Poems for St. Patrick's Day

This is an important time in the year. March 15th is the Ides of March, the day on which Julius Caesar was assassinated, and March 17th is Saint Patrick's Day. Saint Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland, and of Nigeria, and is invoked against snakes.

This gives me the opportunity to say a few words about the curious race whose remnants are still to be found on the western edges of Europe, in Ireland, Wales, the Western Islands off Scotland, Brittany, and in Cornwall. I think that Cornwall is in many ways the place where the true strangeness of this race is closest to the surface: the word fey best describes the essential oddness that lies below the surface. Sometimes only just below the surface!

Their language is Gaelic, and there are generally thought to be five distinguishable forms in the British Isles: Scots Gaelic, which is still spoken in the outer Isles; Irish Gaelic, which is called Erse; Welsh, which has perhaps two dialects (North Wales and South Wales); Cornish, which died out as a native language in the late 19th century, with the last Cornish speaker believed to have lived in Penwith, by which time Cornish was being revived by Henry Jenner, planting the seeds for the current state of the language (the last native speaker was not the fishwoman Dolly Pentreath - this is a myth, apparently); and Manx, which was spoken on the Isle of Man, which is a small island in the middle of the Irish sea. Its name is a redundancy: man (or mon) means island in Gaelic, and the island which lies just off the north-west corner of Wales, which is now called Anglesey, was also originally called Mon.

Welsh is still widely spoken, particularly in North Wales, and there are regular television and radio broadcasts in Welsh. Over the years, there have been efforts by the dastardly English to discourage the use of Gaelic, which at times became violent: the preservation of the language became an article of faith to the natives, and there are now mandatory courses on Welsh and Erse in schools in Wales and Ireland respectively, which continue at least through sixth grade.

You may notice that I haven't so far attached a name to the race. Actually, the race is now called the Celts; but their original locale was in central Europe, in the area (more or less) now called France: in Roman times, Gaul. As Julius Caesar said, "Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est" which means "All Gaul is divided into three parts", and of course the French have a long-running cartoon set in this period, called Asterix le Gallois. These people spoke an Indo-European language quite different from modern French, which is a romance language, like Spanish or Italian. The Celts, or Gaels, spread out from this center.

Anyway, part of the general strangeness is the poetry and song. One of the Irish songs which we all belt out on Paddy's Night is The Minstrel Boy, a poem by Thomas Moore (1779-1852) from Irish Melodies (1807-1834) which included The Last Rose of Summer and Believe me if all those Endearing Young Charms. In this, he refers to Ireland as the "Land of Song" although I think the Welsh would argue with this; they hold rather large festivals celebrating poetry, song, and so forth called eisteddfod, which translates as session. The leading poets are called 'bards' and in early times the bards had a significant role in the political structure of the countries. They were involved with the Druids, so the early Christians hated them. The best-known Welsh bard was Taliessin (6th Century AD). The corresponding Irish (or possibly Scots) figure is Oisin, sometimes written Ossian; he is portrayed as a warrior-poet of the war-band led by Finn, the Fianna Éireann. From which the modern Irish political movement the Fenians derive their name. Oisin was also a harpist, and the 23-string Celtic harp is sometimes called an Oisin harp.

Oisin is believed to have flourished in the 3rd Century, but nothing of his survives. The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) wrote a long poem in 1889 called The Wanderings of Oisin which is set as an argument between Oisin and Saint Patrick. The background to this is interesting, I think. Oisin was a hero of a time much earlier, and he went to Tír na nÓg, which means the Land of Youth, where no one ever grows old, with a woman who became his wife, Niamh: here is one version of part of the legend: a beautiful woman arrives in Ireland where the warrior band is in action. To say that she impresses them is putting it mildly. She tells them:

"My name is Niamh Chinn Óir from Tír na nÓg, and my father is Manannán mac Lir, who is lord in that land."

Her name -- Niamh -- means "brightness." Niamh of the Golden Hair, from the Land of Youth, where no one ever grows old. This song sums it up economically:

Mheall sí é le breáthacht
Mheall sí é le póg
Is mheall sí é gan aon agó
Go Tír na nÓg.

She enchanted him with her unearthly beauty
She beguiled him with a kiss
And without the slightest difficulty
She enticed him to Tír na nÓg. 

Eventually, Oisin feels a need to return to Ireland, although he has no sense of the passage of time. Niamh is finally persuaded to let him go, and sends him on the white horse; but warns him that if he ever gets off the white horse in Ireland, he will instantly lose his youth, and become an aged man. Needless to say, he does get off the horse at some point, and (like the Lady of Shallot) the curse comes on him. He encounters Saint Patrick then, and the stories of the debates between the now ancient pagan hero and the Christian missionary are really very funny. The men who find Oisin take him to the wisest man they know, who is Saint Patrick, by then an old man himself, telling him that the old man claimed to be Oisin: Patrick admired the old legends, and wanted to talk to him:

But what was he to do with this feeble, blind old man who kept muttering, "Tír na nÓg, Tír na nÓg -- The Land of Youth, The Land of Youth"? Patrick was kind and sympathetic, and he said to Oisín, "Tír na nÓg is gone now. It disappeared with the coming of the new religion of Christianity."

"Níl sin fíor," Oisín said. "That's not true." And of course it wasn't. How could Tír na nÓg be gone if it's forever? But Patrick thought it was true -- or perhaps he only wanted it to be true.

Oisín said:

"Féach thiar ansin í,
Thiar ar fhíor na spéire.
Sin an áit go mba mhaith liom bheith --
Sin Tír na nÓg." 

"Look! There it is,
Just there on the horizon.
That's where I belong --
In the Land of Youth." 

Patrick shook his head sadly to see Oisín staring with his sightless eyes and pointing at the wall. Eventually, Oisín understood that for him Tír na nÓg would always remain "just there on the horizon".

After an argument with the Saint, which I will not describe here, in which Oisin's truthfulness is questioned, Oisin proves that he has spoken no less than the truth, and the Saint acknowledges that this is so, and Oisin says: "It was the three things we lived by: the truth in our hearts, the strength in our hands, and fulfilment in our tongues."

I think it is particularly appropriate that we should celebrate Saint Patrick's Day with poetry!

Saint Patrick was not a native of Ireland. He appears to have been a Celt from either Scotland, or Wales, or even England. The Catholic Encyclopedia says that he was "born at Kilpatrick, near Dumbarton, in Scotland, in the year 387; died at Saul, Downpatrick, Ireland, 17 March, 493" which would appear to have made him 106 years old when he died. Another version has him born in Wales; in this version his given name was Maewyn, his birth date was more or less the same, but his date of death is given as 461, which seems more reasonable. There is also a tradition, which I have not been able to document, which has him coming from Barrow-in-Furness in England.

There seems to be some agreement that he was captured at the age of about 16, and sold into slavery in Ireland, where he remained for a while herding sheep until he escaped back to 'Bryttan' which probably meant Wales at the time. He is credited with writing a document called Confessions, which is believed to be authentic, and there is also a letter of his. Really, that's about it, and as with many of the figures of the time, there is very little authentication. He was not actually the first missionary to Ireland; that appears to have been Palladius, but he didn't last long: he transferred to Scotland. It is said that part of the reason was that Palladius didn't speak the language, but that Patrick 'learnt it'. However, since he appears to have been a Celt from either Wales or Scotland, he probably could speak it anyway, and his slavery period must have been a help!

There weren't any snakes in Ireland, then or at any time, so far as we can tell.

However, there seems little doubt that Patrick was quite successful at winning converts. And this fact upset the Celtic Druids. Patrick was arrested several times, but escaped each time. He traveled throughout Ireland, establishing monasteries across the country. He also set up schools and churches which would aid him in his conversion of the Irish country to Christianity.

The poems I have selected this week are Thomas Moore's The Minstrel Boy, which is from Irish Melodies, Volume 5; Bogland, by Seamus Heaney; and to show that I, a Celt myself, have no prejudices, a Welsh poem: The Ash Grove.