A Decade of the Rosary

Some time in the year 2014, I made a vow to the Virgin Mary to say the rosary every day for the rest of my life. Or, if you are a pedant, I made a vow to say five decades of the rosary every day for the rest of my life.

I was standing outside the Merrion Shopping Centre on Merrion Road when I made the vow. I can't remember the date, but I have the feeling it was in summer. So it's most likely been ten years by now, since I'm writing this in October.

I've kept the vow, or perhaps the Virgin Mary has kept it for me. 

Well, I've pretty much kept it. I've missed a day here and there, but very rarely. Maybe a couple of times a year at most. Sometimes it's because I've clean forgot. Other times it's because the day has been so busy I genuinely haven't had the time. (There are such days, now and again.) Sometimes I try to pray it last thing at night (or in the early hours, most likely) but fall asleep in the effort.

Fr. Patrick Peyton, the famous rosary priest, said that it took ten minutes to pray a rosary (although all of the videos of him praying the rosary on YouTube are about sixteen minutes long). Anyway, I've rarely been able to pray it in less than twenty minutes. And very often longer, since my mind nearly always wanders during the rosary. (My mind wanders all the time.)

If I didn't allow my mind a certain amount of wandering during the rosary, I would never finish it. I can't exactly say how much is too much, but when I decide I've hit that limit, I begin the decade I was praying over again. Sometimes I have to do it twice or three times. Generally I let it go after that.

My judgement on whether I should start the decade again also has to do with the nature of my wandering thoughts. If my mind is dwelling on something that seems important or spiritually significant, I might decide to count it as prayer.

Anyway, the Catechism says that trying to pray is itself prayer. A comforting thought.

I've prayed rosaries in all sorts of ways. Very often, when I'm tired, I'll listen to a YouTube rosary on this channel. Kate and Mike have become old friends to me! Mostly, I'll say it on my beads, but sometimes I say it on my fingers. Sometimes I've said it on my fingers while sitting at a dinner-table or having a conversation. Sometimes there's just no other way.

How has the rosary benefitted me? Well, how can I possibly say?

The idea for my book occurred to me when I was praying the rosary. And I'm sure I've had other inspirations while praying it, though I don't remember them right now.

My daily rosary might have had all kinds of beneficial effects, aside from its innate spiritual value. I'm sure that it has. I'm just not one for claiming supernatural intervention except where it's obvious.

In all honesty, it's always felt like a duty, a self-imposed duty. To my shame, I rarely if ever turn to my rosary with delight. I once heard a priest say: "Don't just get your rosary in. Get into your rosary." Good advice, but I find it hard to follow.

Being a lover of tradition, I've often tried to excite myself about my daily rosary by hyping up its traditional aspect in my mind; my own daily tradition! And a venerable one, now! But it rarely seems to work.

I don't want to make it sound like I hate saying the rosary. That's not true at all.

I have my preferences. The Luminous Mysteries always seem like a treat, especially the Transfiguration. I feel like it's not only OK, but in fact entirely appropriate, to play up the awe, wonder and brilliance of the scene. A "peak experience" if ever there was one-- pun entirely intended. I've never been satisfied with any artistic depiction of the Transfiguration. If I painted one (I'd have to learn to paint first) I'm sure it would be universally condemned as tacky and garish. It would be Spielbergian, to say the least.

My other favourite mysteries are the Descent of the Holy Spirit and the Presentation of the Temple. (Are there any more moving words than those of Simeon: "Now, my Lord, you may let your servant depart, according to your Word, because my eyes have seen your salvation..."

I've tried not to play up my daily rosary too much in this blog entry. I've become somewhat allergic to "gushing" in religious discourse. But perhaps I've gone too far in the opposite direction. I'm very happy that my daily practice of the rosary has lasted ten years, and I hope that it lasts to my death. Very often it has comforted me in times of distress, and given me an outlet for my gratitude in happy times. Thank you, Mother Mary!

Provincialism in Time

This post is a bit of a stopgap, something I found in my Google Drive. I sent it to some conservative magazine or website: First Things, or the Imaginative Conservative, or something like that. They didn't bite. Anyway, here it goes.

Some months ago, I found myself making a study of Idylls of the King, a long poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson which was published between 1859 and 1885, and which Tennyson considered his most important work. A long blank verse running to thousands of lines, it chronicles the decline of Camelot over many interlinked stories, and Tennyson used it not only to comment on the human condition but on the Victorian England in which he lived.

The poem was of interest to me for several reasons. The main reason was that I had long admired its sublime climax, “The Passing of Arthur”, which was in fact the earliest part of the poem to be written. Many of its lines would be widely recognized. The line “authority forgets a dying King” is quoted in the movie JFK, and the exchange from which it is taken—between the wounded Arthur and the last of his knights—supplies some more oft-quoted lines:

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of.

The whole poem is an argument for the spiritual in the face of the material and utilitarian, although that is simplifying its theme considerably.

I was also attracted to the poem because it is rather neglected. Back in its day, it was a popular favourite, selling (hard to believe now) tens of thousands of copies. Today, in a time when long poetry is rarely read—and I find it a trudge, as much as anybody else does—the Idylls are a masterpiece more known about than known. The brave souls who embark upon long poetry for its own sake might tackle Paradise Lost or The Faerie Queen, but not Idylls. The road not taken has its own appeal.

I also wanted to know what commentators had said about the poem. Luckily, my library job gives me access to the archives of most literary journals, so I printed off about a dozen essays on the poem, ranging from the early twentieth century to today.

Reading them, I found myself falling into a rather strange and pleasant mood. It reminded me of how I used to feel as a teenager, when I would read a bundle of recent newspapers, enjoyably insulated from the immediacy of their controversies.

Nearly all of the articles mentioned the critical vicissitudes of the poem over time, very consciously relating it to the intellectual and scholarly preoccupations that had succeeded one another since its publication. Victorian critics had admired the idealism of the poem; critics in the interwar and post-war eras preferred the darker, more pessimistic undertones (after all, the whole poem is about the fall of Camelot, and the inability of King Arthur’s knights to live up to his angelic ideals); when post-modernism became the fashion, critics began to pay more attention to the poem’s intricate narrative structure, with its nested tales within tales and its unreliable narrators.

Here’s a funny thing, I found myself thinking. Why do I find myself enjoying this bird’s eye view of Idylls of the Kings’s critical history, admiring how each period had its own relationship to the text, when I am so scornful of academic fashions in general? I remembered my brief foray into studying English at university level, and the disdain I felt for the feminist, post-modernist, and post-colonial approaches they took to the various texts. Literature, I thought, should be timeless, universal, addressed to the depths of the human condition that are beyond the catch-cries of the day. Now, however, as I savoured the critical history of Idylls of the King, I felt like a party pooper.

And it confronted me with a question which I’d never contemplated before. That is, why did conservatives (like) myself have such a deep appreciation of character and atmosphere when it came to place, but a rather disdainful attitude towards character and atmosphere when it came to time? Why was I delighted to learn that a country or a region or a village had its own distinctive ways and manners, but so hostile towards any notion of a zeitgeist, or contemporary sensibilities? Why was I so warm towards provincialism in space, but so hard on provincialism in time?

It’s certainly the case that conservatives should defend eternal truths of the human condition, and indeed the supernatural order, over ideologies of the moment. But is there perhaps, a danger that we are too intolerant of the flavour of our particular niche in time? As pilgrims on this earth, shouldn’t we be as eager to enjoy the distinctiveness of the time we pass through as travellers in a foreign country?

Ivy Day 2024

Happy Ivy Day 2024!

Ivy Day is the annual commemoration of Charles Stewart Parnell, the "uncrowned king" of Ireland who came close to winning Home Rule. He died on this day in 1891.

Every year since then, there's been a commemoration at his grave in Glasnevin cemetery. It used to be a big deal (a long time ago), but it's a pretty subdued affair now. There's a speech by a dignitary, a wreath-laying, and a piper playing a tune or two.

As my readers will know, I'm mad about the traditions, especially neglected and minor traditions. So for many years, I meant to attend the Ivy Day commemoration, but never got round to it. Last year I finally did, and this year I attended a second time. So it's a bona fide personal tradition now.

This year, the speaker was the Taoiseach, Simon Harris. For this reason, I thought there might be more of a crowd, but there wasn't. There was probably around fifty people there.

I actually wrote an article on the history of Ivy Day for this month's Ireland's Own. You can read the first few paragraphs here. (Or you can subscribe and read the rest of it, and all my other articles, including my Irish priests series which now includes thirty-five priests.)

Here are some pictures and a very amateurish minute or so of video from today's event.

Back to the Seventies

 

I've just finished reading The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics by Bruce Schulamn. It held my interest from beginning to end. I don't think there's really more of a compliment you can pay to a book, unless it's that you return to it.

I've been fascinated by the seventies all my life. Here's a blog post I wrote about the atmosphere of the seventies. Are such musings of interest to anyone else? Maybe not. But that's the benefit of a blog; you can write about things that might or might not be of interest to other people.

I love everything about the seventies. I love the music: Led Zeppelin, Slade, Horslips, Wings. (Actually, three of those bands happened to break up in 1980!) I love the movies: Shaft, Airplane! (I know it was released in 1980), The Wicker Man, Halloween, The Color of Money. (And let's not forget the best Carry On films, like Carry On At Your Convenience.) I even love the interior decoration, which is possibly the most detested aspect of the seventies now-- apart from disco, that is.

Speaking of disco (which I personally like), here is the funniest paragraph from the book: "The anti-disco frenzy reached its peak in Chicago on a hot July in 1979. Desperate to revive sagging attendance at home games, the White Sox sponsored Disco Demolition Nite at Comiskey Park. Before a game with the Detroit Tigers, the master of ceremonies detonated a mountain of disco records piled up on the stadium floor. Thousands of white teenagers flooded onto the field; the resultant riot lasted for two hours, causing much damage, many injuries, and isolated incidents of mayhem in the surrounding black community. The White Sox forfeited the game."

In a way, the seventies are topical right now. The event that determined the course of the decade, more perhaps than anything else, was the 1973 Yom Kippur war and the OPEC oil embargo of Israel's allies. The price of oil shot up and, even after the embargo, it remained high. This brought an end to the unique economic growth of the post-war world. Today, of course, Israel seems to be once again at the centre of world history.

The nineteen-seventies also saw the rise of the religious right in America, and a general flourishing of interest groups and identity politics. Black nationalism, "white ethnic" nationalism (like Chicano nationalism), gay rights, feminism (and anti-feminism), and other interest groups began to distinguish themselves from the mainstream. In some ways, I find this sort of climate congenial, even though I haven't much fondness for some of the social movements involved (like feminism). Pluralism appeals to me, as long as it's operating within the context of a shared culture (which I think America has always had).

The book has little to say about Ireland, which isn't too surprising. Or Catholicism, rather more surprisingly.

Nor does it (as far as I can remember) mention the book I'm reading now, The Exorcist (1973), or indeed any of the horror sensations of the decade: The Omen, Halloween, The Amityville Horror, or the rise of Stephen King to literary superstardom.

But, on the whole, certainly a book I would recommend to anybody with even a passing interesting in the decade of glitterballs, earthy tones, and stagflation.

A Big Buffet of Facebook

I post a lot of stuff on Facebook. It's mostly miscellaneous musings, ideas that strike me throughout the day. Now and again it occurs to me that my blog readers might be interested in some of them. Here goes.

I really dislike this campaign. So that's not us. OK. Who ARE we, then? It seems to me that today's Ireland (and not just Ireland) is trying to construct an identity based on negatives, or at the best, abstractions like 'inclusivity". Is this really possible?

I remember in sixth class in school, when I was 11 or 12, I wrote a "column" with the title Bald Hawk Pool (a fanciful translation of my first name), sitting at my desk. I remember the very first article was in defence of stereotypes and the truth they generally contain. That's how long I've felt like this. Ha!

Well, Robert Kee is not afraid to use rare words. As well as "flagitious" (wicked), his book on Parnell uses the word 'condonation', meaning 'The act of condoning, especially the implied forgiveness of an offense by ignoring it.' Mostly a legal term.

I'm always interested in learning new words, but it raises an issue in terms of writing. The consensus these days (and for quite some time) seems to favour a simple, direct style. This isn't just a question of communication but also of aesthetics. Plain English is held to be more elegant and forceful.

And I completely agree with this. (My own exemplar of masterful language use is Yeats's couplet: "The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun".)

But isn't there a danger that language will become unduly simplified if writers avoid the rare and archaic?

I remember reading an interview with the children's writer Helen Cresswell in which she was asked about her tendency to use rather advanced vocabulary in her books. (She actually introduced me to the word 'stipulate'.) Her reply was: "Well, if my readers don't know a word, they can jolly well look it up in the dictionary".

And, although the most poetic language is generally simple, this isn't always the case. Many of the most popular passages in English literature retain their popularity despite archaic terms. Who talks about fardels or a bare bodkin these days? An example that often comes to my mind is the enduringly popular Irish ballad A Nation Once Again. As a kid, I was stumped by the words "our fetters rent in twain". Not a phrase anyone would use today. It doesn't stop anyone belting it out in the pub.

I hope my Facebook friends will excuse a spell of navel-gazing on my part. I'm in pensive mood tonight. I'm thinking about my temperament and how difficult I find it to assign myself to either Team Optimism or Team Pessimism. (No, I don't think that makes me special.) I'm wondering if any of my friends share my temperament, or something like it.

In the first place, I am a melancholic. I wish I wasn't. I can't help suspecting that melancholics are a drain on the world insofar as they are melancholics, while cheerful and exuberant people lift us all up.

My melancholia consists mostly in anticipating failure for myself and everything I care about. I'm always fighting a battle against this. On a larger scale, this means anticipating defeat for every cause I cherish. My outlook is like Tolkien's. The Shadow is only ever defeated temporarily.

Another source of melancholia is a deep, deep sadness at the transience of all things. I can never remember a time I did not feel this.

My anticipation of failure gives me a sort of Hobbesian appreciation of any kind of social order. (I've never read Hobbes.)The absence of famine, war and chaos seems to me a massive achievement in itself. I am always apprehensive any radical change will endanger this.

OK, that's the downer stuff. Underneath all that, there is a sense of wonder which I've always felt but which was hugely developed when I discovered G.K. Chesterton.

I can wholeheartedly agree with Chesterton that mere existence itself outweighs infinitely anything that can be said against it. I love his words about the abyss of light that lies at the back of all our minds. As one Church Father said: "Concepts create idols. Only wonder understands".

But, a step below that (as it were) I feel a constant wonder and gratitude at how things are in their simplest categories. Space and time: man and woman: sleep and waking etc.

And finally, a lifelong humanism, best expressed perhaps in Hamlet's "What a piece of work is a man" speech.

I mentioned I was looking for a reference in Chesterton's work recently. Actually it was an allusion to a previous generation's love of ceremonial; toasts, and speeches, and orotundity in general. I couldn't find it.

But it came into my mind through reading the Parnell biography I'm reading. They really did love to be ceremonial back then. It was customary for a person chairing a meeting to surrender the chair so that someone else could occupy it and call for a vote of thanks for the previous chair. Unyoking horses from a guest of honour's carriages so that the crowd could pull it themselves was another practice. And so on....the book is full of toasts, banners, rosettes, banquets, parades, processions, custom-written ballads, and so forth. And this seems to have been a popular appetite, not just an upper-class thing.

I guess you like this sort of thing or you don't. I like it. There is far too little ceremony in today's society, for my liking. I'm always pleased when I walk past the O'Reilly Hall in UCD and there are graduates in their robes and mortar-boards outside. It's one of the few ceremonial occasions we have left. One of the lecturers told me that, some time ago, there was a proposal to remove Latin from the graduation ceremonies. It quickly died a death, in the face of popular opposition. People wanted their "Harry Potter moment", as he put it.

One of my favourite funny passages from Chesterton, which I came across just now while looking for something else. The old duffer can still make me laugh out loud in this era of alternative comedy and dank memes. Stick with it.

"I cannot help having a dim suspicion that dignity has something to do with style; but anyhow the gestures, like the songs, of my grandfather’s time and type had a good deal to do with dignity. But, used as he was to ceremonial manners, he must have been a good deal mystified by a strange gentleman who entered the office and, having conferred with my father briefly on business, asked in a hushed voice if he might have the high privilege of being presented to the more ancient or ancestral head of the firm. He then approached my grandfather as if the old gentleman had been a sort of shrine, with profound bows and reverential apostrophes.

“You are a Monument,” said the strange gentleman, “Sir, you are a Landmark.”

My grandfather, slightly flattered, murmured politely that they had certainly been in Kensington for some little time.

“You are an Historical Character,” said the admiring stranger. “You have changed the whole destiny of Church and State.”

My grandfather still assumed airily that this might be a poetical manner of describing a successful house-agency. But a light began to break on my father, who had thought his way through all the High Church and Broad Church movements and was well-read in such things. He suddenly remembered the case of “Westerton versus Liddell” in which a Protestant churchwarden prosecuted a parson for one of the darker crimes of Popery, possibly wearing a surplice.

“And I only hope,” went on the stranger firmly, still addressing the Protestant Champion, “that the services at the Parish Church are now conducted in a manner of which you approve.”

My grandfather observed in a genial manner that he didn’t care how they were conducted. These remarkable words of the Protestant Champion caused his worshipper to gaze upon him with a new dawn of wonder, when my father intervened and explained the error pointing out the fine shade that divides Westerton and Chesterton. I may add that my grandfather, when the story was told, always used to insist that he had added to the phrase “I don’t care how they are conducted,” the qualifying words (repeated with a grave motion ot the hand) “provided it is with reverence and sincerity.” But I grieve to say that sceptics in the younger generation believed this to have been an afterthought.

Here's something odd. I recently found myself reading about a Lord Mayor of Dublin back in the day. It occurred to me that I didn't know who the current Lord Mayor of Dublin is. (I'm guessing you don't, either. I asked a few people and they didn't know. It's James Geoghegan of Fine Gael.)

And, for some reason-- how can you explain this?-- I derive GREAT PLEASURE from reflecting that the Lord Mayor of Dublin is an ancient title, going back to 1229, and that (most of the time) most people don't know who it is. The pleasure is from the combination of those facts. I can't explain it. I could analyse it in a long discursion, but nobody wants that.

I suppose I only notice the Lord Mayor when he/she does something controversial or annoying. Looking at the recent holders of the office, I remember Caroline Conroy because she got rid of the live animal Crib at the Mansion House. And I remember Hazel Chu because everything she says and does is annoying.

"I mentioned that Lord Monboddo told me, he awaked every morning at four, and then for his health got up and walked in his room naked, with the window open, which he called taking an air bath; after which he went to bed again, and slept two hours more. Johnson, who was always ready to beat down any thing that seemed to be exhibited with disproportionate importance, thus observed: 'I suppose, Sir, there is no more in it than this, he awakes at four, and cannot sleep till he chills himself, and makes the warmth of the bed a grateful sensation.'"
From The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (1791).

Interesting in the light of what historians are now discovering about "biphasic sleep".

For many years now (easily a decade) I've set my alarm two hours earlier than I have to get up, so I can wake up and immediately go back to sleep. Somehow I feel it prepares me for the shock of getting up and makes it easier. Otherwise I feel I've just closed my eyes and have to get up again. I've been told this is very unhealthy but perhaps I'm just continuing a venerable tradition!

But the genius of Boswell to remember these little trifles...

Computers and Me

When I was a kid, I used to marvel that my parents remembered a time without television. It never occurred to me that I would witness a technological transformation of society that is comparable to the arrival of TV. (Whether it's more dramatic or less dramatic of a change is an open question. I can see arguments on both sides.)

I grew up without computers but I was always aware of them. They were a long time coming. They were standards of fiction long before they became part of the furniture of everyday life.

I think the first computer I ever actually encountered was a console with a simple table tennis game. It's the game the Americans call Pong. It couldn't have been more simple: a green screen, two vertical lines moving up and down the screen, and a white dot as the ball. The console hooked up to the television. I never actually played this, just watched other people playing it. I'd guess this was the early to mid eighties. (I can't find any photos where the screen is green. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong.)

Years later, my cousin (who was an only child and had the best of everything) had a games console; a Spectrum or Amstrad, I can't remember which. Again, I didn't get to play it, just to watch my cousin and older brother playing it. I can remember the title of some of the games: Sport of Kings, War of the Worlds, and Back to Skool. The last one captured my imagination the most, it featured a schoolboy getting into all sorts of trouble. It may have inspired a story (or game) that I developed at great length myself; The War in the School (I feel a bit pretentious italicizing it), which was an elaborate tale of a school battle involving peg-guns, catapults, pea-shooters, and other improvised, non-deadly weapons.

I remember these computer games took longer to load than to actually play. Aesthetically they were quite appealing, with their simple bright colours and very stylized graphics.

On another occasion, I can remember playing a handheld computer game for hours and hours. I'm guessing this was in the late eighties or early nineties. It was a device that you held up to your head and looked into like a pair of binoculars. The graphics and gameplay were very simple. It was a shoot 'em up in which you tried to shoot (or maybe harpoon) waves of shark attacks. They came faster and faster as you progressed. I remember playing it for hours, but not for days. Either I got bored of it or lost access to it.

Although this seems to be my first personal use of a computer, I don't remember being terribly excited about it.

My primary school had a computer, which kids were sometimes allowed to use in an after-school club. But it was very simple. The only game it had was an anagram game, and there were only a few anagrams so it quickly got boring.

When I went to secondary school, there was a computer lab and, from about fourth year (1994), we had a computer class. There was no internet connection. We didn't do much besides write CVs and play with a paint package. I remember we found the term "log off" amusing, being teenagers.

My family got a computer in 1994. It was a hand-me-down from a bank, my father edited a community magazine and somehow acquired it for this purpose. He never actually used it, that I can remember, and I'm not sure it was ever used much for the community magazine. But we used it plenty. It had Microsoft Works (I think), a simple word processor, spreadsheet, and database programme.

I lost no time in using it for writing. It was on this computer that I seriously started writing poetry, which isn't very romantic. I also wrote a diary of my fifth and sixth year in school (aged seventeen to eighteen), which I very much wish I still had. I can actually remember many things from this time simply because I wrote them in my diary, and often re-read it. The computer didn't have internet access.

We did find a computer game we could play on it, Sid Meier's Civilization. Tetris, as well. I can remember playing Tetris for hours and hours well into the early hours, while listening to Abba Gold.

I played another computer game, Shogun Total War, for sixteen hours a little bit later. After that, I resolved on no more computer games.

I can't remember when my family got a computer with an internet-connection. Email became near-universal (among young people) around 1997, I think. My access to the internet was occasional and situational for a long time. I remember the first website I visited regularly was the Philip Larkin Society website.

I didn't get a mobile phone of any kind, never mind a smartphone, until 2004. I vividly remember getting it. I'd just watched the remake of The Manchurian Candidate in the cinema in the Omni Centre, and I went straight from that to the Vodafone shop. I was clueless about mobile phones and asked: "Does it have texting?" The guy didn't even understand what I was asking. I can't remember when I first got a smartphone.

As I've said, computers were plentiful in the world of fiction, even when they were rare in reality. One of my favourite comic stories was called Computer Warrior, and it was a boy who went into his computer to play computer games for real. Another story I liked was The Thirteenth Floor, in which a computer called Max controlled an apartment building. (Wouldn't you know, he became overprotective towards his tenants, and people who came to the building with ill-intent found themselves on the thirteenth floor. But there was no thirteenth floor!) Both of these stories ran in The Eagle, though the thirteenth floor first ran in the short-lived comic Scream!

On the whole, I am all in favour of computers. Every technology has its downside. I don't remember people being more cultural or literate or imaginative in the pre-computer days, whatever they say now-- at least not in the pre-computer days that I experienced.

You Are Cordially Invited...

 What are you doing on the 24th of October?

If the answer to that is "nothing", why not come to the launch of my friend Jonathan Barry's book Great Classic Stories in Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street?

You can read an interview with Jonathan about the book here.

I will be there, still recovering from the gala celebrations of my 47th birthday on the 22nd. (I wish.)

My Fifty Favourite Poems of All Time

I spent a sleepless hour or two after midnight, this weekend, coming up with this list. 

Why fifty? Well, it seems a manageable sort of number.

Despite the title of the post, I can't really claim this is my definitive fifty favourite poems. In another mood, at another time, it might have looked somewhat different. But these are all poems which have a huge personal significance to me, lines from which regularly come unbidden into my memory, and (most importantly) which move me immensely. Most of them are poems that I've loved for decades now. I can't even imagine my life without some of them.

I tried to put them in vague order of preference, but for the most part, this is very fuzzy. It's really the top ten or so where the order matters the most. I can pretty confidently assert that "Ulysses" by Tennyson is my single favourite poem of all time, and that "To Helen" by Edgar Allen Poe comes second. I'm not particularly confident of the placing after that-- is "The Burning of the Leaves" really more important to me than "Locksley Hall?"-- but I'm fairly sure that there's nothing in the top twenty that doesn't deserve to be there.

Beyond that, the placing of a poem is less important than its presence on the list.

Arthur Quiller-Couch, the first editor of The Oxford Book of English Verse, famously wrote that "the best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so". Well, this list makes no claim about what's best (these are my personal favourites, nothing more) but I share his general sentiment. Pretty much all of the poems here are standards of poetry anthologies, although many of the Irish choices would only be encountered in Irish poetry anthologies. Popular taste, over time, is a sure sign of greatness in poetry-- although my guess is that this requires a poetry-reading public, which today (for the first time ever?) doesn't exist. Hopefully this is just a hiatus.

Having said that, I've omitted a few of the most popular poems of all time. (You can compare my selection with the BBC's "favourite poems" poll of 1995.) There's no "Daffodils", no "Road Not Taken", no "Elegy in a Country Churchyard". It's not because I don't love those poems. I do, especially the first. I just couldn't put them above other poems on my list. Similarly, there's no John Betjeman on my list, even though I'm a huge admirer of Betjeman. There's just no stand-out poems among his works that appeal to me so much they would get in the top fifty.

On looking at this list, somebody said to me: "You like Yeats, don't you?". Yes, I like Yeats. In fact, I could easily have filled half of the places on this list with Yeats poems.

I think "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" by Philip Larkin might be the template for half the poems I've written. But don't hold that against it!

"Fanfare for the Makers" by Louis MacNeice is a poem (or excerpt from a poem) that had a massive influence on my as a teen, and indeed ever afterwards. But I don't like the last line. Life can't be confirmed by suicide. Suicide only confirms despair.

Anyway, I hope the list affords you some diversion, and perhaps introduces you to some new favourites of your own.

Ulysses by Tennyson

To Helen by Edgar Allen Poe

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer by John Keats

“Our revels now are ended” by William Shakespeare

The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon (only the first part)

Locksley Hall by Tennyson

Snow by Louis MacNeice

Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album by Philip Larkin

Easter 1916 by W.B.Yeats

Morte d’Arthur by Tennyson

“Fanfare for the Makers”, an excerpt from Canto VII of Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice

The Fisherman by W.B. Yeats

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" by William Shakespeare

Advent by Patrick Kavanagh

Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

Death of an Irishwoman by Michael Hartnett

The Fool by Patrick Pearse

Psalm 23 of the King James Bible

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth

She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron

The Kraken by Lord Alfred Tennyson

MCMXIV by Philip Larkin

A Prayer for my Daughter by W.B. Yeats

And Then No More by James Clarence Mangan

A Birthday by Christina Rossetti

Aedh Sings of the Rose in His Heart by W.B. Yeats

If-- by Rudyard Kipling

Loveliest of Trees by A.E. Housman

Sad Steps by Philip Larkin

Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats

The Wayfarer by Patrick Pearse

Church Going by Philip Larkin

“Sirs, I am but a nameless man...” from The Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton

The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe

Ozymandias by Percy Shelley

When I Was One and Twenty by A.E. Housman

The Song of Wandering Aengus by W.B. Yeats

The Toys by Coventry Patmore

Piano by D.H. Lawrence

Plurality by Louis MaNeice

To a Friend by Matthew Arnold

Dying Speech of the Old Philosopher by Walter Savage Landor

To Edmund Clerihew Bentley by G.K. Chesterton

The Oxen by Thomas Hardy

The Burning Babe by Robert Southwell

The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland by W.B. Yeats

To Althea from Prison by Richard Lovelace

Mine Own John Poinz by Sir Thomas Wyatt

Requiem by Robert Louis Stevenson

Unto Everything There is a Season from the Book of Eccleasiastes

Chesterton and Education: A Talk

Readers of this blog are invited to a talk by Emily de Rotstein on “Celebrating 150 years: How GK Chesterton continues to ‘evangelise’ through education”.

Saturday 7th September, 12 pm
Central Catholic Library
74 Merrion Square, Dublin 2

Emily de Rotstein serves as Executive Director of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, a worldwide lay apostolate established in the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. The mission of the Society is to evangelise through education, inspiring people to live joyful, holy lives, with G.K. Chesterton as a model of lay spirituality.

The Society runs the Chesterton Schools Network, which involves more than 60 Catholic schools in the US and abroad. (See https://chestertonschoolsnetwork.org )

Emily served as a Board member and founding Executive Director of the first Chesterton Academy, and later helped launch the Chesterton Schools Network. Prior to Chesterton, she served as vice president of marketing of Aveso Displays, a venture-backed flexible electronic display company she helped spin out of The Dow Chemical Company. She holds a BA from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and is a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

As seats are limited, please reserve your place writing to irishchesterton@gmail.com

A Horror Story

Would you like to read an original horror story I've just written?

It involves an attic, a diary, and a face from the distant past. That kind of thing. It's 3,500 words long.

If so, please email me at Maolsheachlann@gmail.com.

An Exciting Announcement from Toomey Audio-Visual

I received this email sixteen hours ago:

Dear Customer,

On behalf of Toomey Audio Visual, I wanted to reach out to you with some exciting company news – we have recently been acquired by Stacked Group. Should you not be familiar, Stacked is one of Ireland’s leading suppliers of AV & Digital Signage, IT Hardware, Managed Print Services and Workplace Supplies. The company was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in the Red Cow Dublin, with an all-Ireland presence and over 85 local staff members.

The acquisition is strategically well-timed and will help to further enhance the service and product offerings to our clients. We believe that Toomey AV is very closely aligned with the Stacked Group in a number of critical areas, particularly in terms of professionalism, experience, service and expertise.

The acquisition will help to ensure that we can uphold our commitment to delivering top-tier Audio-Visual services to our clients based on our 55+ years of experience, whilst leveraging Stacked Group's scale, expertise, additional services and wider solutions.

Both the teams at Toomey AV and Stacked are excited about this next chapter and look forward to joining forces to offer our customers an excellent product offering.

Should you have any questions on how this may impact our relationship moving forward, please do not hesitate to contact us on 01 4660515.

Obviously, this is important news in itself, and I'd like to extend my hugest congratulations to both Toomey Audio Visual and Stacked on the happy nuptials.

But why do I mention it?

Well, because I've been receiving Toomey Audio-Visual promotional emails for years. I can find evidence going back to 2017, when I mentioned it on Facebook, but it was already a tradition by then. (I clear out my inbox occasionally.)

The truth is, I feel weirdly sentimental about the strangest things. I don't know how I first started getting promotional emails from them. But something stopped me from unsubscribing, though I've unsubscribed from tons of other mailing lists. Maybe it's because I like the name "Toomey".

They also email me a reasonable amount of times. I think we should be pretty tolerant about advertising and promotion, since it's what keeps the wheels of our society turning. (I write about this here, in case anyone cares.) But there's an implicit contract. Don't BLITZ me with emails. Toomey don't, and so I am happy to keep getting them. I might even buy one of their products one day!

I'm a bit confused by the fact that Stacked Group is headquartered in the Red Cow, though. Isn't that a pub? I rather like the idea of a company having their headquarters in a pub, although of course I know I must be misunderstanding something.

I really think there should be ceremonies for acquisitions and mergers. I don't mean a photo-op where somebody signs a piece of paper and there's a mascot or a big helium balloon or something cheesy like that. There should be a proper ceremony, like a wedding. Both CEOs should make public vows, dressed in ceremonial robes. Why can't we drape contemporary things in time-honoured forms?

The Poetry of Words and Phrases

The miracle of language never ceases to beguile me. With my tongue, lips and vocal chords, I can create vibrations in the air which, when they reach your ear, are decoded into ideas and pictures and emotions. This process, already magical and wondrous, can be captured by words on a page-- so that words can travel over continents and through the ages. Every now and again, the whole phenomenon strikes me with fresh wonder.

I've written a lot about poetry on this blog. People have given various definitions of poetry, but one of the more memorable ones is "the best words in the best order". In a way, though, I think words are a sort of poetry even before they're put into any order. You might even say that every word is a poem in itself, although "detergent" and "update" aren't particularly lyrical. (Ironically, the word "poetry" isn't inherently poetic, in my view.)

On the other hand, many words are inherently poetical. Others are  more subjectively appealing.

What sort of words are inherently appealing? Well, the example that comes to my mind most readily are the names of gemstones: sapphire, amethyst, aquamarine, chalcedony, emerald, obsidian, and so forth. Now, you might say these words are appealing because of their association with the gemstones they describe, but I think that's only part of it. And quite often I have no image or knowledge of a particular gemstone and I still find the word poetic.

Wilde's masterpiece of decadent poetry "The Sphinx" draws lavishly on these poetic names:

On pearl and porphyry pedestalled he was too bright to look upon:
For on his ivory breast there shone the wondrous ocean-emerald.

(There's a lot more where that comes from.)

This particular strain of poetry is also to be found in the Bible, particularly the Book of Revelation's description of the walls of the New Jerusalem: "The first foundation was jasper. The second was sapphire. The third was chalcedony. The fourth was emerald. The fifth was sardonyx. The sixth was sardius. The seventh was chrysolite. The eighth was beryl. The ninth was topaz. The tenth was chrysoprasus. The eleventh was jacinth. The twelfth was amethyst."

I'm guessing that many of these terms come from Latin and Greek, which perhaps give them that flavour of the exotic, antique and classical from which much of the poetry derives.

Colours and hues often have very poetic names, as well: indigo, heliotrope, burgundy, onyx, cerulean, turquoise, aquamarine, magenta.

Funnily enough, I would make the argument that many diseases have perversely appealing names: gonorrhea, chlamydia, rubella, melanoma, meningitis, and so forth. (You may not agree on that, though).

Another class of words that seem to be inherently poetic, although I think this certainly has a lot to do with meaning as with sound, involve faintness or obscurity: silhouette, whisper, echo, shadow, ghostly, phantasmagoric, rumour, shimmer, flicker, and so forth.

I could go on with lists of word-groups that seem to be generally appealing, but I'll move on to words and phrases that appeal especially to me.

One of my very favourite words is "lobby", and another is "foyer". Of course, "foyer" has a bit of a French glamour to it, but I think the main reason I love both these words is because they describe liminal spaces. I also love (to varying degrees) corridor, plaza, mezzanine, mall, street, alleyway, and avenue. I feel I should include "attic" in this list, even though it's not a liminal space in the same sense as the others; it's not a "between" place like the others. But it's liminal in another way, although it's hard to put my finger on its liminality. (This article addresses this very subject, although it's a bit too woke for my taste.)

Why do I like terms for liminal spaces so much? It's hard to say. There's something very exciting about a liminal space, especially one that is a mixture of "inside" and "outside". All life, all drama is lived in the space between me and you, us and them. Public or semi-public places seem ripe for this drama.

A final place-word which appeals to me enormously, even though it's not really liminal, except insofar as every place could be liminal in some way: canteen (as in, a cafeteria). I love the word canteen. It's so cheerful, down-to-earth, unpretentious, and redolent of a collective life of some kind. I like restaurants which are more like canteens, such as the restaurant in IKEA.

Here's a round-up of some other words I especially love: kaleidoscope, sepia, merry-go-round, horizon, gossamer, alabaster, brandy. I could add many, many more, and I probably will.

Poetry has already begun, in the more conventional sense, when we put words together. So perhaps it's legitimate to say that phrases are already poems, ready-made poems, as it were.

Finally, a list of phrases that excite me (mostly quarried from a previous post):

Softly-falling snow.

The cold light of day (which is supposed to be sobering, but which I find reassuring).

Deep waters.

Dizzy heights.

The morning after the night before.

Down memory lane.

The silver screen.

Till the cows come home.

All human life is there.

Blue moon. (I'm told the song of this title was my mother's party piece.)

The dead of night (also the title of one of my favourite films, Dead of Night from 1945).

The middle of nowhere.

The back of beyond.

In at the deep end.

Burning the midnight oil.

The last bus home.

Night train. (There was a radio show with this title in my childhood, which was broadcast all night long-- or at least, that's the impression I got.)

The graveyard shift.

The old, old story.

The small hours.

The wee hours.

Any phrase involving "country", in this sense: bandit country, cowboy country, gator country, Brontë country, Kavanagh country, etc.

What are some of your favourite words and phrases? No, really, tell me!

A Review of Lynn Connolly's "The Mun" (Part One)

Last night I dreamt I went to Ballymun again.

Well, not really. I can't remember what I dreamt about last night. But I often do dream I'm back in Ballymun. Not just in Ballymun, but in Ballymun as it used to be, the Ballymun I grew up in, back in the eighties and early nineties.

Although even that's not quite true. Generally, the Ballymun I dream about is an imaginative reworking of that "classic" Ballymun; sometimes a very imaginative reworking. I have a recurring dream about a sort of space-age Ballymun, when the flats have been transformed into gleaming white indoor cities with all sorts of amenities.

Other times I dream about trying to get back up the stairs to 62 Sillogue Road, the seventh-floor flat where I lived the first twenty-three years of my life. Sometimes the last flight of stairs are crumbling away, or have already crumbled away. Sometimes the journey up the fourteen flights is nerve-wracking, since there's all sorts of bedlam going on between me and my destination.

You get the point. Which is that memories, just like dreams, are subjective. Nobody experiences anything exactly the same way.

Bear this in mind as I write this review of The Mun: Growing up in Ballymun by Lynn Connolly (Gill & MacMillan, 2006). 

First things first: the book is excellent, a highly entertaining, touching, and frequently hilarious first-person account of life in this very distinctive suburb of Dublin. It's written without a hint of political correctness (thank God), and I zipped through it in one evening and one morning. (I'm not a fast reader.) I'll admit I did skim through one or two chapters which were of less interest to me, so forgive me if I haven't got the best fix on some of the details. (Which means, please don't correct me on them; I'm more interested in the general gist of the book.)

I've known about this book for ages (it's almost twenty years old), but I've avoided it. I thought it was going to be politically correct. And in some strange way, I didn't feel ready to read it until now.

And when I did finally read it, I felt a lot of conflicting emotions. There's much talk these days about FOMO: Fear of Missing Out. All my life I've suffered from a variation of this: I'll call it FOHMO (Fretting Over Having Missed Out).

My FOHMO complex was fully activated as I read The Mun. You see, Lynn Connolly grew up in Ballymun in the early seventies, whereas I was born in 1977. The Ballymun I knew was eighties and nineties Ballymun. And, as The Mun explains, they were very different experiences.

Ballymun was built in the mid-sixties and it was considered a model housing estate. It was clean, it had relatively good amenities (though not all it had been promised), and it was full of young families who were delighted to get out of the tenement housing many had been living in. As Connolly describes it, the tenants of the new Ballymun worked together to keep the common areas clean, watched over each others' children, and enjoyed a vibrant social life together-- in Ballymun itself, crucially, especially in its two pubs the Penthouse and the Towers.

Things changed in the eighties, as the book chronicles very vividly. Dublin Corporation (who don't come out this book at all well) began to use Ballymun as a destination for all of their "problem" tenants. The struggle to keep common areas clean became more difficult and people eventually gave up. Crime, vandalism, and-- worst of all-- the drugs epidemic took hold. Some people began to put iron bars in front of their windows and doors.

My family lived in Ballymun from the beginning, so I heard all about the good times. But, by the time I became aware of the world around me (which was later than with most kids), the bad days of Ballymun were well and truly underway.

I was very conscious of this decline, and I felt cheated to have come along at the wrong time. Being a kid, it wasn't (for me) so much about the open drug-dealing that I witnessed in the staircases, the constantly broken lifts, the indescribable vandalism (which I will try to describe), or the poverty. I was a kid and I took all that in my stride.

No, what got me was that I missed out on all the fun. I was constantly hearing stories of fun and festivity in the early days of the 'Mun. The whole atmosphere seems to have changed between the seventies and eighties. Even photographs bear this out. You can see how much cleaner Ballymun was in the old black and white photos. There's no evidence of vandalism, people are smiling and happy, and people are together. In colour photographs from the eighties, everything looks different; you can see the graffiti and grime, people generally look less happy, and they are literally standing further away from each other. Or so it always seemed to me.

My own experienced was coloured by two important facts, apart from coming along in the eighties.

First off, my father was a community activist, Peadar Kelly. (I use "Ó Ceallaigh" because "Maolsheachlann Kelly" just sounds weird.) He played a major role in the history of Ballymun. He edited the community newspaper/magazine The Ballymun News, he helped set up the Ballymun Workman's Club (fleetingly mentioned in Connolly's memoir), he helped found the Irish language school I attended (Scoil an tSeachtar Laoch, which sounds like it was way better from the English-language schools in Ballymun) and...well, a whole lot of other things.

So I heard a lot about Ballymun and the history of Ballymun in my home. Did I ever!

Secondly, I was a very shy and withdrawn kid. I didn't "mix" (to use a word I came to hate) for a long time. So I wasn't in the thick of things in Ballymun even in the eighties. In the nineties, I was a bit more outgoing, and played soccer (just kickarounds) with local kids, getting to know them fairly well. This definitely coloured my view of things.

Connolly's view of kids in Ballymun, even in the eighties, is that they were mostly good-natured, but got into mischief out of a desire for fun and excitement. To me, Ballymun often seemed more like Lord of the Flies. A lot of kids (mostly boys, but some girls) were feral. I got beaten up twice, once pretty badly. The humiliation was worse than the experience itself. Now, not all kids were like that, but quite a lot of them were.

I said I would try to describe the vandalism in Ballymun as I was growing up. It was breathtaking. The omnipresent graffiti was the least of it (I rather liked that). People would frequently urinate in the lifts, burn rubbish in the rubbish chutes, and tear down trees. It seemed to me that everything that could be smashed, pretty much, was smashed.

For instance: Connolly describes how the entry to the fifteen-storey flats originally had thick wooden doors, which were one-by-one ripped from their hinges. (She says she knew somebody who made and sold coffee-tables from them, which is at least better than pointless destruction.) I never knew of their existence. I remember the ground floor landing of my own block of flats had a sort of soft plaster ceiling. Literally overnight, this became punctured all over, when it became a craze for kids to throw L-shaped metal brackets up into it. I remember this very vividly.

And yet, and yet...

And yet, for all the feral kids, and the vandalism, and the sense of being a Johnny-come-lately, I have many golden memories, memories of Ballymun, as well.

First off: it was a place. That might be a strange thing to say. But it seems to me that we are all increasingly living in a sort of no-place ("he's a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land"). The suburbs are extending over the world, and look increasingly samey. Countries themselves look increasingly samey.

Ballymun had a very strong sense of identity. Kids on school trips used to sing: "We're from Ballymun, Bally-ally-allymun." Well, maybe kids everywhere sung their own equivalent of that, but everybody had heard about Ballymun. Even when it appeared on TV, it was instantly recognizable. You could see it from the planes landing and taking off at Dublin airport (my father actually thought that was the idea-- the Powers That Be wanted to show off how modern we were to international visitors.)

Ballymun was even more distinctive than I realised at the time. As Connolly explains at one point: "In the early 1980s there were around twelve thousand under-eighteens living in Ballymun; a vastly greater saturation of teens than in any other area of Ireland". In fact, I think she might be understating it; I read somewhere that Ballymun had the youngest population in the whole EEC (precursor of the EU) at this time.

As well as taking pride in a strong sense of identity, I had happy particular memories, many of which find echoes in Connolly's memoir.

About Halloween, she says: "Hallowe'en was a magical time in Ballymun. All the kids would get dressed up and go trick-or-treating. Then there would be the parties for the kids with apple-bopping, etc. And no Hallowe'en would be complete without a barmbrack. At Hallowe'en in Ballymun you would find things in your barmbrack that the EU have probably since prohibited as a choking risk. Wrapped in greaseproof paper there would be several items that told your fortune... A stick-- meaning you would grow up to be either a wife-beater or a beaten wife; a ring (always popular with the girls) which meant you would marry; a dry pea-- you would never go hungry... I can't imagine for a moment these prophecies were ever taken seriously, kids would just laugh and gently tease the friend who was growing up to be beaten."

Halloween in Ballymun! There was nothing like it. I remember the stockpiling of woods, for the various different bonfires, would go on for weeks. As far as I remember, these were entirely organised by kids, though I think adults stepped in at the building stage. The fire would begin to be built in the afternoon and would be reminiscent of The Wicker Man by the time it was lit. As mentioned before, we lived on the seventh floor (which was actually the eighth floor, since there was a ground floor). The bonfire was built, year after year, in the field directly in front of our block of flats, and the sparks would fly up to our windows. I'm even told the windows themselves would be warm to the touch, though I don't remember that.

I'm surprised Connolly uses the term "trick or treat". It was "Help the Halloween party!" that kids would say when they came knocking on Halloween.

As for the fireworks...it was like a warzone, without the fatalities. I've been in America on the Fourth of July. It's impressive, but it still falls short of a Ballymun Halloween in my childhood-- not in quality, of course, but in sheer quantity.

It's plain that this review is going to take more than one blog post. I expect it's going to be a whole series. Watch this space.