19 Wild Swans at Coole

Posted by on Oct 29, 2014 in Ireland | 2 comments “Easter, 1916” is probably William Butler Yeats’s most important poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” his most well known, but for those who read a lot of Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole” may be his most beloved. It is certainly the most popular poem among the students I bring to Ireland every two years: they compete fiercely to read the poem aloud when we visit Coole Park, and sometimes we have to have more than one performance. Over the weekend Ron and I were down in Limerick and North Kerry enjoying several beautiful fall days in the countryside. Though it looked like rain on Sunday, Ron came up with the brilliant idea to drive a little bit out of our way on the way home to stop off at Coole Park, once the home of Yeats’s friend, patron, and collaborator Lady Augusta Gregory, now a property of the National Parks and Wildlife Service. What better way to end our weekend trip than a late October walk in the woods in the rain? When we arrived at Coole, the trees were certainly “in their autumn beauty,” though “the woodland paths” were far from dry. Lady Gregory’s house—where she entertained Yeats, John Millington Synge, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, George Moore, Violet Martin, and many more of the well-known Irish writers of her day—is long gone; only the foundation and the clearing reveal its location “In the Seven Woods” Yeats wrote about, 1000 acres of forest, and today, six kilometers of trails. The presence of so many writers at Coole is confirmed at the Autograph Tree, a glorious copper beech in the walled garden. The tradition began in 1898 when Lady Gregory asked Yeats to carve his name on the tree. I’ve been to Coole many times, most often in the winter with student groups. I’ve seen it flooded, iced over, and on several spring and summer visits, fully abloom in a thousand shades of green. But I’d never been there in the season when the poem was written. We visited in early afternoon, not twilight, and it rained quite a bit during our visit, but the lake was “brimming,” and “among the stones” we did see, if not “nine and fifty,” about thirty or so wild swans, drifting “on the still water, / Mysterious, beautiful.” Yeats wrote “The Wild Swans at Coole” at Coole Park a few months after...
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18 The Belfast Miracle

Posted by on Oct 24, 2014 in Ireland | 2 comments I first visited Belfast, Northern Ireland, with my family in the early days of January, 1998—before the Good Friday Peace Agreement that came about later that year. A ceasefire had been in place for several years. Though the city’s resolute citizens tried to go about their lives in a normal way, the tension was palpable. Police cars that looked more like tanks roamed the streets, and almost every shop had its burly guard at the door. As an American you were forgiven for saying the wrong thing or asking an all too obvious question, but conversations were strained, filled with euphemisms and code words. We stayed in the Europa Hotel, the “most bombed hotel in the world” because there so few hotels in the city and because we thought they were courageous to have stayed open throughout the Troubles and in spite of periodic damage to their premises. When we handed the keys of the rental car to the doorman for valet parking, he kindly suggested that we tuck out of sight the little Republic of Ireland tricolor flags we had given the kids in their Christmas stockings. “I don’t mind,” he said, “but someone might.” I was there to figure out if Belfast should be on the itinerary of the student trip Linda Hubert and I were planning for the following year at Agnes Scott. To see the city, we went on a walking tour with a guide who at least made an attempt to hide his political allegiances. I was impressed with the variety of Victorian architecture, even more so when we learned that because of severe bombing during World War II, most of the buildings were completely new inside, retaining only the facades of the original structures. Imposing structures like City Hall, the Grand Opera House, Belfast Castle, and Stormont (current home of the Northern Ireland Assembly, but then housing the Civil Service) marked the city as a capital of politics and culture. I would have planned a trip only to see the beautiful Victorian Crown Liquor Bar and Saloon with its stained glass windows, snugs, and gas lamps. The Linen Hall Library was a revelation, an oasis of free thinking established during the enlightenment and determined to serve the intellectual interests of all citizens since then. The tall yellow gantries of Harland and Wolff shipbuilders—builders of the Titanic among other famous ships—gave the city’s industrial...
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17 Divided by a Common Language

Posted by on Oct 20, 2014 in Ireland | 8 comments When Michael O’Brien was guiding Agnes Scott students around Ireland, we would occasionally come upon an English word that one of us didn’t understand, or that had multiple meanings depending on context, or that was simply unfamiliar, or that didn’t exist in American English or in Irish English. Michael would give a look of mock despair and exclaim, “Divided by a common language!” While Irish English is perfectly understandable most of the time in both vocabulary and accent, such moments do arise. One of the most appealing characteristics of English is its regional variations that define not only parts of the world and countries, but regions within countries, states, and even cities. For a long time I’ve collected interesting and fun examples of Irish English, and now that I’m here for an extended stay, my list is growing rapidly. From time to time, I’ll show off my collection here. Warning! If you are easily offended, read no further. There is one word that I’ve learned not to use here in Ireland: pitcher. Yes, the word meaning that thing you use to pour milk into coffee or water into glasses. The more common word here is jug, and when I say “pitcher,” I always get confused looks. People hear “picture,” it seems. When questioned, they know what a pitcher is, but the word is archaic to them: “Something from ancient Greece in a museum,” someone explained to me. I’ve now trained myself to say “jug”: “Can we have a jug of water for the table, please?” “Feck off!” “What’s your feckin’ problem?” “For feck’s sake!” Don’t be offended. I haven’t sunk to a new vulgar low. Feck is a very common word here in Ireland. You hear it every day, and you hear it on television. In most (but not all) cases it is considered a family friendly version of “the f-word,” to use that most euphemistic of all euphemisms. There are debates about its origin, but one argument suggests that it comes from the Irish word feic, which means “see.” I have to tell you that there are loads of words in Irish that sound a lot like the f-word when pronounced emphatically, including the word for word itself, focal, pronounced to rhyme with buckle. What this means about Ireland, I don’t pretend to know. The culture surrounding feck and the f-word is just very different here—the words are...
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16 Autumn Gardens

Posted by on Oct 16, 2014 in Ireland | 0 comments “Fall” is the more common term in English, fhómhair in Irish (pronounced like the English “four” but with a more obvious diphthong) but “fall gardens” even if lower-cased sounds like THE fall in THE garden and I don’t mean that. I mean that time of year “When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang / Upon the boughs which shake against the cold,” that time of year when gardens start to sag and fade but are still beautiful, maybe even more so, as their colors blend with the red and orange and yellow and brown leaves on the ground, when the silhouettes of trees and shrubs start to emerge from their foliage, “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.”* What I love about visiting gardens in the fall is seeing everything in transition, the summer waning, the winter setting in, and even hints of spring amid the long shadows and touches of cold. The stems and blooms that have long died linger as pale brown ghosts alongside the rich fall flowers—here in Ireland they include black-eyed susans, michaelmas daisies, hardy plumbago, californian lilac, cyclamen, lilyturf ,and so many more. I didn’t know there were autumn crocuses until I saw a carpet of them yesterday. Recently I visited two autumn gardens, one at Mount Stewart on Strangford Lough in County Down and another at Kilmacurragh in County Wicklow. Mount Stewart was the seat of the Marquess of Londonderry and is now in the possession of the National Trust. The neo-classical house and its contents and the extraordinary grounds are very well preserved, and on the day I visited, very well used by the public. A fall festival was going on with food vendors, children’s games, traditional singing and dancing, and a state-fair style competition for baked goods, garden produce, and flower arranging. The gardens were designed by the imaginative Edith, Lady Londonderry and include a Shamrock Garden with topiary in the shapes of Irish symbols and the famous Dodo Terrace. I’ve seen them vivid and gorgeous in the full intensity of a hot July day, but I think I like them even better at this time of year. By contrast, the grounds at Kilmacurragh were almost deserted, but this place is less well known than Mount Stewart and much less geared to visitors. The house and grounds now belong to the National Botanic Gardens thanks to one...
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15 The Mountains of Mourne

Posted by on Oct 9, 2014 in Ireland | 11 comments On our driving map of Ireland, quite a few roads in southeast County Down are highlighted in green, which means they are “scenic.” The map is pretty reliable on this point, though of course there are many non-green routes that deserve to be so designated, as Ron and I indignantly note when we’re driving on them. This green-striped region is one of the few parts of Ireland I’d never visited, and it is also where the woman Agnes Scott College is named for lived as a child, the young Agnes Irvine. She sailed to the US in 1817, a girl of eighteen, settling in Pennsylvania, marrying and raising a family. Her son General George Washington Scott would found the college named for her in 1889, one hundred and twenty-five years ago this year. County Down is only about ninety minutes from Dublin, a border county with a long seacoast on the Irish Sea, and is home to Ulster’s tallest mountain range, the very same mountains Agnes Irvine and her mother Mary Stitt Irvine missed when they emigrated in 1817, never to return, the Mountains of Mourne. Some people say “Mourne Mountains,” but “Mountains of Mourne” as in Percy French’s 1896 ballad, sounds so much better. The name actually comes from a Gaelic clan name, Múghdhorna, pronounced pretty much like “mourn” and a perfect illustration of how in the Irish language, whenever you see a pile-up of vowels, you can be sure they won’t be pronounced. I wanted to see this part of Ireland and to understand the pull of those mountains. I think the photo at the top of the page explains why the Irvines loved the Mountains of Mourne. Though you can see them from all over the region and out at sea, the best place for a view is along the coast of Dundrum Bay between Newcastle and St. John’s Point, where you’re looking south across the water to the mountains. Standing on this stretch at Tyrella Beach about fifteen miles north of where Agnes lived near Kilkeel, I could grasp the origin of the refrain of the ballad that celebrates them, “Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea.” French must have been thinking of this exact view. I snapped over fifty pictures, hoping to capture the changing light, the roll of the waves, the sheen on the rocks, the shore birds darting about...
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