends would belt out song after song, from “Monto” to “James Connolly, the Irish Rebel”, never hesitating over a single line.
By the time my father died in 2019, the situation had changed. After his funeral reception, in the Brian Boru pub in Glasnevin, those who lingered over drinks made an effort at a sing-along. Now, however, the words did not come so easily. The youngsters knew no ballads at all, and even the older mourners-- who would have had innumerable ballads on the tip of their tongues twenty years ago-- struggled to get through more than a verse or two. Smartphones were produced to call up the lyrics. “Do you remember when we didn’t need phones to have a singalong?”, asked one person, gloomily.
We don’t sing songs anymore. We don’t tell stories. We don’t swap riddles. We don’t play parlour games. This may be an exaggeration, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. Even joke-telling seems to be on the decline. When is the last time you told or heard an actual joke? When did you last encounter that once-familiar trio, Paddy Englishman, Paddy Irishman, and Paddy Scotsman?
Surely you don’t have to be a galloping reactionary to regret this. You don’t have to deny the virtues of television, cinema and comic books (or even computer games and memes!) to feel that we are losing something.
Where does oral culture persist today? The only vibrant examples I can think of are terrace chants and popular devotions in religious communities. “Ooh, Ah, Paul McGrath” and “Who Ate All the Pies?” may not exactly be poetry, but at least such ditties have their own independent life, passing spontaneously from mouth to mouth without any debt to the culture industries. And it’s comforting to think of the tens of thousands of worshippers, across the face of our land, who can rattle off “Hail Glorious Saint Patrick, the Saint of our Land” or “Sweet Heart of Jesus, Fount of Love and Mercy” at the drop of a hat (or the ring of a bell).
Whether skipping chants and “haunting children’s rhymes” still exist in schoolyards is a question I’m not qualified to answer. I’m rather afraid to find out.
Surely this is something we can all address in our own ways. For my part, I have been memorizing poems for the last few years. I have about ninety of them stored in my brain now. I mentally recite them when I am washing dishes, walking to work, even (though perhaps I shouldn’t admit it) sitting in boring meetings. As long as I keep them refreshed, they’re all mine-- even on a desert island.
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,